113 Facts About Niall Ferguson

Sir Niall Campbell Ferguson, is a British-American historian who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.

Niall Ferguson is a co-founder of the University of Austin.

Niall Ferguson has written and presented numerous television documentary series, including The Ascent of Money, which won an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2009.

Niall Ferguson has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek.

Niall Ferguson began writing a semi-monthly column for Bloomberg Opinion in June 2020 and has been a regular columnist at The Spectator and the Daily Mail.

Niall Ferguson has contributed articles to many journals including Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy.

Niall Ferguson has been described as a conservative and called himself a supporter of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Niall Ferguson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 18 April 1964 to James Campbell Niall Ferguson, a doctor, and Molly Archibald Hamilton, a physics teacher.

Niall Ferguson grew up in the Ibrox area of Glasgow in a home close to the Ibrox Park football stadium.

Niall Ferguson was brought up as an atheist, although he has encouraged his children to study religion and attends church occasionally.

Niall Ferguson cites his father as instilling in him a strong sense of self-discipline and of the moral value of work, while his mother encouraged his creative side.

Niall Ferguson has described his parents as "both very much products of the Scottish Enlightenment".

Niall Ferguson received a demyship from Magdalen College, Oxford.

Niall Ferguson studied as a Hanseatic Scholar at the University of Hamburg from 1986 until 1988.

Niall Ferguson received his DPhil degree from the University of Oxford in 1989.

In 1989, Niall Ferguson worked as a research fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge.

Niall Ferguson then became a fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, where in 2000 he was named a professor of political and financial history.

In 2002 Ferguson became the John Herzog Professor in Financial History at New York University Stern School of Business, and in 2004 he became the Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

From 2010 to 2011, Niall Ferguson held the Philippe Roman Chair in history and international affairs at the London School of Economics.

In 2016 Niall Ferguson left Harvard to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he had been an adjunct fellow since 2005.

Niall Ferguson has received honorary degrees from the University of Buckingham, Macquarie University and Adolfo Ibanez University.

In May 2010, Michael Gove, UK education secretary, asked Niall Ferguson to advise on the development of a new history syllabus, to be titled "history as a connected narrative", for schools in England and Wales.

Niall Ferguson teamed with a Republican Party student group to find information that might discredit the student.

Niall Ferguson resigned from leadership of the program once university administrators became aware of his actions.

In 2000, Niall Ferguson was a founding director of Boxmind, an Oxford-based educational technology company.

In 2007, Niall Ferguson was appointed as an investment management consultant by GLG Partners, to advise on geopolitical risk as well as current structural issues in economic behaviour relating to investment decisions.

Niall Ferguson was an advisor to the John McCain 2008 presidential campaign and supported the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign.

Niall Ferguson has written regularly for British newspapers and magazines since the mid 1980s.

Since 2015, Niall Ferguson has written a weekly column for The Sunday Times and The Boston Globe, which appears in numerous papers around the world.

In May 2012, the BBC announced Niall Ferguson was to present its annual Reith Lectures.

Niall Ferguson said that governments should follow the lead of business and adopt the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, and above all generational accounts should be prepared on a regular basis to make absolutely clear the inter-generational implications of current fiscal policy.

Niall Ferguson asks whether the modern state is quietly killing civil society in the Western world, and what non-Western societies can do to build a vibrant civil society.

Niall Ferguson addresses the paradox that, though the 20th century was "so bloody", it was "a time of unparalleled [economic] progress".

Niall Ferguson compared and contrasted how the West's "killer apps" allowed the West to triumph over "the Rest" citing examples.

Niall Ferguson argued the rowdy and savage competition between European merchants created far more wealth than did the static and ordered society of Qing China.

Niall Ferguson argued that the modern West had lost its edge and the future belongs to the nations of Asia, especially China, which has adopted the West's "killer apps".

Niall Ferguson argues that in the coming years, we will see a steady decline of the West, while China and the rest of the Asian nations will be the rising powers.

In 2018's The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson proposed a modified version of group selection that history can be explained by the evolution of human networks.

Niall Ferguson has been referred to as a conservative historian by some commentators and fellow historians.

Niall Ferguson himself stated in a 2018 interview on the Rubin Report that his views align to classical liberalism, and has referred to himself as a "classic Scottish enlightenment liberal" on other occasions.

In 1998, Niall Ferguson published The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, which with the help of research assistants he was able to write in just five months.

Furthermore, Niall Ferguson expressed disagreement with the Sonderweg interpretation of German history championed by some German historians such as Fritz Fischer, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen, and Wolfgang Mommsen, who argued that the German Empire deliberately started an aggressive war in 1914.

Likewise, Niall Ferguson has often attacked the work of the German historian Michael Sturmer, who argued that it was Germany's geographical situation in Central Europe that determined the course of German history.

In particular, Niall Ferguson accused the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey of maintaining an ambiguous attitude to the question of whether Britain would enter the war or not, and thus confusing Berlin over just what was the British attitude towards the question of intervention in the war.

Niall Ferguson accused London of unnecessarily allowing a regional war in Europe to escalate into a world war.

Niall Ferguson attacked a number of ideas that he called "myths" in the book.

In Niall Ferguson's view, had Germany won World War I, then the lives of millions would have been saved, something like the European Union would have been founded in 1914, and Britain would have remained an empire as well as the world's dominant financial power.

The German-born American historian Gerhard Weinberg in a review of The Pity of War strongly criticized Niall Ferguson for advancing the thesis that it was idiotic for Britain to have fought a Germany that allegedly posed no danger.

Weinberg wrote that Niall Ferguson was wrong to claim that Germany's interests were limited only to Europe, and maintained that if the Reich had defeated France in 1914, then Germany would have taken over the French colonies in Asia and Africa, which would have definitely affected the balance of power all over the world, not just in Europe.

Niall Ferguson sometimes uses counterfactual history, known as "speculative" or "hypothetical" history, and edited a collection of essays, titled Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, exploring the subject.

Niall Ferguson's championing of the method has been controversial within the field.

Niall Ferguson demanded an apology and threatened to sue Mishra on charges of libel due to allegations of racism.

Wilson charged that Niall Ferguson failed to look at the empire via non-British eyes because to do so would be to challenge his claim that Britain "made the modern world" by imposing its values on "the Other", and that the history of the empire was far more complicated than the simplistic version that Niall Ferguson is trying to present.

Niall Ferguson compared the modern European Union to the Western Roman Empire, describing modern Europe as not that different from the world depicted by Edward Gibbon in his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

About the 2015 European migrant crisis, Niall Ferguson wrote the mass influx of refugees into Europe from Syria was a modern version of the Volkerwanderung when the Huns burst out of Asia and invaded Europe, causing millions of the Germanic peoples to flee into the presumed safety of the Roman Empire, smashing their way in as the Romans attempted unsuccessfully to stop the Germans from entering the empire.

Niall Ferguson argued that Gibbon was wrong to claim the Roman Empire collapsed slowly and argues that the view among a growing number of modern scholars is that the collapse of the Roman Empire was swift and violent; unforeseeable by Romans of the day, just as the collapse of modern European civilization would likewise be for modern Europeans.

In 2017, Niall Ferguson opined that the West had insufficiently heeded the rise of militant Islam and its global consequences in the same way it failed to predict that the rise of Vladimir Lenin would lead to the further spread of communism and conflict around the world.

Niall Ferguson stated that Islam differs from Judaism and Christianity through being "designed differently" as a political ideology that does not recognize the separation of mosque with the secular and temporal, and that the Muslim world has mostly followed an opposite trend to Western society by becoming less secularized and more literal in interpreting holy scripture.

Niall Ferguson concluded that if Europe kept pursuing large scale migration from pious Muslim societies combined with poor structures of economic and cultural integration, especially in an era when existing migrant communities are either unassimilated or loosely integrated into the host society, it is "highly likely" that networks of fundamentalist dawah will grow in which Islamic extremists draw in the culturally and economically unassimilated Muslims of immigrant backgrounds.

Niall Ferguson observed that even when living in Western nations, both he and his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali have to live with permanent security measures as a result of her public critiques of Islam and status as a former Muslim.

Niall Ferguson supported the Iraq War and described himself a month after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as 'a fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang' and he is on record as being not necessarily opposed to future Western incursions around the world.

Niall Ferguson was initially skeptical of Donald Trump's bid for the 2016 United States presidential election.

In 2018, Niall Ferguson argued that a Clinton presidency would have been more disruptive to the United States, and that Clinton would have been "immediately" impeached as Trump supporters would have likely believed that the election was rigged.

Niall Ferguson stated that he regarded himself "in the middle ground" in a generally polarized public and media opinion on Trump's presidency.

Niall Ferguson elaborated that while he found Trump's personality "pretty hard to take", he cited several positive achievements undertaken by his administration, including America's stronger economic performance and noted that he found Trump's foreign policy stances on China, North Korea, and the Middle East an improvement over that of the Obama administration.

Niall Ferguson further opined that the media was more focused on Trump's behaviour on social media than the "competent job" being done by members of his administration.

Niall Ferguson condemned the 2021 United States Capitol attack committed by supporters of Trump, arguing on Twitter that the participants should be prosecuted and Trump's behaviour had cost the Republicans the Senate.

Niall Ferguson argued that politicians who refused to condemn the event were unsuited for office.

Niall Ferguson argued that Trumpism was likely to remain a force within American politics and likened it to Jacobite Pretenders who sought to revolt in order to restore the House of Stuart to the British royal throne after the Glorious Revolution.

Niall Ferguson observed that Biden's approval ratings were lower at the time of writing than Trump's were in office and highlighted that other leaders, such as Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, and Malaysia's Anwar Ibrahim, were able to engineer political comebacks after being barred from politics.

In September 2023, Niall Ferguson again opined that the Democrats were likely to lose the White House to Trump unless Biden stepped down.

Niall Ferguson argued that scandals involving Hunter Biden would furthermore hinder Biden's image by causing voters to feel less concern about Trump's indictments as both cases would heighten public perception that all politicians are crooks.

Niall Ferguson argued that Trump's "greatest weakness" was his conduct during the 2021 United States Capitol riot and refusal to accept the 2020 election result but noted that the "system contained Trump's impulses successfully in 2020 and 2021", and said that the problem with the Democratic claim that he is a threat to democracy is that for many ordinary voters it sounds overdone and is not as compelling an argument as it was in the past because voters have seen a Trump presidency.

Niall Ferguson argued that Trump and Putin could work for the victory of Marine Le Pen and the National Front in the 2017 French presidential election, arguing that Le Pen was the French politician most congenial to the Trump administration.

In February 2010, during the Greek government-debt crisis, Niall Ferguson appeared on the Glenn Beck Program predicting that if interest rates rose in the United States, it could experience a similar sovereign default and mass civil disorder to what was occurring in Greece.

Niall Ferguson was an attendee of the 2012 Bilderberg Group meeting, where he was a speaker on economic policy.

Niall Ferguson was highly critical of the results of the 2016 European Union referendum, warning that "the economic consequences will be dire".

Later, after backing the Remain campaign during the referendum, Niall Ferguson changed his mind and came out in support of Britain's exit from the European Union.

Niall Ferguson contended that the Obama administration's policies are simultaneously Keynesian and monetarist in an "incoherent" mix, and specifically claimed that the government's issuance of a multitude of new bonds would cause an increase in interest rates.

Krugman argued that Niall Ferguson's view is "resurrecting 75-year old fallacies" and full of "basic errors".

Matthew O'Brien countered that Niall Ferguson was still distorting the meaning of the Congressional Budget Office report being discussed, and that the entire piece could be read as an effort to deceive.

In 2013, Niall Ferguson, naming Dean Baker, Josh Barro, Brad DeLong, Matthew O'Brien, Noah Smith, Matthew Yglesias, and Justin Wolfers, attacked "Krugman and his acolytes" in a three-part essay explaining his dislike of Krugman.

At a May 2013 investment conference in Carlsbad, California, Niall Ferguson was asked about his views on economist John Maynard Keynes' quotation that "in the long run we are all dead".

Niall Ferguson stated that Keynes was indifferent to the future because he was gay and did not have children.

Niall Ferguson posted an apology for these statements shortly after reports of his words were widely disseminated, saying his comments were "as stupid as they were insensitive".

In spring 2018, Niall Ferguson was involved with College Republican leaders at Stanford to oppose a left-leaning student take over of the Cardinal Conversations initiative.

Niall Ferguson later apologized and resigned from the said initiative when emails were leaked revealing his involvement in the events.

Niall Ferguson was an early skeptic of cryptocurrencies, famously dismissing his teenage son's recommendation to buy Bitcoin in 2014.

In February 2019, Niall Ferguson became an advisor for digital asset protocol firm Ampleforth Protocol, saying he was attracted by the firm's plan to "reinvent money in a way that protects individual freedom and to create a payments system that treats everyone equally".

Niall Ferguson has stated that he identified as a Scottish nationalist as a teenager but moderated his views after moving to England to study history.

Niall Ferguson has argued that Scottish nationalism is sometimes fueled by a distorted view that Scots have always been oppressed by the English and is misconceived by people from outside of the United Kingdom as the choice between being Scottish or English.

Niall Ferguson has argued that Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion remained a land divided by warring clans and religious factions, and that the Union helped to quell some of the conflicts.

In 2021, ahead of the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, Niall Ferguson argued that the Labour Party administration under Tony Blair had made a mistake in believing devolution would stem Scottish nationalism but instead enabled the Scottish National Party to assume regional power and criticised the SNP government of Nicola Sturgeon for its management of the Scottish economy, education and freedom of speech.

In 2011, Niall Ferguson predicted that Grexit was unlikely to happen but that Britain would leave the European Union in the near future as it would be easier for Britain to leave the EU owing to the fact it was not part of the eurozone and that returning to a national currency would be harder for countries who had signed up to a single currency.

Niall Ferguson elaborated that while Brexit would still have some economic consequences, the EU had been a "disaster" on its monetary, immigration, national security, and radical Islam policies.

Niall Ferguson added that "one has to recognise that the European elite's performances over the last decade entirely justified the revolt of provincial England".

In 2020, Niall Ferguson predicted that the EU was destined to become "moribund" and was at risk of collapse in the near future and that the single currency had only benefited Northern Europe and Germany in particular while causing economic havoc in Southern Europe.

Niall Ferguson argued the "real disintegration of Europe" will happen over the EU's migration policies that he says have both exacerbated and failed to provide solutions to illegal immigration to the European continent from North Africa and the Middle East.

Niall Ferguson stated that high levels of illegal immigration from Muslim-majority nations would in turn further the rise of populist and Eurosceptic movements committed to rolling back or leaving the EU.

Niall Ferguson later criticized both the British and US federal government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as inadequate, calling them "both, in their different ways, intelligible only as colossal failures by governments to make adequate preparations for a disaster they always knew to be a likely contingency".

Niall Ferguson dismissed the idea that right-wing populism had been responsible for failure of government responses to the pandemic, accusing liberal politicians such as the then Belgian prime minister Sophie Wilmes and United States president Joe Biden of making similar mistakes to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

Niall Ferguson reflected in a 2021 podcast interview with Lex Fridman that many of the failures in the United States had been systemic rather than the personal fault of Trump, and that Trump was unfairly blamed because of the Trump administration's messaging.

Niall Ferguson alleged that Barack Obama's handling of the US opioid epidemic had been similarly costly but more obscure.

Niall Ferguson praised Operation Warp Speed, and argued that part of the reason for the failure of the US government to effectively respond to the pandemic was the absence of a similar program for COVID-19 testing.

Niall Ferguson added that "The issue is can Hamas be destroyed, as it should be, at an acceptable cost".

Niall Ferguson met journalist Sue Douglas in 1987, when she was his editor at The Sunday Times.

In February 2010, Niall Ferguson separated from Douglas and thereafter started dating Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Niall Ferguson married Hirsi Ali on 10 September 2011; she gave birth to their son three months later.

Niall Ferguson's self-confessed workaholism has placed strains on his personal relations in the past.

Niall Ferguson was the inspiration for Alan Bennett's play The History Boys, particularly the character of Irwin, a history teacher who urges his pupils to find a counterintuitive angle, and who then goes on to become a television historian.

In 2018, Niall Ferguson became naturalised as a United States citizen.

Niall Ferguson was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the disciplines of language, literature and history in 2020.

On 14 June 2024, Niall Ferguson was awarded a knighthood in the birthday honours list of King Charles III.