Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson hosted the PBS show The Ascent of Money last night. The promotional material states:
In THE ASCENT OF MONEY, Ferguson ? whose series War of the World
garnered critical attention last summer ? traces the evolution of money
and demonstrates that financial history is the essential back-story
behind all history. ?Everyone needs to understand the complex history
of money and our relationship to it,? he says. ?By learning how
societies have continually created and survived financial crises, we
can find solid solutions to today?s worldwide economic emergency.?
I only watched part of the program. While not Austrian, it seemed balanced. The conservative Smith Richardson Foundation helped finance the program. Review his bio here. You can watch the show on its home page here or the rebroadcast Friday, Channel 4 at 2 am.
Also take the poll on the home page. “Should the American government continue to bailout struggling corporations?” It is running 76 percent No at this point.
The program is based on Ferguson’s book with the same title. The Economist‘s review of the book here concludes with this:
Of far greater interest is Mr Ferguson?s general theory, which does
not emerge until the end of the book. He thinks that finance evolves
through natural selection. Although the professor cautions against the
sort of Darwinism that sees evolution as progress, he believes that new
sorts of finance are constantly coming into being as the environment
changes. The sequence of creation, selection and destruction is what
has generated many of the financial techniques that modern economies
depend on.This leads Mr Ferguson to make two timely points. One is to remember
that evolution depends on extinction as well as creation. You have to
allow ill-adapted techniques to fail if you are going to get something
new. As the world rushes around rescuing every bank in sight, it is a
reminder that the guarantor-state will later have to administer painful
medicine.The other is to observe the wonder of what financial evolution has
created. Just now it is only natural to think of the ?roller-coaster
ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and
crashes.? But Mr Ferguson sees something else too: ?From ancient
Mesopotamia to present-day China?the ascent of money has been one of
the driving forces behind human progress: a complex process of
innovation, intermediation and integration that has been as vital as
the advance of science or the spread of law in mankind?s escape from
the drudgery of subsistence agriculture and the misery of the
Malthusian trap.? Amid this financial bust, cleave to that.