The Great Degeneration cover art

The Great Degeneration

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Great Degeneration

By: Niall Ferguson
Narrated by: Paul Slack
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £8.99

Buy Now for £8.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Symptoms of decline are all around us today, it seems: slowing growth, crushing debts, aging populations, anti-social behaviour. But what exactly is amiss with Western civilization? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, is that our institutions - the intricate frameworks within which a society can flourish or fail - are degenerating. To arrest the degeneration of the West's civilization, Ferguson warns, will take heroic leadership and radical reform.

The Great Degeneration is the latest, provocative work from Niall Ferguson, best-selling author of The Ascent of Money.

©2012 Niall Ferguson (P)2013 W F Howes Ltd Economics Taxation Capitalism Socialism Economic inequality Banking Economic disparity

Listeners also enjoyed...

 A Brief History of Misogyny: the World's Oldest Prejudice cover art
Lee Kuan Yew cover art
The Great Delusion cover art
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics cover art
Democracy and Its Crisis cover art
Milton Friedman cover art
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue cover art
Darwin's Dangerous Idea cover art
First Peoples in a New World cover art
Where We Are cover art
The Rothbard Reader cover art
Economics in Three Lessons and One Hundred Economics Laws cover art
The Captured Economy cover art
Austrian Economics and Public Policy cover art
The Indispensable Milton Friedman cover art
How Will Capitalism End? cover art

Critic reviews

"Brilliantly written, full of wit and virtuosity, stuffed with memorable lines and gorgeous bits of information. A great read" ( The Times)
"Brings history alive for the reader with a dazzling knowledge... peerless" ( Independent on Sunday)
All stars
Most relevant  
I bought this following on from (the brilliant) Ascent of Money, and was a bit disappointed. It is so brief that I felt useful details had been left out, and yet I also felt it was quite hard to follow as an audiobook. Ferguson follows the 'institutional' paradigm of successful societies, and refers repeatedly to 'Why Nations Fail' by Acemoglu and Robinson. In a sense this book is an appendix to theirs (explaining why our societies are poised for failure) and I'd recommend the first one, if you haven't read/audioed it, and then try applying their criteria for success to your own society.

Maybe the worst thing was the tone of the narration. Paul Slack reads in a 'Jeremy Clarkson sarcasm' voice throughout, which made me feel that the degeneration of the legal system and collapse of civil society was my own, personal, fault.

Buy the hard copy

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
good listen and an interesting critique of modern institutions - to an extent it is a thorough PEST style analysis but has some interesting insights. Very libertarian and pro free market, which I mostly agree with, but this occasionally seems like a Ron Paul type libertarianism - though arguments are well reasoned and compelling

Worth a listen

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I regret spending the money on this, as it was a waste. All the content here is the same as Ferguson’s Reith lectures ‘The Rule of Law and its enemies’, which you can listen to for free on the BBC website.

Do not Buy!!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.