The Great Degeneration
This book was written by a man named Niall Ferguson. He wrote the book to propose some ideas and facts on the Western rise and the fact that the rest of the world has grown at a slower rate. Niall Ferguson writes about the not only the growth but the decrease of growth and the complete halt of growth that seems to be inevitable for the United States. He further warns that this is happening to the West and that something must be done before we are surpassed and cannot come back from the fate to which we are headed.
In the first chapter of this book the author poses an argument that he believes the “Great Divergence” was caused by something called institutions. After reading the chapter and gaining an understanding that institutions are any mechanism that is put in place with the intent to govern a group. The idea presented is that the use of institutions has helped advance Western civilization many years ahead of China. I agree with the author’s argument. I believe that having institutions in place allowed the Western civilizations to be able to innovate and create a much faster growing economy.
The book states an argument that, to the author, it does not make any logical sense that the reason Western civilization was ahead of the rest of the world is that they had and/or have some sort of superiority. Along with the idea of institutions pushing the Western civilization forward, I believe that a superiority had to be present. If there was not a superiority to some degree over the rest of the World, then it is very hard to explain how the West was able to come up with and effectively implement institutions when the rest of the world was unable to do the same.
In this chapter I learned a great deal on what the great divergence actually means. The great divergence is a reference to a time period where great growth was happening in the United