The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay And Economies Die, by Niall Ferguson

This book deals with an issue that is very important but often overlooked and underrecognized when it comes to the health of societies and their economies, and that is the health of institutions. The author examines the need for well-functioning societies to be free to create, free to innovate, and also possessed of sound and robust social institutions where people can volunteer and help make the lives of those around them at least a little bit better. The author tells, in one of his chapters, about the experience he had being introduced to the organized service of the Lion’s Club in helping to clean a stretch of Welsh beach near a home he had bought that had become filled with trash coming in from the Irish Sea that the local government did not care enough to involve itself with. Those who try to argue that the government is what provides good things to people often fail to account for the way in which it is people who volunteer their time and money and attention and interest who actually spur through what needs to be done without having to get laws passed or regulations. Unfortunately, this tendency is gradually being lost in the increasingly sclerotic societies of the West, which used to be far more free than they are now, far less susceptible to pruning away the parasitical regulations that choke innovation and creation and the well-being of ordinary people.

This book is a short one at just over 150 small pages divided into four chapters. The book begins with a list of figures and a sizable introduction that the author uses to talk about the problem of institutions and raise his perspective in looking at the economic implications of social changes related to laws and our approach to them. This is followed by a discussion of the human hive, and the way that human beings wear many hats and must cooperate in order to survive (1), and find difficulties in being able to trust others to do the right thing. This is followed by a discussion of the Darwinian economy (2), where the threat of failure and the reality that one’s firm or institution could go extinct is a motivating factor to do well, rather than depending on being propped up by government. This is followed by the landscape of law (3), where the author examines the problem of bad laws and overregulation (3). After that the author discusses the problem that results from a decline in private civil institutions in that government ultimately cannot replace despite its own expensive and coercive efforts (4). The book then ends with notes and acknowledgements, and hopefully there will be a sequel to the effort.

How does one reverse the course of regeneration? This book is eloquent, if short, in its writing about how it is that the West (in particular the United States and UK and other English speaking countries, but not only them) got into the state we are in. This book succeeds excellently at discussing the harm in how we got where we are, and why it is that economic stagnation (if not actual decline) appears to be our present and our future, with potentially disastrous political effects when people feel that the political class and their crony elites are keeping other people from living as good a life as possible. But the ultimate point of learning about where we are is not to know and to mourn, although that may be necessary, but to try to reverse the tide and to overcome the degeneration of our society. In many ways, the decline of institutions is itself a spiritual problem, in that the growing power of the false messianic state has sought to elbow out religious institutions from any sort of room within society, and the consequences of that are dire indeed. Nothing short of a national repentance could overcome that sort of situation, and it is easy to wonder if it is too late for that.