Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the disparity in work hours between different cultures and its implications on economic outcomes.
Niall Ferguson's quote points to the significant difference in work hours between Koreans and Germans, emphasizing the shift in economic performance and productivity. He suggests that such a divergence in labor intensity marks a pivotal moment in global economic history, where traditional perceptions of economic disparity are being challenged by emerging economies that work longer hours.
In practice
During a lecture on global economics, I could use this quote to discuss labor differences.
It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.
If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.
Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.
For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.
Trade is now clearly designed to favor the wealthiest and most powerful corporations at the expense of the rest of us. The three wealthiest people on earth now control more assets than the combined incomes of 600 million people in the world's 48 poorest countries.
The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.
The recurrence of periods of depression and mass unemployment has discredited capitalism in the opinion of injudicious people. Yet these events are not the outcome of the operation of the free market. They are on the contrary the result of well-intentioned but ill-advised government interference with the market.
Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
An overwhelming number of economists, international civil servants, and policy-makers argue that a fragmentation of the Eurozone would cause a new depression and massive wealth destruction around the world. It would also end the period of economic integration that has characterized world politics since the end of the Cold War.
Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess
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