Professor Niall Ferguson offers an evolutionary approach to financial history: he questions the impeding of natural selection by keeping the financial dinosaurs alive through the life support of monetary injections: without creative destruction, our economic system cannot be a healthy one. <br />The view that financial history could be evolutionary in fact pre-dates Darwin, born 200 years ago this year, but the view has been pushed into the hinterlands of contemporary thinking about the worlds of finance and economics. <br />Through the publication of his book, The Ascent of Money, Professor Niall Ferguson brought about a timely re-emergence of the evolutionary approach. By looking at finance along evolutionary lines, we can relate the long run of financial history to recent events and so illuminate them in a way which will perhaps offer us a clearer sight of how we should pull ourselves out of the current economic crisis. <br /> <br />Professor Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, the William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, a faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, a Senior Research Fellow Jesus College, Oxford University, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a contributing Editor of The Financial Times. <br /> <br />This was the 2009 Gresham Special Lecture.
