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.
Interpretation
The welfare state, initially successful, has become unsustainable due to increased life expectancy.
Niall Ferguson's quote reflects on the irony of the welfare state's evolution. Originally designed to support citizens, its significant success in prolonging life has led to financial strains that challenge its sustainability. As people live longer, the costs associated with pensions and healthcare have escalated, necessitating reevaluation and major changes in policies, such as adjusting retirement ages, to ensure the system can continue to function without collapsing under its own success.
In practice
Discussing the future of social services in a political debate.
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.
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.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
In short, there are mysteries of science and of soul that will never be understood no matter how hard we measure, no matter how strongly we believe, no matter how deep our think tanks and how high our aspirations. But as anyone will tell you—for we all know this within our hearts—the impossible happens and grand cosmic mysteries are solved on a regular basis, although most of the time the solutions lead to even greater mysteries.
All other ways of mortification are vain, all helps leave us helpless; it must be done by the Spirit.
The fear of death comes from limited awareness.
There was no measure that required greater caution or more severe scrutiny than one to impose taxes or raise a loan, be the form what it may. I hold that government has no right to do either, except when the public service makes it imperiously necessary, and then only to the extent that it requires.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.