Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a senior faculty fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His most recent book is “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”

He was interviewed recently by Noema editor-in-chief Nathan Gardels. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.