Niall Ferguson wrote, in February, about what he called “Ferguson’s Law”1: any great power that spends more servicing its debt than it spends on defense risks ceasing to be a great power.
I understand the point, but I wonder if debt service is the correct measure for today’s world. I am not a historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but I would think that, back then, defense and interest on debt were the two major expenditures of government and that the ability of governments to raise money was more limited than today.
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