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Slowing growth, crushing debts, aging populations, anti-social behavior — what exactly is amiss with Western civilization? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, is that our institutions are degenerating and that to slow the degeneration of the West’s once dominant civilization will take heroic leadership and radical reform.

SPEAKER BIOS

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and the author of many books, including The Great Degeneration.

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9 am — Registration and Continental Breakfast

Session 1: From Dutch Backwater to the UN
Featuring: Mike Wallace
World War II was the culmination of a more than 300-year trajectory, which catapulted New York from the edge of the world to its center. Not only did the city become the home of the United Nations, but it emerged as the cultural and economic seat of an American new-style empire.

In his State of the Union Address on January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt looked forward to a world in which everyone enjoyed four essential freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These values were central to both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who made it her personal mission to codify those rights in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts discuss the speech and its far-reaching influence, and also delve into this extraordinary couple’s influence on one another.