Niall Ferguson, Columnist

Take It From K-Pop's Finest: Globalization Lives!

Despite dire predictions, neither the financial meltdown nor Covid nor today’s supposed “polycrisis” can unravel the world economy.

January 29, 2023 at 5:00 AM UTC

By Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” He is a columnist for The Free Press.

Globalized.
Photographer: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

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Blame my younger sons for introducing me to BTS. Until this month, I had managed to maintain my middle-aged ignorance of South Korea’s greatest gift to popular music.

BTS, for those of you who don’t have tweenagers, are a seven-member South Korean boy band formed in Seoul in 2010. Originally, BTS stood for Bangtan Sonyeondan, which translates as “Bulletproof Boy Scouts” — not a bad name for a band, except that Boy Scouts in my day did not wear earrings, makeup and androgynous clothing.