Doom: A Conversation with Niall Ferguson on the Politics of Catastrophe

good afternoon and welcome to our virtual event doom a conversation with neil ferguson on the politics of catastrophe i'm brian anderson the editor of city journal and joining me today to discuss his latest book is indeed neil ferguson he's the milbank family senior fellow at stanford university's hoover institution and an acclaimed historian who's written books on everything from finance and social networks to henry kissinger and the british empire last year was an unprecedented time or so it seemed as covet 19 spread across the world public officials cited the unique threat of the virus to justify extreme interventions in daily life and then civil unrest and violence exploded in u.s cities in a kind of political or social contagion that accompanied the public health emergency it was certainly a troubling year as neil's book shows however disasters and crises are never entirely unprecedented political and natural catastrophes are often entwined and we should try to understand the causes and characteristics of past calamities to help us grasp today's and perhaps better prepare for future disasters in his new book called doom he investigates the common features of geological and atmospheric political and geopolitical biological and technological disasters with that goal in mind throughout our conversation please feel free to submit your questions on whatever platform you're watching us on and we'll do our best to get to as many as we can so neil thanks very much for joining us today it's a pleasure to join you brian um you analyze in doom dozens of historical disasters these range from the black death during the 14th century and the napoleonic wars of the 19th century to the titanic sinking in 1911 and the great famine in mao's china during the 20th century these events happened across many different times and places but what are the common features in your view the recurring patterns and where does covet 19 the crisis surrounding that rank among the disasters you discussed yes it might seem a rather eclectic uh array of of unfortunate events and you might wonder what business i have bringing wars and and pandemics together with earthquakes and and wildfires but there are a couple of things that i think all disasters have in common certainly the kinds of disaster that i'm interested in the obvious one is excess mortality a sudden increase in mortality above what might have been expected based on our relatively recent experience a sudden increase in the probability of of of premature death and that that that's the same whether you're con confronted by a war or a pandemic and and i make the argument which is really borrowed from a martyr sends arguments about famines that the distinction between a natural and a man-made catastrophe is a false dichotomy in many ways coveted 19 illustrates that really well even if you don't believe the lab leak hypothesis though that's looking more and more likely as an explanation of the origins of the pandemic so that's that's the first idea that we really can and should think about pandemics and wars uh in the same within the same framework the second point that that hit me when i was reading a book about the outbreak of world war one uh celine's uh fernandinho's extraordinary account at the beginning of voyager budolanoi it's the fact that to the individual caught up in a disaster there is a a strange sense of unreality and the unreality comes partly from the sense that it can't possibly be happening to you uh it might possibly be happening to somebody else but it can't really kill you and that's a really important and curious human quirk we struggle a bit to grasp the idea of a suddenly increased probability of mortality that applies to us and the other thing i think is quite important that's the sense of confusion that one one is struggling to make sense of this unfolding disaster because it is very unfamiliar it's a new kind of experience not many of us get to experience multiple disasters sometimes uh it happens i think my grandfather went through a whole succession of disasters beginning with the first world war but most of us get one big disaster maybe two when it happens you're really thrown no matter how well educated you think you are so those are important common factors and they explain a lot about our difficulty in dealing with disaster even when we've attained much higher levels of scientific education than say medieval peasants you discuss three different types of disasters in the book black swans grey rhinos and dragon kings uh what are these and what distinguishes them and could you just give a few brief examples of each well it sounds like a rather strange zoo doesn't it uh the idea here these are other people's ideas that i've brought under uh one zoological roof is that disasters can appear a little bit like the the grey rhino that you see trundling towards you uh across the serengeti you kind of know it's coming for you and you have some warning because you see it from some distance and and this is an idea uh that uh that characterizes a lot of disasters that we we see them coming it's not as if a pandemic was wholly unpredictable people have been predicting a major pandemic for decades and in fact i list all the different ted talks and op-eds and books that made the prediction that there would be a major pandemic and it's it's dozens of them uh so that's the gray rhino the odd thing is that when a gray rhino actually hits you when the predicted disaster happens a strange metamorphosis occurs and it's sort of suddenly a black swan and everybody's calling it unprecedented uh this is a year like no other had that many times at the end of 2020 and and we we act surprised as if nobody could possibly have foreseen this the black swan is an idea nasim talib pioneered in the book of that name some years ago it's it's the thing that you really can't foresee because it lies outside your your range of experience and also your your kind of distribution of probabilities so that's an oddity that that something that we talked about for years when it actually happened uh in early 2020 to most people completely by surprise as if we hadn't had all those grey rhino ted talks telling us it was coming the final idea is the dragon king some disasters kill a lot of people but don't have very major consequences a good example of this is the 1957 58 influenza pandemic which almost nobody remembers including people who were around at the time killed a proportion of the world's population not that different from covert uh but its consequences you'd struggle to find in any history book it's a sort of non-event other events kill a lot of people and have huge consequences and that's where this notion of a dragon king which i borrowed from didier sornet comes in it's the idea of an event that's sort of so huge that it lies beyond even a parallel distribution and i think the first world war is a good example of this because the first world war is significant not just because of the 10 million plus people who died in in conventional warfare it's significant because of all the consequences that followed from it like the russian revolution and the breakup of the three empires of central and eastern europe so those are the three creatures that i use to try to organize um a typology of disaster the idea being that that excess mortality alone doesn't really determine the historical significance of an event uh people naturally attribute disasters both human caused and natural or geological or whatever to poor leadership they blame the leaders in charge but in one of your chapters you you write quite interestingly that the point of failure during a catastrophe is often not at the top but in the middle in a combination of errors you know committed by technical operators or middle managers um what what are some historical examples of this and and in your view was that the case in our response to covet 19 as well well this idea came from reading richard feynman's account of the space shuttle challenger disaster in 1986. feynman was a brilliant caltech physicist who got brought into the official inquiry and slightly disrupted it with his enough or unorthodox very non-washington modes of inquiry the the key point about the space shuttle disaster was that the point of failure was in the middle of the nasa bureaucracy now the press corps when the disaster happened did what it always does it tried to pin responsibility on the president and so there was a story that briefly did the rounds that the space shuttle launch had been hurried it had been uh moved ahead uh too fast because reagan wanted to mention it in his state of the union this was a total non-story it fell apart pretty quickly but what had gone wrong that was less obvious now it's true that to make it clear this wasn't a huge disaster in terms of loss of life only seven people died the crew of the challenger but it was a very big disaster in terms of its impact on public consciousness and i don't know you may remember watching it on television many people watched the launch live and were sort of stunned to see the thing blow up seconds after launch anyway feynman delved into the the innards of nasa and he found to his surprise that the engineers at nasa had known all along that there was a one in a hundred chance the thing would blow up i mean this was this was clear to the engineers so it was clearly only a matter of time until something like this happened because they were doing regular space shuttle launches at that point but somewhere in the middle of the nasa bureaucracy a mysterious figure mr kingsbury had decided that it would be better to report that as one in a hundred thousand rather than one in a hundred and and feynman's argument is that ultimately was the nasa bureaucracy's refusal to admit that the risk was 100 that led to the disaster and there's a nice bit in feynman's account where the engineers are complaining they could never get a meeting with mr kingsbury and for me mr kingsbury is a sort of a symbolic figure maybe a little bit like woody allen zellig he's always there somewhere kind of in the middle of the the management structure just quietly changing the the odds of of failure in ways that are satisfying bureaucratically but ultimately disastrous i looked at the titanic in a similar kind of spirit at the time the ship went down everybody hated on the the the chairman of the white star line whose life was more or less destroyed by the disaster he basically became a recluse uh in uh on the coast of ireland and scarcely spoke but it wasn't his fault that such a large number of passengers drowned and if you want to know whose fault it was you have to buy the book i've learned not to give everything away on these calls but but it's not what you think because the titanic has had a whole series of of legend-like explanations attached to it uh not least in the famous movie um the reality is once again one of those little middle management mishaps that prove disastrous and and how do you see this in the context of covet 19 do you think that that pattern played itself out in the current crisis as well i i it did accept that this time that the story that it was all the president's fault has really stuck and you can see why because trump made so many errors of judgment and said so many ludicrous things over the course of 2020 that for most liberal journalists it was just a natural reflex to to blame it on him and you may remember jim fallows writing a piece in the atlantic saying that essentially the president was like the pilot of an aircraft and if the aircraft crashed it was pilot error i must admit i read this piece and as i was reading it i was thinking no this is this is wrong uh and the reason it's wrong is that that being president of the united states is nothing like being a pilot not not even remotely because you're you're sitting atop this enormously complex bureaucracy and and this has been true for decades when decisions get to the oval office they've already been kind of fought over at multiple levels of the bureaucracy all the way up to the cabinet level so i thought that was a kind of misunderstanding of the nature of presidential power and then i thought a bit more about it and i realized that you could apply the feynman principle and the way you do it is this why exactly did the us suffer very high excess mortality why have we got maybe six hundred thousand deaths that happened prematurely because of the pandemic and the answers to that that question go something like this first because cdc utterly failed to ramp up testing in fact made testing harder than it needed to be so nobody knew right into april or may who had covert in the united states secondly there was no attempt to create a contact tracing app of the sort that they used in places like south korea and more recently taiwan that wasn't even seriously attempted by the big tech companies thirdly there was a total failure to protect the vulnerable particularly in elderly care homes and that again happened at the state level that was really a failure of state governments and finally there was no effective enforcement of quarantines at any point uh so that people who were potentially infected just basically were able to do what they liked so all the things that really explain the excess mortality don't seem to me to be uh attributable to presidential decisions this is not to exonerate trump or defend him he made as i said numerous errors of judgment it's just that i don't think his errors of judgment were responsible for a really significant percentage of the the death toll the truth is what happened in the u.s last year and it was true in the uk and it was true in multiple western countries including countries without populist leaders was a terrible failure of the public health bureaucracy which had on paper a pandemic preparedness plan of numerous plans in the case of the us it's just that none of those plans worked if we tell ourselves that it was all the president's fault and getting a new president has solved the problem and i've heard this argument made then the next disaster whatever form it takes will will probably expose a similar failure in the bureaucracy in a different part of the government so this is a really important argument it's not a popular one because nobody wants to feel as if they're letting trump off the hook but in reality if we just say to ourselves if only joe biden had been president a year earlier it would have been fine then we really are deluding ourselves by the way this kind of argument was recently made in the uk by dominic cummings the former adviser to boris johnson whose critique in a long twitter thread and then in his testimony to parliamentary committee was basically this that the entire system had failed not just the elected politicians not specifically the prime minister but the civil service had failed and the public health experts had failed and i think the same story is in fact true in the united states and we should realize that um you you note in the book that politicians and democratic societies are structurally disincentivized from dealing with tail risks unlikely tail risks anyway long-term problems um can you explain a bit why you you see that as the case and what's the alternative if we can't trust uh political leaders or or society leaders to prepare us adequately for disaster what's what's the alternative if there is any well i think there are two problems that democracies face one is what henry kissinger called the problem of conjecture which is that if you are as a leader confronted with the possibility of a disaster and uh you're told that by taking early but costly action you can preempt it and avoid it or alternatively do nothing and you might get away with it because it might not happen it's not certain to happen it's very tempting to go for option two and kick the can down the road why because the the costs of option one uh are not likely to get you rewarded politically people don't really vote for leaders who've averted disasters there's no gratitude for a disaster that didn't happen and this is i think a fundamental problem of incentives in democracy we never really discuss why there wasn't another 911 but it's actually a really interesting question why there were no subsequent large-scale terrorist attacks in the united states and it's been 20 years and nobody certainly gets any credit for that even if we know why it happened so i think that's part of the reason the other part of the reason is that in nearly all democracies a large and complex bureaucratic state has evolved particularly in the last 50 years much larger than was the case 100 years ago and these bureaucracies have their own pathologies they're very good at the cya approach to disaster uh preparedness that's the cover your ass approach where they produce preparedness plans that run for pages and pages usually with an accompanying powerpoint deck and it looks as if the problem has been addressed and i think this is very clear in the case of of covert though there were numerous pandemic preparedness plans from multiple agencies there was even an assistant secretary for preparedness and there's this great 2019 survey that the economist intelligence unit publishes in concert with johns hopkins saying that the us is the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic with the uk in second place uh and of course these preparations turned out to be pretty much worthless when an actual pandemic happened so that's the other thing now what can we do about this i think the wrong answer to that question is we need to heed every cassandra who has a prophecy of doom one of the key points about this book is you can't predict the big disasters they just don't lie in that realm where you can say with confidence there's going to be a pandemic in 2020. you can't really get much beyond there's going to be a pandemic that can't that there's going to be a big earthquake in california one day but anybody who tells you with great confidence that they know when it's going to be is probably a snake oil uh salesperson so i think the wrong approach is to say we need to heed every cassandra and be prepared for every contingency that's the kind of thing that bureaucracies find appealing but but in truth you could waste an unreasonable amount of resources preparing for everything from the asteroid hitting the planet uh to the zombie apocalypse so the right approach and this is the answer to your question is to emphasize rapid reaction because the countries that got this right or at least did best taiwan south korea to some extent israel the countries that got this right acted very quickly and we were slow and i think what we need to emphasize is not powers of prophecy but rapidity of reaction i was very impressed when i was in taiwan at the beginning of 2020 by the fact that they were sort of ready for all kinds of problems from china including election interference at that time as they were running an election but they were quick on the draw when there was this story about a new disease in wuhan that mysteriously according to the chinese authorities wasn't being transmitted from human to human they kind of just didn't believe that and acted very swiftly to make sure that they could limit the spread of the virus within taiwan so i think that's the key and our bureaucracies are very slow in responding because that's really the way they've they've evolved great at the preparedness plan very bad at executing it i think that's fixable but not if we learn the wrong lessons from 2020 which i think we're in the process of doing uh you know the vaccination effort uh shows though that i think free economies um have certain advantages you know you know the us and the uk were really at the forefront of developing the most effective vaccines and and it was thriving in innovative private industries with government help in this case that that may have provided us our exit strategy from the you know from the pandemic yeah if you're going to get one thing right in a if you're going to get one thing right in a pandemic get vaccination right and as i was writing the book remember books aren't like newspapers so it really was kind of finished in august and proofs were finalized in i guess october it was before the phase three results came out from pfizer and moderna but my hunch then was and it proved to be right that the western vaccines would be a lot better than the chinese vaccines and the chinese promises to save the world with their vaccines i regarded with great and it turned out justified skepticism the modern and physical results were even better than i'd expected but they do illustrate the importance of not having a highly centralized approach to problems of public health and the fact that there is still a very competitive biotech industry explains why mrna vaccines exist uh and those people who kind of look longingly at china in mid-2020 say ah if only we could be like them i think really misunderstood the nature of the crisis which after all had originated in china for a pretty good reason um one of your most interesting chapters is on social networks and you've written a previous book on this um that the structure of social and biological networks you know affects transition patterns in everything from ideas to viruses um i you know i think social media was was really instrumental in getting international protests going over racial or police perceived racial injustice in america uh while covet 19 containment efforts you know involved massive interventions to disrupt the networks the social networks that convey the virus i wonder if there's a way to think about network science and networks to minimize the risks of either informational pandemics or biological pandemics well it's a key question my last book the square in the tower was about the kind of monsters that we've created that now dominate our our public sphere and these are network platforms whose business model that's to sell ads necessitates getting people's eyeballs on screens for as long as possible and that that actually leads to algorithms that prioritize fake fake news and extreme views and and conspiracy theories now this was something that i was deeply concerned about really from from 2016 2017 when i i wrote that book and i think our failure to address that problem left us very vulnerable to the infodemic that has ultimately made it very difficult for the us to to defeat covert 19 i mean if if there is a significant holdout of 25 or so of the population who just won't get vaccinated it's not clear to me that the u.s can get to herd immunity because these new variants like the delta variant coming your way uh it's already widespread in the u in the uk uh will get these people and that's because it's just way more contagious than the original so-called misnamed wild variant so that that's i think a really important part of our our story that that we've got a much much worse information ecosystem than the eisenhower administration had to contend with back in 1957 when a similar sized pandemic struck i think the lesson for me and it's an important lesson not only about information networks but also about networks of travel and transportation which are crucial in a in a pandemic is that one needs circuit breakers to be in place given that contagion produces these very disastrous outcomes in the biological or medical world we need much better circuit breakers than we seem to have uh there should have been a much earlier suspension of travel from wuhan that happened it was insane that flights were still leaving uh direct flight to new york and san francisco and major european capitals right down until january the 23rd and that was uh during the chinese lunar new year holiday when enormous numbers of people were leaving uh wuhan so i think the obvious uh step that we need to take is to think much more about how we can have rapid circuit breakers so that the network can temporarily uh be disrupted the interesting thing about covet is the super spreader feature that that has a low dispersion factor 80 of the spreading is done by about 20 of the infected people and and if you could stop those super spreaders from doing that their work in the early phase of the pandemic then you had a pretty good shot at containment so that's one obvious takeaway the second and more tricky thing is what to do about the network platforms i mean they clearly dominate the public sphere and they haven't really reformed themselves in any in my view meaningful way since since 2016 and there are lots of bad answers to this question like oh let's have an anti-trust campaign against them which is the biden administration's option this isn't going to fix anything i mean it's a complete in my view cul-de-sac to try and solve these problems with antitrust another wrong answer is let's just have a really powerful federal regulator that can can squeeze the big tech companies harder that again is highly unlikely to work on the basis of of historical experience so i i argue for a kind of double a combination punch that just increases the liability of the companies i mean you have to do something about section 230 so that they don't simply plead uh immunity every time anybody tries to sue them from a harm arising from content on the platform and you need some kind of first amendment right so that people can't be censored arbitrarily on political grounds i think both of those things had been in place uh the internet would have done a lot less harm than it did in 2020 some questions are coming in from viewers here's an interesting one um from tim k he asks are there further examples of institutions in the private sector that do have proper preparedness plans and can governments learn from them so does does the private sector do a better job of of preparing for catastrophe or disaster than the government did well it's hard to know how good private sector preparedness plans are um if one goes back to a different kind of disaster the financial crisis what's striking about that is that on paper there were all kinds of preparedness plans uh in the sense that banks were supposed to be quite well regulated entities and there were federal agencies that had supervision of the mortgage market and yet the system blew up and when it did blow up there had to be frantic improvisation the fed certainly didn't have depression preparedness plan ben bernanke improvised that and you can trace it in the fomc transcripts over a period of weeks bernanke was able to persuade his colleagues that this could be 1929 and they had to really throw everything at the problem so i think one can see in the financial world the kind of absence of preparedness on the eve of 2008 everybody basically underestimated what the consequences of lehman's failure would be i sort of scouted around at the time of the pandemic uh to see who was doing it right and uh talked to audrey tang uh the taiwanese digital minister and said well you know how did you do so much better and and her answer was that you need to have a plan but you need to have a kind of practice uh you need to have run some simulations you need to have a sense of how it will work and i think what's wrong with a lot of planning in western democracies is that we have the plan but don't really try it out this is very true for california and the earthquake i'm sure there's an earthquake preparedness plan that covers many pages somewhere in sacramento but in four and a half years of living in california i haven't been involved in a single drill not not at home not at work so my sense is that the problem is not the lack of planning it's the lack of practice and here the military is interesting because the military has a longer tradition of of planning uh it also has a longer tradition of skepticism about planning because everybody knows from reading close of it that the plan disintegrates on contact with the enemy and then you're heavily reliant on your on your drilling and how well trained you are so i think the problem is actually this lack of drilling uh audrey tang emphasized to me not only this sense that the plan existed and it had been tried it had been practiced but also that they have very i think intelligently used technology to increase the transparency of decision-making and make government more responsive to citizens you'll remember that we had a mass shortage most people in fact had a shortage of protective equipment at the beginning of the pandemic so we lied about it and told people oh you don't need masks only the medical professionals need masks a lie that then came back to haunt the public health officials when they had to tell the truth that masks actually helped in taiwan they were honest about it they said look we have a shortage let's try to to allocate the masks appropriately so i think this use of technology is what we have to copy they've understood i think quite well there that you can use internet platforms to increase the accountability of government to citizens and get information to flow rapidly in a crisis so the decision makers are not flying blind or relying on on models with with made up numbers uh here's another question from a viewer herb stop he asks as technology advances do you foresee more intentional disasters from bad international actors whether china or iran the kind of ransomware attacks we're starting to see from cyber criminals uh more regularly will we ever be able to force the perpetrators of these acts to pay for their actions in any kind of effective way that's a great question herb at the end of the square in the tower the last book i argued that we were kind of on the eve of a 30 years war in cyberspace and it would have the same characteristics of warfare in europe before the piece of westphalia there would be no rules there would be no respect of national borders it would be a free-for-all and i think that's the reality of cyber warfare today it is a permanent state of of war of all against all uh and and that's quite alarming because you can imagine an escalation of cyber warfare suppose there's a crisis over taiwan and uh it gets really uh it gets kinetic as people like to say that's the moment at which the u.s can expect a really massive coordinated cyber attack and uh if a few crooks can you know temporarily disrupt the fuel supply on the east coast i think the chinese and russian governments together could probably do quite a lot more than that so this is a big disaster that that could strike much sooner than the disasters that we're supposed to spend our time thinking about namely climate change in truth a massive all-out cyber attack could happen next year it could happen anytime and i'm not sure how well prepared we are for that the other problem you raise is is important that there is no deterrence in cyberspace uh we we like to say or claim that we can deter uh the russians and joe biden's been doing that this week but it's a lie because we can't and the truth is that there are lots of criminal organizations that are probably in some relationship to moscow that will carry on uh with their malware and other attacks and the russians will simply say nothing to do with us and it'll be hard for us to prove that it is anything to do with them most of the people trained in strategic thinking during the cold war are addicted to deterrence that's what you do if you've spent your time thinking about nuclear strategy but the bad news is there's no deterrence in cyberspace and it's not even clear if you can identify your attacker certainly not in a hurry that's that that's really important i think because the next war will be much more of a cyber war than most of us are ready for and i worry a little bit that that when we come under this attack if it's successful and disables significant parts of our infrastructure if we can't any longer have zoom calls no more seriously if if there are fundamental breakdowns in internet-enabled forms of of infrastructure management i think the country will be paralyzed and i'm not convinced i have no reason to believe that we have a good plan for that and we certainly haven't trained for it because i don't know a single organization and correct me if i'm wrong i don't have a single major organization that has a contingency plan for a full outage where you will no longer be able to communicate via email or or cell phones what do you do then i don't think of any i don't know any organization that's thought that through um this relates to that question in a way you you reject in the book this uh growing perception i think that the covet 19 crisis has uh set the united states on a path to permanent decline relative to china um you know in your view how has the the uh pandemic affected the global order is the u.s a little better positioned for post-pandemic strength than you know a lot of people recognize yeah when i was writing the book there were a lot of articles uh saying the asian centuries donned it's all over for the united states here comes china etc and i i instinctively rebel against this line of argument so what the book says is look it may look as if china's done brilliantly and the us has done abysmally but let's take a closer look a this thing originated in china it doesn't look like it's a pretty story otherwise why would they be covering up what happened so assiduously it's done major reputational damage to china not just the origins of the pandemic but the way they used their so-called wolf warrior diplomacy to try to bend the narrative i mean that really went down badly in europe and if you look at the pew surveys attitudes towards china and towards xi jinping became much more negative last year pretty much everywhere certainly in all developed countries um secondly in the financial crisis that the pandemic caused it was the u.s that led it's the fed that's clearly the dominant entity in the u.s treasury that are the dominant entities uh in global finance and by using massive perhaps excessive fiscal and monetary methods they succeeded in offsetting the economic shock and propelling the united states to a very rapid recovery this year china meanwhile although it didn't have such a serious uh shock to its system last year it's still uh in many ways struggling to get uh consumption to recover it's well below trend right now and so they've had to fall back on the old methods of debt finance fixed asset investment methods that ultimately will run out of road i think china's on a significant and sustainable and sustained rather decline in its growth rate and of course that's partly demographic in nature the third point is that the vaccine race was won by these western uh and principally american companies so chinese vaccines have been a huge disappointment countries that relied on them have not been able to bring the pandemic under control chile is a good example but there are others vaccinated really large proportions of people the vaccines have low efficacy and there are variants that they don't really deal with at all well so when i was writing the book which was as i said in august last year my hunch was that the us would look a lot better by the time the book came out and china would look a lot worse and i think that's proved to be true the last point i'd add is just that it's cold war ii i mean we may not want to face that but as far as the chinese are concerned it is cold war ii and in this cold war i think uh the us has significant advantages uh though not so significant that it's guaranteed to win and i think the what the pandemic did was to make it a bit clearer to people that it's cold war ii maybe not entirely to convince them most intellectuals who write about these things don't like the cold war analogy but i'm a firm believer in it because it seems to me that it takes nearly all the boxes uh that you would want to see ticks if you were looking for another another cold war and that's where the book ends because of course if if you get to a full-blown cold war uh you've always got the scenario that it turns hot which the cold war did in its early stages in in 1950 with the invasion of south korea that would be in our time equivalent the equivalent in our time would be a chinese invasion of taiwan next year which would certainly have the potential to produce a very big war which would be another disaster for my next updated edition well let's hope that doesn't happen um but yes it's it's certainly a plausible scenario um you know one of the political effects of the pandemic and i think this is true of of disasters generally they they have um the consequence of making previously radical ideas all of a sudden mainstream and i think we've seen this um in the coven 19 crisis with with both um you know economics and social policy where there's been a big shift in what's acceptable i wonder if you could comment on that a little bit yeah i mean as i said in the book it's extraordinary how ideas that were marginal or fringe ideas at the beginning of of 2020 like universal basic income or modern monetary theory suddenly seemed mainstream by the time uh the cares act was passed and uh and and the fed was uh buying a vast new uh issuance of of treasury bonds to finance sending checks to people's uh to people's uh mailboxes i mean extraordinary things can happen very rapidly in a crisis and and of course then they become uh permanent features this is uh one of the laws of of history first identified by german uh economist adolf wagner that if the state acquires responsibilities uh in a crisis it will tend to hang on to them even after the crisis is over and we saw that the world wars led to a significant increase in the scale of government in pretty much every combatant country covert 19 looks like it's doing something very similar indeed and certainly the biden administration has seized the opportunity to argue that this proves the need for government to be bigger therefore there's going to be an additional what up to six trillion dollars of of spending in the form of multiple legislative plans uh there's no question that that these plans would not have been viable politically had it not been for covert a because donald trump would probably have been re-elected and b because without this emergency they would still have seemed like like fringe ideas uh this is a related question from somebody watching uh vic h uh he says the world economic forum founder claus schrub said that the pandemic represented an opportunity to reset the world is their historical precedent vic asks for elites to use disasters to reorder society according to their ideological preferences certainly a good example that that i cite and doom is that in england after the black death uh there was a really quite significant effort to expand royal authority and impose greater controls on the on the labouring peasant population controls that that sought to limit their mobility which was quite important in the aftermath of the black death which killed a huge proportion of of the population remember vastly more than than covered i mean if covert kills 0.05 percent of the world's population that will make it uh just barely a top 20 pandemic it will bring it nowhere close to the black death which may have killed a third of humanity and certainly killed between a third and a half of the population of most european countries so there was a shortage of labor in the wake of of the black death that was actually quite a major problem and the response of the english state was to increase its control over people's mobility as well as to impose a whole bunch of new taxes the good news is that ultimately this produced later in the 14th century a peasant's revolt and it was a kind of a case of overreach where i think the english state had had simply extended its power so far that it alienated a critical mass of of the population but yeah i mean i think disasters typically seem like opportunities to to reorder things often on the basis of erroneous claims about what has caused the disaster and that's the danger here that uh i hear siren voices saying this happened because government wasn't big enough therefore we must make government bigger whereas in reality uh the public health bureaucracy has never been bigger uh than it than it was in in late 2019 um if if we draw the wrong inferences uh as i i'm sure claus schwab is uh in danger of of doing uh after all the world economic forum has a terrific track record of of drawing erroneous inferences uh as well as of missing disasters i can't resist pointing out that in january 2020 i was at the world economic forum presided over by clash schwab but the dot the agenda was entirely dominated by climate change all the top risks in the global risk report were climate related and i ran around the conference hall trying to explain to people that a pandemic has actually already begun and that it was slightly troubling that there were four or so delegates from wuhan at the conference at least according to the participants list uh so yeah i mean the world economic forum's bound to come to some wrong conclusion about this uh before reverting to having discussions about climate change the striking argument you make in the book or observation is that the reaction to the pandemic of the late 50s in the united states was nothing like the reaction to covet 19 that the life basically just went on as if nothing was really going on there wasn't the kind of lockdowns and disruptions we've seen in 2020. i wonder what's what's the difference because as you as you know that pandemic of the late 50s was very similar in terms of uh it's its health consequences to to covet 19. i think covert will turn out to be worse because it's not over and it's killing significant numbers of people still so i would guess that in terms of its share of the world's population that it kills covered will end up being bigger but not much bigger not not as big anywhere close to as big as 1918-19 so i still think the 5758 asian food's about the best points of comparison we have and remember that pandemic killed young people as well as old people i mean this is a very aegis disease covert uh they'd have been very happy to have had covert in the 1950s because in 57 you were dealing with excess mortality amongst teenagers as well as the very young we haven't really had to deal with that and that is a huge huge difference which we perhaps underestimate it also matters actuarially because if you're kidding young people the number of life years lost is is really a lot larger than if you're if your disease is just killing people over over 60 or over 65 or 70. so i think it's worth comparing the two uh diseases and i do in the book and it's one of the parts of the book i really enjoyed writing because i just felt as if i was reading about a different country the approach of the eisenhower administration was unbelievably minimalist they spent almost no additional federal funds and they spent the money only on facilitating uh the production of a vaccine that was it uh there were no closures there was no declaration of emergency uh schools stayed open people continued to work yes there were spikes of mortality two pretty big waves uh of mortality rather as we've seen in the last 18 months and life went on economically you can't detect the pandemic and the data it's really hard to see it there was a slight recession in 57 but it had nothing to do with the pandemic and actually had started before it so i i came away with two answers to the question of why the difference and one answer is a cultural one i mean the generation that had fought world war ii and eisenhower was president had a different attitude to the possibility of excess mortality they also had a different attitude to to a crisis and the speed with which the eisenhower administration reaches its decisions and then follows through is really impressive they got a vaccine within a matter of months from development to getting it into people's arms so there's partly that and i think ordinary people just were tougher not so risk-averse people were willing to accept that there was a risk of infectious disease and that was life the other thing that i came to realize as i was writing the book was that they just didn't have the options that we had i mean you just couldn't tell everybody in 57 work from home you couldn't i mean many people didn't even have a telephone line so it was a different very different world and when you go back and and read about 5758 you see that the the nature of the country has has changed perhaps more profoundly than than we realize in in the intervening time uh the the the book argues that you know coven 19 is going to have a lot of long-term effects on our societies but that the death of cities like new york and london is not going to be one of those consequences uh you do say though and this is this is uh quite interesting big cities will become cheaper grungier and younger i wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on that um you know which is a question of course of great interest to the man and institute well the good news for the manhattan institute is that i think this will be much more of a problem for san francisco as cities so so badly managed that this uh almost has felt like the death now new york and london are different as the book shows they've withstood multiple disasters over their history including many uh worse uh epidemics than than this one and london of course survived uh heavy bombardment by the luftwaffe in the form of the blitz so i think the general proposition that i that i would advance is that it's quite hard to kill a big financial center although it can happen and venice is the example of a financial center that died and became an ossified uh tourist destination i mean you could imagine that perhaps happening to new york but i don't think covert is going to do it and the reason that i i think that is that there's just an enormous uh elasticity uh with a place like new york or london if something happens that causes let's say a bunch of the wealthier older citizens to leave whether for fear of their health or more likely because they feel the city is no longer a great place to be the taxes are going up better to be in in palm beach then that just creates opportunities for younger people who previously couldn't afford to live in manhattan to to move in so younger grungier for sure i mean you can sense the the crime problem as one of the lasting legacies of the protest wave of of last summer in multiple american cities but you know you and i are old enough uh brian to remember when new york was a pretty grungy uh young and quite dangerous uh city uh it goes through these cycles uh uh as does london uh and maybe it got a bit too uh glitzy and and and high-end uh for its own own good pre pre-pandemic i mean a plague that really kills the elderly much more than everybody else in a previous era let's go back a hundred years ask yourself how people like us would have reacted to such a disease if it had struck in 1920 well the social darwinists would have been celebrating uh that a disease could be so discerning as to take away people who either were very elderly or had significant co-morbidities and they would have seen this as a great opportunity to rejuvenate society that's not how we think today because our culture is radically altered but in truth there there will be some of that though it must be said not as much as if the disease had been much more lethal than it has been your concluding chapter suggests this is a point you make throughout the book that predicting the exact next next disaster isn't a science we can't really do it in that sense but that science fiction and dystopian literature uh you know can offer us a way to imagine different kind of scenarios can they serve as warnings and you know are there particular works that you find relevant to our current moment i was thinking to myself back in 2019 i've i've read a lot of history in my life but i really haven't read enough science fiction and the reason i was thinking that was that trying to apply history to contemporary problems will get you a long way and and certainly more people should do it but history is quite bad at helping you think about technological discontinuities and what they might mean whereas science fiction is this great effort by a good many imaginative people to to do that for you so i spent the pre-pandemic year furiously reading science fiction writers in an attempt to think about those sorts of discontinuity that as a reader of history i might i might miss and a couple of writers really uh helped me think better about the problems that we confront uh the chinese author you see shin whose three body problems some people listening will certainly have read is i think one of the most extraordinary writers living today and i devoured his work available in in translation including the two uh sequels uh the dark forest uh and and death's end amazing books not least because they give you a great insight into how and highly intelligent contemporary chinese thinks about the world and the future so those are must-read books and i love them and i quote them extensively towards the end of of doom the other writer i got very into was neil stevenson whose book snow crash written in the 90s seems to have envisaged a great deal about the world as it is today particularly a world in which everybody is sort of half the time online and their avatars are having a slightly better time than they are that's certainly the world of a lot of young people uh over the past 18 months uh young people have been under kind of house arrest because of a disease that doesn't particularly threaten them and they've been leading a life on a social life online that i struggle a bit to to fathom but stevenson foresaw all this in so crash and i think snow crash is a rather brilliant uh visualization of what a world could be like if if the online experience started to be better than than the real thing here's a question from a viewer uh m bernstein how replicable is the success of south korea taiwan and new zealand in dealing with kovid two of these are small states with bad neighbors two are islands and all tend to be more homogeneous and trusting than most western countries across a number of dimensions that's a great and legitimate question and i don't want to give the impression that the united states can be taiwan uh or south korea uh for that matter new zealand i think though that we forget a couple of disadvantages that taiwan and south korea had they were very near to where the disaster began uh compared with us effective distance really matters in a networked world and we really effectively were much closer to wuhan than we realized given that the fact of direct flights and therefore we should have been thinking a bit more like the taiwanese about the chinese threat because it was much closer to us than we really wanted to to face the second point i'd make is that just because you're a really big country doesn't mean or shouldn't mean that you can't do things like testing i mean there really is no excuse for the utter failure of cdc to get testing uh to be done well that wasn't something where a small country had an advantage we should have been really good at that we have any amount of capacity uh throughout the economy to generate rapid and efficient tests and it was flunked partly because cdc wanted to centralize the production of tests which was an idiotic decision when you think about it for even a few a few seconds the same goes for contact tracing do we have some disadvantage there hang on a minute we've the biggest technology companies in the world they could graph our social networks at facebook in a five seconds with great precision the fact that we took no advantage of the technology companies vast reservoirs of data and processing power i think is a really odd thing and one might well ask why with all the data that they have are those companies not doing more in the public interest than they seemed willing to do last year i think i think scale isn't relevant here you can do this kind of thing regardless of your scale provided you have an effective government and a willing private sector which i think we seem to lack finally the issue of homogeneity and trust is a really interesting one because i don't know that it's as powerful a distinguishing feature as people tend to assume when they draw cultural contrasts between oh i don't know confucian east asian societies and and libertarian anglosphere societies i mean those kinds of arguments look less plausible to me when you realize that not only new zealand but also australia proved perfectly able to do the kind of things that they were doing in south korea and taiwan and i don't think australians are that different from british and american people when it comes to uh trust uh and homogeneity uh so i think we give ourselves an excuse and it's a kind of weird excuse when we say oh we couldn't do those things like contact tracing because we're such liberty loving individualists and yet we were willing to submit to effectively mass house arrest in the form of strict lockdowns i don't i just don't understand how lockdowns were a triumph for the anglo-american spirit of freedom and a contact tracing app would have been a terrible violation of those of those ideals well uh neil i think we're nearing the end of our broadcast time today i wanted to thank you very much for uh joining us at the manhattan institute for an excellent discussion uh and i want to thank all of the viewers who watched uh neil ferguson's book doom the politics of catastrophe is out now uh it's available for purchase at the link in the comments window on your screen and you can get it uh and in all bookstores send on amazon of course if you'd like to hear about uh more conversation like today's uh or interested in supporting the manhattan institute or city journal you can subscribe to mis newsletters city journal itself of course or consider making a donation so there are links for doing so also in the comments window on your screen so thanks again neil uh and uh really appreciate your time today fascinating you

Channel: Manhattan Institute

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Length: 60min 4sec (3604 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021