Niall Ferguson: Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe EN

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] our guest tonight is perfectly able to understand our language but it's easier to talk about the book about the book doom in english and so we are quite sure that you will understand what we are talking about if not especially when i talk or ask questions please give me a sign but you know our guest tonight it's it's an honor that we have him with us tonight because he's uh yeah he's a welsh star uh in history like cristiano ronaldo in soccer or lady gaga and pop music this is what he is for for for history brilliant sometimes flamboyant traveling all over the world all the time that's a matter in the book uh he because so many people all over the world want one to listen to him want to listen what this scholar next to me thinks he's a senior fellow at the hoover institution you know different famous addresses in his career oxford of course london school of economics uh stanford who institution is part of of stanford now he lives in uh near in some kind of neil ferguson another applause please thank you [Music] you shouldn't have done that because now we know that the german is excellent maybe there was a mistake there was once a time i came to berlin in 1989 or 90 and i for the first time was able to travel around in in the east after vender when he was in far cart for an [Laughter] and that was the end so now it's english then anglo-saxon yeah you can give us an introduction in your in your new book doom politics of catastrophe well thank you yog it's such a fantastic idea to talk about doom in a crematorium perfect only only in berlin would anybody come up with that idea so i i'm just thrilled because because this is a book that encourages us to think honestly about death and to think historically about it not only to think about our individual and inevitable doom because we we're all going to die except peter thiel the rest of us though i think have to face the fact that we are mortal but the problem is that disasters happen and suddenly our probability of death seems to change suddenly we confront an unexpected increase in our risk of death and have to consider that our our lives will be shorter than we planned now i wanted to write a book about disasters for some time i was thinking a lot about how to do that because i kept thinking of a line from alan bennett's play the history boys which you may have heard of alan bennett was one of the beyond the fringe team with jonathan miller and peter cook and dudley moore after that years later he wrote the history boys which is about a rather nasty history teacher helping a group of english school boys to get into oxford or cambridge and at one point the the one of the boys gets very frustrated with history and he says but sir history is just one thing after another which is a great line but that's not quite right because actually history is one disaster after another and it feels that way doesn't it you you've got covert 19 the biggest pandemic that we can remember and then you turn on the television and germany is under water and then you change channel and kabul is falling to the taliban and my mother who's 84 says oh it's just one disaster after another and in a way it is i mean history is like that because historians are drawn towards disaster what was the first book i ever wrote it was a book about the biggest monetary disaster in history the german hyperinflation after the first world war and i used to hang out with german historians which is a masochistic way of spending your time [Laughter] fun they do not do because they study disasters all the time i mean german history was the deutsche katuswa that's what mynik called the mid 20th century german experience so i kept thinking there's a way of doing this that puts disaster in perspective and tries to show that it's not the end of the world that we really have to worry about even although we find that a very interesting idea we're fascinated by the end of the world it's in our major religions all the science fiction movies are basically some version of the end of the world but doom says relax the end of the world is really quite a long way away it's just disasters of varying sizes and forms that we have to deal with and we need to think rationally about disasters in order to deal with them well what was lacking last year certainly in the united states and in i think many european countries was any sense of perspective was it just the seasonal flu or was it the black death in reality covert 19 was somewhere in between we struggled to understand what was happening i think mainly because of the lack of historical perspective so the idea of this book is to put disasters in history into some perspective and to make sense of the paradox that we get richer we get safer we live longer our living stands are higher on average than at any time in the past that steve pinker is right when he says in enlightenment now things are getting better why is the news always about the disasters this was my old friend steve pinker's complaint ever since we were colleagues at harvard steve pinker is right but there's a flaw in his argument and i tell the story in the book of the the bat that exposed the floor the bet was made by the astrophysicist martin reese who years ago i think in 2007 made a public bet at something called the long now foundation in san francisco he bet publicly that by the end of 2020 bio error or bio terror would have caused at least a million deaths and that was the bet by the end by the last day of 2020 an act of bioterror or bioera would cause at least a million deaths or i think they used the word casualties and steve pinker took the bet because steve pinker said there's not going to be a pandemic they said ebola would be a pandemic they said sars would be a pandemic there's not going to be a pandemic because progress because enlightenment both the positions are true that life has got massively better especially in the last 200 years and for most of humanity especially in the last 50 years but disasters keep happening and paradoxically our scientific progress has created new kinds of disaster and in many ways made us more vulnerable to disaster than ever before so steve pinker took the bet and of course lost the bet because of covert i was wanting to write a book about disasters and dystopias when covert began with a little email i got on january the third last year something funny about this new pneumonia in wuhan if you're a historian you kind of know that that's not good because so many pandemics have begun with a little paragraph that says new form of disease in china but i'd also been reading a lot of science fiction because i had decided in 2019 that i hadn't been reading enough science fiction i'd almost overdosed on history but i was reading science fiction to try and get a better sense of the possibilities of technological change so oddly enough i had been reading margaret atwood the oryx and craig books which are about a disastrous man-made pandemic so it wasn't just the history that was making me nervous in january last year it was also the science fiction a lot of science fiction is about pandemics all the way back to mary shelley's book the last man which is kind of the first ever work of science fiction so what you get in this book to be clear is not a a book about covert it is a book about all disasters and one of the things i try to show in the book is that there is no really meaningful distinction between a man-made or human-made a natural disaster we use these categories but they are meaningless and i got this idea from amartya sen the great indian economist who said famines are not natural disasters they are political and my insight last year was that is true of all disasters not just famines was covert a natural disaster you do not need to believe in the lab leak hypothesis uh to think that it was in large measure man-made even if even if it turned out that there was no lab leak and the mutation that produced zara's kov2 was natural even if that story turned out to be true which i begin to doubt it was still man-made in the sense that it was decisions by individuals by policymakers by bureaucrats that determined how many people died in one country as opposed to another remember almost nobody died of covet in taiwan and half a million in the united states it was the same virus so the politics of catastrophe is one of the central ideas of the book another idea that the book tries to explore which i think is interesting is the difference between a grey rhino a black swan and a dragon king now a grey rhino is uh michelle wilker's idea for a disaster that you see coming towards you like you see it you you can see it not just months off but years off year after year ted talks by larry brilliant and bill gates a pandemic is a major risk we need to be very concerned about a pandemic the grey rhino climate change is another and yet when it happens when the disaster strikes this thing that has been predicted 20 times becomes a black swan and everybody's amazed and the journalists go on tv and they say this is absolutely unprecedented this is out of left field 2020 was a year like no other this is all rubbish because there's nothing more precedented than a pandemic that is very precedented so i wanted to try and explain why it is that we can see the gray rhino coming but we're still surprised when it strikes why just to illustrate the point in 2019 was the united states said to be the best prepared country for a pandemic in the world and the uk was second and yet when the pandemic happened both countries handled it quite badly why why was it suddenly a black swan and then why do some disasters kill large numbers of people but have no historical consequences they don't become dragon kings that is to say there are some disasters that don't matter historically let me give you an example in 1957 a new strain of influenza swept the world they called it the asian flu because it came from guess where china there really was a paragraph in the new york times that said strange new strange new form of influenza in hong kong and it killed not quite as large a proportion of the world's population has covered covert is now on 0.06 and our estimates for the 1957 58 influenza are quite a bit lower than that about half that but it's still the pandemic most like covert just to give you an idea the 1918 influenza was much worse it was 10 or 20 times worse than covert in terms of the share of the world's population that it killed it was about two percent even if you accept the highest estimate for covert the asian flu was still 10 times 10 times worse and the black death forget it it killed about a third of all human beings the bubonic plague so the interesting thing is that 1957 was very like our experience last year and yet nobody remembers it you can talk to people who were alive in 1957 and they don't remember it how do we explain that that some historical events have consequences far greater than the body count would lead you to expect and some have very many fewer consequences than the body count would lead you to expect this is an important question that the book tackles if one asks why it feels as if covert was a great disaster it's not really the body cone that you're thinking about what you're really thinking about is all the disruption particularly the economic and social disruption that it caused and also the second order political effects like the huge wave of protests that happened last year in the united states or the fact that cold war ii between the united states and china became so much more obvious in the context of the pandemic so these are the kind of broad brush strokes that i that i use to to help you think about disaster bringing all the disasters together including the titanic now many people have seen the movie titanic be honest you have all seen that movie i think every person in the world saw that movie but that movie does not tell you the truth about the titanic disaster and what really happened and i'm not going to tell you tonight because if you want to know you have to buy a book i learned an important thing in the last year from my nine-year-old son thomas i was doing a lot of podcasts about the book and interviews and events and i was feeling a little bit frustrated about the book sales and i was sitting complaining damn it michael lewis is selling more books than me and i've done all these podcasts my son thomas who's nine said dad have you considered that a podcast might be a substitute for a book rather than an encouragement to buy the book of course so now i don't give it all away the reason titanic is interesting is that although it's a relatively small disaster in terms of its death toll it is extraordinarily impactful culturally similarly the space shuttle challenger is one of these disasters that i mean you didn't kill many people seven people the crew but every every american beyond a certain age remembers that that event and i'll tell you one more thing and then i'm going to shut up and we'll have a conversation uh about that disaster because it's really important when the space shuttle blew up spectacularly just seconds after its launch the first response of the washington press corps of the media was to try to blame the president and the story was the space shuttle launch had been rushed at the orders of ronald reagan because he wanted to mention it in his state of the union address now this was fake news there had never been any intention to mention it in that speech so what really happened i will tell you this the physicist richard feynman discovered that the nasa engineers knew that there was a one in 101 percent chance that the space shuttle would blow up they knew that they knew why too they knew that the o-rings that kept the fuel from leaking from the launch tanks contracted in cold weather so that if it was a cold day the probability was probably even worse than one in a hundred but in the nasa bureaucracy there was a little man named mr kingsbury mr kingsbury and mr kingsbury changed one in a hundred to one in a hundred thousand which is different and as i read fyman's account i thought you know there are a lot of mr kingsbury's in the history of disaster and just as there's this strong temptation in 1986 to blame reagan if you possibly could last year there was an even more powerful temptation in the united states to blame it all on trump it was so satisfying it's it solved the problem of why the united states was doing so badly it was trump jim fallows wrote a whole essay for the atlantic saying pilot error was all his fault now i am not saying that trump made no mistakes he made so many that you lost count what i try to show in the book is that that those mistakes cannot explain the very high levels of mortality in the united states last year and if you tell yourself as an american it was all trump's fault and we got rid of him therefore the problem is solved you haven't understood the nature of disaster because the nature of disaster is that the point of failure is sometimes quite far down the chain of command it is mr kingsbury the things that killed people last year in large numbers were failure to provide adequate tests early on absence of any system of contact tracing failure to protect the elderly in elderly care homes and then any a failure to quarantine potentially infected people none of those things had anything to do with donald trump nor in britain were they the fault of boris johnson these were failures of the public health system cdc the centers for disease control utterly failed to provide enough tests and it would have failed in pretty much the same way if joe biden had been president a year earlier tolstoy says in war and peace the greatest of all novels that the illusion of the time of the period around 1812 was to think that it was napoleon and napoleon alone that made it all happen this fox this fallacy that we think the leaders are all important is still very much alive in the western media and indeed non-western media today and doom says let's not exonerate bad leaders but let's recognize that often in a disaster the point of failure is further down the chain of command and this is important because the next disaster could very well play out in the same way who was mr kingsbury last year was a man named robert cadillac have you heard of robert cadillac robert cadillac was the assistant secretary for preparedness at the department of health and human services was his job and he was therefore the man who oversaw the 36-page pandemic preparedness plan that came out in 2018 but not long after it was published robert cadillac gave a lecture a talk at the university of texas and a friend of mine philip zeliko found this talk and he sent it to me there's a video and in the talk the assistant secretary for preparedness says if we don't have a real insurance plan against a pandemic we're going to be sol if there is one now i didn't know what sol meant because it's an american military acronym and it's short for out of luck we're going to be whistling in the wind a bit said cadillac this was just after they published the pandemic preparedness plan so dumas about that kind of thing it asks the question why given that we know so much more scientifically than any previous generation that we can sequence the genetic structure of a virus in a matter of hours and devise highly efficacious vaccines even in days and yet somehow with all our knowledge we still cannot bring this disease under control and the answer cannot simply be that some governments are led by incompetent populists that is not a sufficient explanation somewhere in the pentagon there is a 36 page cyber attack preparedness plan and my guess is that it will be about as good as the pandemic preparedness plan when the cyber attack happens the final insight of the book is that it is better to be generally paranoid to be open to a whole range of possible disasters than to be meticulously prepared for the wrong disaster you do not get the disaster that you want you get the disaster that history the great ironical god gives you so i think one of the reasons that we did badly last year was mr kingsbury and mr cadillac and all the other people whose job it was who did it badly but there's another reason and that is more than in any recent pandemic more than in 1957 crazy ideas proliferated from the outset about the virus about treatments about vaccines the internet has created as i argued in my last book the square and the tar which i think was pletsu and tuma the internet has created a vast machine for reviving magical thinking and the revival of magical thinking the belief that the vaccine will inject a microchip into your bloodstream which which half of the people who refuse to be vaccinated believe in the united states magical thinking is back and magical thinking is in some ways more contagious than covert and you're asking yourself is there a vaccine is there a vaccine for magical thinking and the answer is that there is [Laughter] and it's available here thank you very much indeed [Applause] in germany there's an ongoing uh discussion among scientists about about the virus and it's a very tough discussion would you say that you compared to this magical thinking that you believe in in one single scientific truth the thing that i learned are writing this book which i i kind of knew already because my mother is a physicist and my sister is a physicist she's at yale i'm the dumb one and i'm the black sheep but they always kind of like to talk about science at dinner and you learn that there is no such thing as the science some settled body of fact that you have to swear that you believe in there are sciences lots of them multiple disciplines and they are all engaged in a constant battle to falsify existing hypotheses so last year i was kind of obsessed with the pandemic beginning in january i went to the davos world economic forum and they were all talking about climate change and i'm going no there's a pandemic now so it was just so maddening you can't imagine running around the conference centrum in davos and they're all having their sessions about climate change and you're saying the pandemic has begun there are four people from wuhan in the list of participants i was obsessed with it after that so i was reading as much as i possibly could read of the literature that was being produced in multiple institutions with countless scientists in a whole range of different disciplines from virology all the way across to network science it was deeply impressive i want to to say that that the thing that gives me hope when i think about the world is that this was possible this huge decentralized effort highly decentralized by scientists working in multiple institutions and disciplines to figure it out and the constant need to update your view on a daily basis as new studies came out the spectacle of theories being cast aside remember the weather theory the weather theory had a good run back in about march april and then it fell apart so no that there is definitely no such thing as the science there are sciences and i passionately believe in the scientific method i think in fact historians should do their best to to use the scientific method but the idea that there's some settled science especially about a new problem that that's an illusion and a very unhelpful one because i think it it's asking for another kind of magical thinking do you believe in the science i mean that's a religious that's a religious injunction believe in the science no no no no you're not supposed to have faith you're supposed to have skepticism and we've we've lost sight of that and i think as a result magical thinking has has won in the in the minds of the the general public certainly in the united states let's talk about the asian flu in 1957 you already mentioned uh people deal completely different with these what did they do they produced songs and they didn't uh they didn't lose their sense of humor in in the 1950s why it's a different world i i went back to 1957 in my time machine and it was just astonishing there was a rock and roll song released well into the pandemic in the united states called the rockin pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu and it was quite a successful single it's actually quite good it's worth a listen you can get it on itunes and that world of 1957 was a different world because people were accustomed to the risk of infectious disease as something that could shorten your life they were more worried about polio actually than the asian it was a world in which a really large proportion of adult men had fought in world war ii including of course the president at that time but most of the senior government officials had been in the war and there was a structural difference too you could not really work from home in 1957. i mean this wasn't really an option for almost anybody maybe a handful of people maybe the poets were able to carry on but you actually couldn't work from home in just about every occupational category so nobody could do a lockdown in 1957 it wasn't even discussed there was a discussion of how quickly you could get a vaccine and they did it amazingly quickly there's a fantastic bunch of heroes in this book books need heroes and my heroes are not like the heroes in the marvel movies which i hate my heroes are always smart and not very muscular and the hero that comes up in 57 is morris hillman and maurice hillman was this montana vaccine genius this guy in his career produced an enormous number of the vaccines that we still use and he got the vaccine for the asian flu in about three months they got it into people's arms incredibly quickly so 57 is a different world in so many respects but one of them that i love is morris hillman's way of running his laboratory now i don't know what what it's like in germany these days but in the united states if you're working in a government laboratory or or a university you have to be very careful about how you how you treat people you've got to be very sensitive and make sure that they feel safe but morris hillman to try and encourage people to work well at his laboratory would show new hires shrunken heads he would pull out these shrunken heads and say these are the people who failed at my lap can you imagine anybody doing that today you know harvard so it was a different world in so many in so many ways york that it's almost as if although geographically it's the united states it's as if the culture has completely changed and i found that a particularly exciting part of the book to write because our attitudes towards death have changed so much and they seemed by comparison more pragmatic about the risks that they were running and remember the asian flu actually caused higher excess mortality higher mortality than expected amongst teenagers than amongst elderly people so it wasn't just like in our pandemic that the elderly were mostly the victims that wasn't true in the asian flu and yet there was a sense that this was just life and one had to get on and that's why nobody remembers 195758 because it had no economic consequences no political consequences it had no consequences beyond the excess mortality that happened so yeah i think i think it's very helpful to compare the two cases not that i'm saying they're the same they're not but it is the nearest thing of all the pandemics in history 5758 is the nearest thing to covert as far as i can see and therefore it is it is a worthwhile comparison a better one than the 1918 which was so much so much worse but that wouldn't have been a political default last year to say you know what it's just life cope with it change your attitude towards death we couldn't have said that last year that wasn't really possible for two reasons one i've already given we had an option that they didn't have we had the option to say okay what if we shut everybody in their homes and stop them going to work which was never an option in 57 the fact that we had that option is important it was the option that neil ferguson by the way i should explain i am not that neil ferguson the guy imperial college the epidemiologist that's that's not me he was the one who said we need to lock everybody down until the vaccines are available that was what his march 16th report actually said and last year rather earlier this year he gave an interview in which he said we weren't sure if we could get people in a democracy to accept those chinese methods but we we we were able to now i felt at the time and i mean at the time because i was very angry about that report the he and his colleagues were gravely underestimating the economic and other costs of what they were going to do and they were also missing and had been missing since january a much better strategy which was the strategy in taiwan and south korea so the lockdowns were a last resort they were enormously economically disruptive it's not that it's not that we had an alternative to just let it rip and that never really existed because even in those parts of the world like sweden all parts of the united states that really didn't do tight lockdowns people's mobility drastically declined so this this is a very interesting point that my colleague at the hoover institution john cochran made cochrane said people will adapt their behavior as data come in about illness hospitalization and death and they did the worse the news was the fewer trips people made to stores and we can trace this in google and apple mobility data so interestingly even where there were very light restrictions people hugely reduce their their mobility and again we were able to do that in 1957 there was no amazon in 1957 people didn't have the option of let's just not go out and that's the thing that that really hit me as i was writing the book the reason we caused a huge economic shock last year was because we could the reason they didn't in 57 was because it wasn't an option so it's not a moral thing it's not like we're wimps and they were tough that's the wrong way to think about it it's more that we had these options and therefore we exercised them underestimating i think the kind of cascade of economic and social consequences that that they would have uh why why you talked about mr kingsbury and all the other mr kingsbury in the world but why produce so many countries entirely different countries uh such a holy mess like you you called it out of the covert pandemic what is the reason the main reason for that well i think that if you take a step back uh and ask well what really were the decisive variables you realize quickly that it can't just be that some countries had populist leaders and others didn't that doesn't work because so many countries that did really badly like peru or belgium just they didn't have populist leaders so that feels like a false hypothesis to me i think the best answer is that very few countries except a handful in asia properly learnt the lesson of sars and the lesson of sars was if a coronavirus evolved that was less deadly than this more contagious but less deadly it would be really hard to deal with most of the health bureaucracies in the western world and i include latin america as well as europe and north america were really set up for another influenza and that was the model that the us and british public health experts had in their minds because they they'd seen that movie before whereas the the south koreans and the taiwanese understood that a coronavirus would be different the biggest difference is the super spreader problem that basically 80 of infection is done by 20 percent of people and it happens in specific locations like crowded indoor events exactly like this one uh-oh but in a virgin population without any uh without any uh previous infection and without any vaccination a crowded indoor environment is is perfect for for this particular disease so this dispersion factor which is really the key to understanding covert this low dispersion factor the super spreaders they got that in taiwan and they got it in south korea and they knew the importance of something larry brilliant said in his ted talk about pandemics he said in the face of a new pathogen the two most important things are early detection and early action and that was the opposite of what we did in the u.s it was like ah we don't need tests and tests and as for action there was no action and until actually the first action was paradoxically by trump and it was trump who said let's stop the planes coming from china and he was criticized for that very very bitterly in the new york times and although it was too late and it wasn't perfect it was actually at least directionally the right thing to do if we'd been able to stop people flying from wuhan in around about january the 6th it really would have made a huge difference by the 23rd or 31st it was too late so i think ultimately there was a failure to process the implications of sars and and that that was just a general failure in most western countries now i could go on and offer you some further thoughts i think most developed economies have a bureaucracy problem and having spent three days in germany i am here to tell you that you have it too in fact it's very clear that there are mr kingsbury's currently running the german railways and also some time now conducting repairs on the autobahn and i'm just getting around this country i'm sorry 20 years ago people like me would come from britain to enjoy german infrastructure but it appears to be the same infrastructure as 20 years ago today so mr kingsbury is alive and well and he's busy in just about every every branch of bureaucracy in every developed country producing 36 page plans for this or that none of which work and this is a problem that i think is is under appreciated by educated people ordinary people get it it's really interesting that's why they wanted to drain the swamp and why they voted for the populists to begin with this sense that the bureaucracy is a self-serving and dysfunctional force and people in the elites because they're part of it ultimately you find that hard to to recognize so i think that's a part of the story again go to taiwan um it's really a very interesting country to visit because it's the place where chinese democracy works and what is fascinating there is that they really have rethought the way government works they under the direction of audrey tang the digital minister who's another of the heroes my heroes are kind of unsung maurice hillman audrey tang an extraordinary person and audrey tang began in the occupy movement was brought into the government with the mandate to use technology to improve the quality of government services and audrey had a mantra which was let's use technology to make government more accountable to the citizens not the other way around not like in the people's republic of china so when the pandemic came they already had a new kind of operating system literally they had a whole bunch of software platforms and when they got into the the shortage of of masks you know these things that we all carry around with us now whereas in the us the the public health bureaucracy lied at first they lied they said oh you don't need masks don't worry about masks no need for masks because they knew there weren't enough but in taiwan they admitted we don't have enough masks we need to get them to the health professionals let's use software to make sure that the masks get to the right people that's the way to do it so i came away from my visit to taiwan which was just before the pandemic thinking you know what there is a way to deal with mr kingsbury and that is to shine some bright light on on what he is doing using technology to make public services faster acting and it was the speed of the taiwanese response that really impressed me uh so i i think these these are solvable problems that's why although doom i don't know if if there's a copy of the german edition it looks a very scary book sort of maybe i should have called it fun but i mean that would have been a lie uh it is a book about about about doom but it's actually a positive uplifting uh conclusion that i offer which is we can fix this this is this is not impossible we definitely can do much better with the next disaster not only in the us but i think across the western world but we do need to stop copying the wrong china the people's republic of china should not be our role model if you were the kind of person who thought they're welding the doors of the apartment block so people can't get out cool that's the way you reacted then you are thinking about this the wrong way the way to react was they're welding the doors of the apartment blocks so people can't get out that's insane we should look we should have looked at the other china we were looking at the wrong china and that led us to the lockdowns as opposed to the testing tracing isolating regime that worked so much better in taiwan but so you you are an activist then because friday's for future says we can fix climate change if we take it serious or if we start to take it serious would you agree are you a supporter of this movement because you say this is another thing another catastrophe we can see we can predict and we can fix climate change is a much slower moving disaster than a pandemic and i don't think that's a controversial position the intergovernmental panel on climate change is has basically constructed 50 and more than 50-year scenarios we can deal with that problem but we have to be serious about it in a different way there is no point having endless conferences whether it's in paris or glasgow or kyoto if 48 of all the increase in co2 emissions since the last conference is china that there really is no point in pursuing goals of transforming the energy regimes of europe and north america if the chinese continue to build coal burning power stations so if we're going to talk about climate change let's stop talking about it in a fundamentally dishonest way i think there are ways in which this is an unfixable problem it's pretty unlikely to me that we will be able to constrain china i can't think of how we would do that and it doesn't seem to be likely that the chinese will significantly alter their strategy before 2030. so global warming is going to happen unlike a pandemic it's not going to kill people half so much as it's going to move them the big problem about climate change is the mass migration that seems inevitably to follow from it and in that sense i think we we need to think about this in a different way i am very bored of people who deliver sermons and who essentially offer us a religious experience when this subject comes up there was a huge irony last year which was that greta tunberg had her wish granted i was standing there at davos when she said you must stop all your emissions now immediately nothing else will do and we did not because of what she said but because of the pandemic the pandemic allowed a drastic reduction in emissions first in china then in europe and then in north america we did it and we know that that radically reduced greenhouse gas emissions for a significant period of time but it also cratered the world economy and sent unemployment rates up to levels that we haven't seen since the great depression so that seems like it might not work as a policy option just saying there's just a frustrating lack of realism about much of this debate and that's why i bring the book at the end back to this geopolitical domain because ultimately the other thing that kills people way faster than climate change is war and we have developed a certain amnesia about that which is strange especially here what would drastically reduce life expectancy more than covert would be a really large-scale war would be if the us and china went to war over taiwan and that's a much nearer-term problem than most of the things that we will talk about at glasgow it's a really near-term problem that could happen in the next three years so my sense is that climate change is an extremely important issue that we're not discussing nearly rigorously enough but it's only one of a range of different things that we have to worry about and the others have the potential to act much more rapidly just in the way that that covert did so this is not a please believe me not a climate denying book that's why the american dust jacket is is not a pandemic dust jacket it's it's the guy finishing his game of golf while the wildfire rages which is a real image from from oregon in 2017 but the world can burn in a bunch of ways that's really that's really what the book is saying and i can't tell you which one it will be or which order they will come in and nobody can there isn't a model that tells you what the next disaster will be so we therefore have to be much more broadly paranoid we have to remember the catch-22 line just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you the disasters are out to get you and you don't get to choose which one comes at you first so you you predict a war between two empires you're an expert in empires and your books were about empires and the downfall of empires about the war between these two empires the united states and china is afghanistan another sign for that this hasty retreat or departure uh from afghanistan which shows that uh the the american empire is in downfall it certainly sends a signal to beijing that the biden administration is probably not going to fight over anything very much i mean i don't find what happened in kabul surprising i'm i'm so old now that books i wrote 20 years ago were predicting that the u.s would not succeed in iraq and afghanistan that was the subject of a book called colossus that was written at the time of the invasion of iraq the only thing that has surprised me york is how long they stayed in afghanistan if you'd asked me in 2001 or three i'd have said 10 years tops i really wouldn't have expected the last troops to still be there in 2021. so this is the least surprising thing that's happened uh this year and even the fact that it was so completely bungled uh wasn't too surprising uh given the the nature of american governance uh because it was surprising to people who thought that electing joe biden would magically change everything end the pandemic and make it christmas every day but in truth most of the trump administration's policies have been continued by joe biden including abandoning afghanistan which trump had already basically done the year before including continuing the trade war with china including continuing the technology war with china there's immense continuity but the key question for me about afghanistan is not what happens next to the afghan people that that is a painful question to think about and my my wife ayaan hirsi ali is in a great rage about what this means for the women of afghanistan and i share her feelings of of anger but there is a bigger consequence and the consequence that i'm concerned with is what the chinese and the russians conclude from this because if their conclusion is that action against taiwan or perhaps further action in ukraine or even action in the baltic states will not elicit a serious response from washington then the probability that they do something is really significantly elevated from xi jinping's point of view trump was really hard to to figure out i spent a lot of time uh until recently going to china teaching as a visiting professor at xinhua i became good friends with yuhu the chinese vice premier who had to handle the chinese trade negotiations and i know that they found trump impossible to predict they could not figure him out and that was a kind of deterrent a version of the madman theory that richard nixon famously proposed except with trump you really were dealing with somebody who was kind of mad and there was no way of knowing how he would react on any given issue the chinese never figured it out so they had to kind of at some level be cautious there is no equivalent senile man theory of geopolitics right so that doesn't work on the contrary there is a significant risk that if the chinese figure out the present is essentially senile and his national security adviser thinks that foreign policy should be for the middle class that the invasion of taiwan will have no significant consequences any more than the annexation of crimea did when joe biden was vice president so that's the thing that's troubling to me i sense that xi jinping feels time is running out that there isn't an enormous window of opportunity for him to achieve what he has explicitly said is the ultimate goal of his leadership which is to bring taiwan under the fist of the chinese communist party so what is he going to do wait until biden's gone wait until the americans have succeeded in building the quad and getting the japanese and the australians and the indians on board i mean waiting does not seem like the right way to go so my worry is that we have one of these classic historical predicaments in which the rising power underestimates the incumbent power thinks it's kind of done and thinks also that for its own reasons it can take and should take a strategic risk this is very german in 1914 where my career in many ways began and i worry that that's exactly the kind of sequence of events that could happen in other words cold war would be a good outcome that would be a good outcome jim stavridis has just published a novel imagining full-scale us-china war there are other versions of this that already exist like the novel the ghost fleet but jim called his book 2034 and i just think that's that's way too late this is a much more 2020s scenario so that's that's where i i think we need to be worrying a bit more than we are uh and europeans my impression on the basis of just a few weeks really don't think much about that and indeed don't really want this to be cold war ii they would rather that didn't happen but i'm not sure you're still a scottish european so what would be your advice let's say they seek your advice eu officials what would you tell them my message to european officials leaders who bothered to ask me is that you do not have the option to be non-aligned in cold war ii there was a non-aligned movement in cold war one india belonged to yugoslavia but i don't think germany and i don't think the eu can be non-aligned in cold war ii for one very simple reason it's all very well to talk about strategic autonomy as president macron likes to do but in practice europe is a very long way away from that and in fact the there would be a resemblance between the fate of the old afghan government's army and the fate of european armies if the americans withdrew air support and other support in the event of an attack by let's say the russians i mean the us is indispensable to european security and there is no european government willing to pay the price of true strategic autonomy it is far far too high politically and financially so i think what will happen jurg is that cold war ii will become more and more of a reality and harder and harder to ignore until at some point europeans will just have to choose they won't and they won't really have the option of choosing china but this this is one of the interesting things about cold wars cold wars are latent disasters if you think about it the cold war is just the avoidance of world war three george orwell coined the phrase cold war he was the first person to use it and he defined it as a peace that is no peace so in that sense cold war is latent disaster and you and i are old enough to remember and some people else in the audience will remember what it was still in the 1980s to consider the possibility of world war three when i was a when i was a student or maybe even a school boy my favorite punk band the jam released a bomb in wardall street i mean so we thought quite a bit about the possibility of nuclear war but we've sort of for three decades been able not to think about world war three and i'm i'm afraid we're going to be forced back into thinking about it the way things are going and that's how cold wars begin they don't begin with a bang they actually begin imperceptibly with some british intellectuals saying this is a cold war when orwell said that almost nobody knew what he meant almost nobody believed him even when churchill went to fulton missouri and talked about an iron curtain i went back and i looked at the u.s press coverage of that famous speech nobody took it seriously the new york times said oh this is just imperial bluster by the old warmonger cold wars are hard to spot actually and nobody quite wants to admit they're happening until in the case of the first cold war north korea invades south korea and it's not cold anymore so i think that's the analogy that i'm i'm working with but let me make a make an important methodological point certain things you can learn from history and nowhere else power the dynamics and nature of power they don't change that's why we can understand fucidities we can understand machiavelli it's not difficult because certain universal truths about power are there they're there in the ancient political theorists so history allows us to see the way that power works and wars happen the things that are always the same we can see from history that in a pandemic many crazy ideas will be believed and social order and trust will be will be reduced all of that we can learn from history but what history is bad at teaching you is technological discontinuity and what it does and that's why cold war ii will be different it will be technologically different it will not be essentially about nuclear weapons it will be about cyber warfare and i think if i had to to predict one thing tonight it would be that we haven't really properly imagined the nature of the next war and the extent to which it will be a cyber and information war and we will know that it's happening when our devices stop working when the shutdown happens and the infrastructure is suddenly not working and that you have to i think read science fiction to get your head around it's a not so funny book this doom book but it's it's it's uh uh very exciting to read it and they said uh very uncomfortable some subject you already mentioned our attitude towards uh towards death because sometimes it reads like we have become a bunch of pathetic i wouldn't put it quite like that but you know people who are far too afraid of death i don't think it's fear i think we just shut it out it's more denial i mean this is very true in the united states but maybe it's true in europe and the uk too evelyn war wrote a wonderful book the loved one which is one of his greatest works making fun of the american way of death it's all about uh the euphemisms that americans use when they're talking about about death and of course americans still use euphemisms because in america you don't die you pass i can never keep a straight face when somebody says that somebody passed it's very unfortunate i'm going like past is what you do with a football but americans don't say that someone died it's strange you don't use the word death or dead or dying that just doesn't happen and i think the reality is not fear i think it's denial and we very very rarely see death in our modern world philippe arias the great french historian made this point that we we screen death out in the modern world so that we rarely encounter it and once you stop seeing it of course you stop thinking about it i mean who wants really to think about being extinguished i i find it difficult i have a total mental block about finishing my will i mean i i really find it difficult to do even though i know it's very irresponsible of me not to finish the document just in case one of you is in fact a jihadist and this is my last book talk [Music] so we have a natural predisposition i think not to think about it and medical science is giving us a pretty good shot at getting into our 80s and that's a long way off even if you're in your 50s so what is certainly true is that on more than any previous generation we in the developed world we can forget about death and the more we do that the more implicitly we imagine a right to immortality and that is different that is different and that was why when covert suddenly increased everybody's probability of of death at least a little bit it caused such a kind of spasm and half of americans went into denial it's a hoax and the other half went into paranoia and wanted to be locked in their homes so i do think we've we've got even worse at thinking about this issue than we were in evil and wars time and that's saying something i i certainly think that one of the reasons for taking my vaccine is to get your head a little bit more around the reality of death i mean the fact that in a normal in a normal week thousands of people in america die and in germany in a normal week we'd almost forgotten that the number of people who die every day in the world is very large and covert only increased it by a percentage and not a huge percentage i think all of that is really challenging for us to think about but we need to think about it because we if we don't think honestly about death then we end up with the zero risk mentality and this is this i think is a real pathology and i think it's a very unhealthy one where no risk is acceptable and no excess mortality is allowed at that point you realize that you're creating a society in which safety is the the dominant imperative and i see that creating fragility when what we really need to build is anti-fragility an idea that nasim talib popularized the fragile society will break under stress a fragile system will break under a relatively small stress the resilient one will be okay but the anti-fragile society is stronger under stress and i think we're building fragility and not anti-fragility in the way that we think about these issues but from your perspective what makes a society resilient i've thought a lot about that question and i think there's an old answer to that it goes all the way back to the age of early age of islam asabia the the idea of social cohesion peter turchen has revived that idea in some of his recent work and i think it's a it's a powerful notion that a a strong society has in the cohesion uh and of course a deeply polarized and divided society lacks that there seems to me to be a good deal of truth in that but i want to offer a slightly different a slightly different take i think a strong society is possessed collectively of reason and believes fundamentally in the pursuit of truth as something attainable through reason and science and the healthiest society has at its core individual liberty and above all freedom of thought speech and publication the great strength that arose in the western world really from the 18th century right through to the 20th was a consequence of those things more than anything else because if you have those things you are more likely to come up with the innovations that transform the world uh so my my view is somewhat different from that's a beer view yes it's nice if everybody agrees and gets along sure but actually i think i'd rather be in a fractious argumentative society where we could say exactly what we think and not be afraid of being cancelled because somebody decides it's time to unleash the twitter mob so i'll go with reason free speech and free thought a society with those things will come up with better vaccines it will come up with better technologies and it will ultimately be able to solve the problems that i've talked about tonight a society which just obsesses about safety and says that even words of violence and that the imperative should be to protect people's feelings from being hurt that's the kind of society that goes down so the vogue movement makes us weak yes very much so i think it's actually one of the most alarming developments of my lifetime that a kind of everyday totalitarianism has now become a normal state of affairs on the university campuses of the major the major universities in the united states it's a thing i would never have predicted even as recently as six years ago for most of my most of my career i assumed wrongly that the following forms of behavior only occurred under a dictatorship only occurred when someone like stalin was in power or hitler or mao one writing letters of denunciation directed against your contemporaries or your superiors two acts of administrative injustice without due process leading to the termination of of careers three deletion of publications and indeed removal of individuals from from public life by fiat all of these things i thought were peculiarities of totalitarian regimes that was what i was taught by norman stone when i was a graduate student now i've realized that you can have all of those behaviors without stalin or hitler that people will actually start behaving this way in a free society if they have the incentives to do so so this is a very new thing for me uh what i i think can be called everyday totalitarianism or grassroots totalitarianism where the informers and the denouncers uh the people conducting the show trials are not in any way sponsored by big brother they're doing it of their own volition as part of a strange cult-like cultural revolution it's very it's very strange and at the end of the book uh i'm going to be doing the spoiler now so i'm going to tell you the punch line but not why the titanic sank the punch line is the real danger the really big danger that we confront in the near term is actually still totalitarianism and we should be much more worried about it because it now has far better technology than totalitarianism 1.0 which was running on kind of telephones totalitarianism with artificial intelligence and facial recognition is way more powerful than all orwell's 1984. i mean the telescreen is kind of stuck on your wall in 1984. now the telescreen is here and the worst of it is that the free world has the same technology and the same levels of surveillance that's the crazy thing that we have actually got totalitarian architecture in the free world now and just because it's not under the direct control of the government isn't to me particularly comforting so i think totalitarianism has to be much more of a worry because it killed so many people in the 20th century it's the single biggest cause of premature death in the 20th century by far sorry pandemics they didn't come close even although the 20th century is a big pandemics including of course hiv aids which we haven't talked about but is actually a much worse pandemic in our lifetimes than covert because there was no vaccine and 36 million people have died but but even if you add all the pandemics together totalitarianism still wins because it caused not only massive wars and not only genocides but the two biggest famines in history so that's my great fear that it's creeping back and not just in china but sort of from below and through the internet in ways that i i certainly underestimated when i was when i was teaching history back at harvard uh ladies and gentlemen there's rebecca and she's got a microphone so if you feel uh or if you'd like to ask a question you're more they're more than happy to take your question oh there's somebody i told an american friend today how long a german book event happens in 90 minutes and he asked is there also extra time and does it ever go to penalties which i thought was a great question so yes sir please hello hello can you hear me i can hear you say hello it's a good start yes my name is marcus and maybe on a positive note you say history is full of disasters catastrophes can you also look at catastrophes avoided what are the big examples looking back and what can we learn from it that's a great question thank you so much because counterfactuals are one of my great obsessions and i believe that no historian is really doing his or her job if they don't make the counterfactuals explicit this is not a popular or mainstream view there are historians who think that it's quite illegitimate to ask about things that didn't happen yeah but they are wrong richard evans is wrong and all the other people who have criticized counterfactual history because philosophically it's obvious that you can't really make a causal statement without implying a and therefore you should make it explicit so what about the disasters that didn't happen well i mentioned one already which is world war iii and it is a highly uh good thing that it didn't happen and by no means easy to explain one of the reasons that i'm writing the life of henry kissinger is to think more about that because it was important that world war iii didn't happen and i think one has to one has to ponder deeply why that was particularly given the ways in which the united states and the soviet union were led so that's one but let me give you one that you probably never thought of there has not been a major volcanic eruption a really big one in more than 200 years the last really big volcanic eruption that was so big that it actually altered the earth's climate was tambora go further back to the 1100s and 1200s the world saw so much volcanic activity that there really was a period of significant global cooling so we haven't had a really big volcanic eruption for two centuries and that's quite odd uh and it's certainly not guaranteed to continue my hunch is that history has a sense of humor i always i mean i don't know how you imagine history but i don't really imagine history as cleo i imagine history is a kind of sarcastic glaswegian in a pub watching with a sneer mankind's vain activities and waiting until the day before the great conference in glasgow and then launching massive volcanic eruptions that create a chronic problem of global cooling that's something that hasn't happened but we know that it could because there's no geological explanation for the low level of volcanic activity and no guarantee that it will that it will continue so i think that's a that's a good cancer factual to keep in mind uh to pick up marcus question nobody prevented volcanoes from from this catastrophe exactly so is it are there any any any glory in prevention were there any glory in prevention in the past a good mr kingsbury let's see uh things that could have happened uh disastrously uh but were prevented i suppose the best answer i can give to that is that we cuba somebody mentioned cuba the cuban missile crisis did not well that's another world war three so all the world war threes that didn't happen we can perhaps bracket together 1983 as well as as cuba and maybe berlin uh two but i was thinking of a of a different thing that that that was prevented we didn't really take biological warfare all the way and and that that's interesting because clearly there was lots of investment in biological weapons uh during the 20th century and i i think it's worth pointing out that the successful restraint of the use of biological weapons more or less successful has been one of the achievements of the 20th century and there you have to give credit to uh unsung heroes because this was not glamorous work i'm not talking about signing conventions and biological weapons but actually enforcing them and making sure that they they were adhered to that that's does that seem have you got a better one marcus i'm always in the market for good ideas i'll give you the credit if you didn't hear marcus's hypothesis was that europe has in a sense prevented uh disasters conceivable perhaps lower level wars i i take a slightly contrarian view on that which is the the reason there's been peace in europe is not european not the european union but nato and that that's really why there hasn't been a major war but we can agree that it's it's good that there hasn't been a a major european war apart from apart from bosnia um but but bosnia kind of revealed something important which was that when there actually was a war in europe the europeans couldn't stop it yeah and we've kind of forgotten in post 911 uh in the post 9 11 era that that in the end the the great european war in in the balkans was ended by the united states and that problem was successfully frozen uh after dayton so yeah mr holbrook rather than mr kingsbury thank you another question because we are already in extra time in extra time it's going to go to penalties maybe we've got another question there was somebody shouting please yes excellent um thanks a lot um it's always a pleasure listening to you i'm just curious what you take or stances on catastrophes actually as a trigger for reforms policy reforms and others because i don't mean that in a cynical way i know it sounds easily like this but i think often after catastrophes you often have a lot of changes also um in the in a positive way and which is curious what you learned by doing your research on catastrophes on that thank you it's a it's a great question it's one that i i talk about in the in the book the the late manchester olsen uh made the argument and others have made similar arguments that what set both germany and japan on new paths after 1945 was precisely that there had been the catastrophe of defeat and massive massively destructive defeat so that the institutions of the past were in some measure swept away and conversely he argued britain because it didn't lose uh couldn't achieve the same kind of institutional revitalization and spent most of the post-war period as the sick man of europe so this is a fairly familiar notion from the modern era when i take a step back and look at the pattern of disasters over the long run and over the whole of the the globe i think on balance it's rare that a disaster is a good thing very rare and that more commonly uh one disaster leads to another and it's really hard to get out of the cycle of disaster uh if you are in somalia or in afghanistan there are there are kind of disaster traps which are more common actually uh than than disasters that that then lead to reform eras at least that's that's my uh sense from a pretty casual look at the the data i i've been asking myself a quirky question about my own country which is quite a fun way maybe to get to the final whistle because i promised you the book was fun well dumas are very scottish idea and a very scottish word but doomed is a famous line from a british sitcom scotland was afghanistan scotland was the afghanistan of europe in the 17th century we know from braveheart even if you disregard the highly historically inaccurate account of the life of william wallace in braveheart and look at real history right up uh to the end of the 17th century and into the 18th century scotland was the most violent country in europe in the north there were clans who were extremely warlike and routinely engaged in looting and plunder as a business model and in the south in my town glasgow and edinburgh they were religious zealots who were the taliban of calvinism scotland was the place you went if you wanted to get knifed or burnt as a witch it was a very demonstrably afghanistan-like place well during the i mean it's true i the data are really shocking it was it was just wild there you can see why the english were scared to go to scotland so in his wonderful historical novel waverly the first true historical novel walter scott says from the vantage point of whenever he wrote 18 i forget now i'm going to get it wrong 1814 early 19th century he says just 60 years ago our country was an unrecognizably dangerous place meaning right up to the 1745 jacobi rebellion the last attempt by the highland clans to overthrow uh the usurpers and restore the stewart dynasty and so scott observes correctly that in the space of really 60 years scotland had gone from being afghanistan to being south korea by the time he was writing it was the most dynamic economy in the world it had phenomenal intellectual life it had produced in adam smith and all the famous names david hume perhaps the greatest thinkers that any one little country has produced it it reinvented banking and commerce it was a tiger economy this transformation happened amazingly quickly but i don't think it was the the disaster of colloden i don't think it was the failure of of the jacobite rising that led to all of that other deeper forces were at work the rising literacy that had followed from the reformation the quality of the intellectual life at the universities the fact that scottish politics had ended formally with the union of the parliaments of the old pathologies of scotland's politics were essentially terminated a lot of things had to happen at once for scotland to go from afghanistan to south korea now it's a really encouraging thing to me that that happened it means that really anything is possible and that's always been my line if you read my book civilization the west and the rest a subtitle that a lot of people hated the point i was making in that book was that the west's rise was totally copyable that everything that happened that worked in the west you could copy that was the six killer apps and the scottish story is similar it's like you can be afghanistan and it's curable so i i end the evening on this optimistic note that we can even in a world of inevitable unpredictable disasters we can turn afghanistan into south korea's and that means there's a great deal of hope actually despite the impression we get that history is just one disaster after another and that's the final whistle thank you very much indeed thank you thank you very much i believe [Music] [Music] uh our guests tonight our distinguished guest neil ferguson thank you very much thank you very much earth design you

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Id: 1zFAJGJ6gFs

Length: 97min 42sec (5862 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021