Niall Ferguson in conversation with Rana Foroohar at Live Talks Los Angeles

welcome to another virtual live talks los angeles event we welcome neil ferguson and rana farar to our series we invite you to visit and subscribe to our youtube channel for over 300 conversations follow us on twitter facebook and instagram our handle is live talks la they'll discuss neil's book doom the politics of catastrophe neil is a historian and the author of 16 books including civilization the great degeneration kissinger 1923-1968 the idealist and the ascent of money he is the milbank family senior fellow at the hoover institution at stanford university rana is global business columnist and an associate editor at the financial times she is also cnn's global economic analyst her books include makers and takers the rise of finance and the fall of american business and don't be evil how big tech betrayed its founding principles and all of us i am ted haptigaber founder and producer of the series they will talk and towards the end i will pose some questions sent in from the audience i'll let you take it from here rana okay well thanks ted and hello neil i am so pleased to do this with you um and i have to say i'm incredibly jealous not because you not just because you've written 16 books and i've only written two so far although i'm working on the third one um but your timing is kind of unbelievable and that's always a thing in the publishing world you know is your book that you've worked hard on going to come out at the right moment uh a history of catastrophe this is kind of the right moment for that so i want to hear a little bit about the evolution of the book how you got the idea and then once coveted hit sort of how whether that reshaped your thinking did throw a spammer in things did you have to change the beginning or the ending well first thanks for doing this rana it's great great to see you i've i've learned a lot from reading you over the years and i'm delighted there's a new book in the pipeline i don't recommend writing 16 i think that's that's probably too many books but uh too late now i was thinking a lot about disaster before covert 19 struck in fact i had been plotting a book about the history of the future that was going to look at dystopias in science fiction going all the way back to mary shelley in many ways invented the genre but i couldn't quite get my new york editor to buy the idea of of such a a book that obviously was a paradoxical notion a history of of the future and then i was uh saved by a real disaster that that struck back in january and as i've been thinking a lot about uh dystopian and disastrous scenarios i think my antennae were kind of ready to spot that there was a pandemic coming almost as soon as i'd heard about the strange new virus in wuhan too many science fiction books have that plot line in them and so i turned it around and decided to write a general history of disaster because it suddenly hit me that we didn't have such a thing there were books about past pandemics quite a few of them some excellent but there really was the book that brought it all together under one roof and i wanted to attempt to to synthesize the history of disaster and to see if there are anything if there's anything we can learn from disaster in general because i i had this hunch that a bit like tolstoy's happy families all disasters are at some level the same yeah yeah well one of the things i actually really love about this book is you take on the big picture you don't shy away from it and it's not one of those many at this stage kind of here are 10 things that are going to change post pandemic you're really sort of looking in a systemic way i mean geopolitically financially ecologically historically technologically at all these disasters and sort of bringing bringing the whole picture together and i want to kind of tease out some of the meta takeaways um and and also how they really uh go against the conventional wisdom which i think is something that you do wonderfully and and one of the points that i wanted to call out is as you go through history and look at different disasters it wasn't always about oh people that have the science and all the facts that han did really well and the the folks that were perhaps more religious or living in the middle ages or whatever it was did poorly which kind of goes against the grain of today's narrative about a post-fact world um you know different sides of the aisle talk a little bit more about that well there's a kind of narrative in our heads i i think which which is essentially the triumph of science and it's it's what might be called the the whig interpretation of the history of science and in in that account which as i said most of us sort of have in our heads there's a past in which people are clueless and have no idea what the hell is causing disease and they die like flies and then we start to gradually start to figure it out and and with every passing decade uh more brilliant uh men and women with microscopes bring us closer to understanding uh all the different threats that we face and ultimately we we achieve victory over infectious disease and we're just left with a few stubborn holdouts like cancer but no doubt crispr will get us there and that that's i think the way a lot of us think about history at least when we ask ourselves the question why did life expectancy roughly treble over a period of a couple of hundred years what i wanted to try and show in the book is that sure scientific knowledge did advance by leaps and bounds especially in the 19th and 20th centuries and in our own but at the same time we were creating ever more integrated networks uh capable of uh of contagion on unprecedented scales and so we would take two steps forward scientifically and then maybe one or one and a half steps back in terms of creating new vulnerabilities for ourselves as a species and this happened in the 19th century that cholera became a huge problem in the 19th century because of scientific and technological advances that made vast new industrial cities possible and allowed far higher levels of uh oceanic travel and in the same way in our own time uh we travel on an unprecedented scale with planes and that means that we are a lot more vulnerable to novel pathogens than than we used to be so that slightly changes the story and it shifts the historical emphasis away from a kind of linear tale of scientific events to a rather more complex story in which social networks which at one level are great because they propel the exchange of ideas are also rather dangerous because they allow the transmission of all kinds of contagion you know i have as you're as you're talking about social networks i'm i'm smiling because i'm remembering the lead of your book uh and this idea that davos the world economic forum in davos may have been we think a super spreader event of course they would deny that but i was there you were there we were both sick afterwards i mean this is this is exactly what you're talking about this sort of network of people they go off to all the world's ski locations afterwards and then we get this we get this pandemic um but but let me go to this other point that you you kind of flipped at which is networks and network optimization which is a big topic right now we're talking about supply chains we're talking about um this new geopolitical conflict with china efficiency versus resiliency and a lot of um problems actually i covered this a little bit my first book stem from the fact that these networks are optimized in a certain way but as you point out we never know what the next disaster is going to be i mean we are always fighting the last word these things are very unpredictable so how does that inform or how should we what should we take from your book to inform the debate right now about efficiency versus resiliency and everything from industry to the financial system to how we should regulate technology well i think it's fair to say rana that you and i and probably most of the people listening have witnessed more than one disaster uh we witnessed the financial crisis which is a very different kind of disaster uh from the pandemic and we witnessed the disastrous uh events of 911 and the disastrous sequence that followed from that the invasions of iraq and afghanistan so we've seen disasters in different domains uh in the space of what 20 years and it strikes me that one of the the common features of what we've witnessed uh is that although we think of ourselves as being well prepared for disaster uh in practice when it strikes we we seem to do quite badly and maybe we're doing worse than we used to and i've been thinking a lot about the analogy between the financial crisis and and the pandemic if you think back to 2007 when i was writing the ascent of money banks were highly regulated on paper there was a really quite elaborate system of financial regulation in place and there were the basel rules and bank capital adequacy which kept getting longer every time they were revised and yet when a financial crisis struck none of this regulation seemed to work i think we had exactly the same experience with covert in 2019 the us was rated very highly in terms of pandemic preparedness and on paper the us and the uk had terrific pandemic preparedness plans and i've read some of them page after page after page of recommendations it's just that when a pandemic happened none of it worked so i think there's a very important thing in doom which is that we we must be aware of the illusion of preparedness meticulous bureaucratic preparation for the wrong crisis or for a crisis which is sufficiently different from the one that we planned for that all our preparations turn out to be to be futile that that's a thing that i've been thinking a lot about because i i sense that it's not a universal problem it's not the case that in taiwan or in south korea the disaster of covert had these same dire consequences and their response was altogether different from ours nimbler quicker leveraging technology and that's that's what i feel like we need to learn and the reason i wrote the book before the disaster was over because we're still not at the end of this pandemic was the sense that we really were in danger of learning the wrong lessons even before it was at an end yeah that's really interesting i'm going to come to the point about taiwan in a minute because i find that fascinating but you're hitting on something important which is in some ways the tyranny of experts i mean you know experts are great but experts also tend to not say i don't know and i think that what you're advising or what it sounds like you're advising is a bit of humility around around just trying to predict these things and and trying to get out and advance them it's almost like you want to have a an entirely different way of viewing disaster and preparing for it yeah well that's exactly right and you used words like fragility and resiliency earlier inspired partly by the work of nassim taleb not only in the black swan but in anti-fragile i've thought a lot about his central argument that in modernity we we optimize we build uh systems whether it's a financial system or a public health system that really are optimized for for efficiency and work 99 of the time the problem is that in the tales of the distribution in that one percent of the time a disaster strikes and that's the moment that uh suddenly the fragility of the optimized system is is revealed and that happened both in the financial crisis and it also happened with the the pandemic so i i guess one of the kind of lessons from history seeing the past through a kind of talib lens and i you know onassimo depth for these ideas is that we've actually become somewhat more fragile over time and i'll give a simple illustration in 1957 a pretty big pandemic hit the united states not perhaps quite as deadly uh in the u.s but globally it killed about the same proportion of the world's population which is about 0.04 so far that was the asian flu as it was called in 57 and the the experience of the united states was very very different and one reason it was different one reason that there were no lockdowns and no school closures is that there were way more hospital beds in relation to the population in the late 1950s than there are today and i actually hadn't fully appreciated that until i was uh revisiting the story to to write a piece ahead of the book's publication so we had actually lots of redundancy in the healthcare systems of the 1950s a lot of the time those wards lay empty a lot of the time the beds were empty fast forward to 2020 you've got an optimized hospital system and it's not even the most optimized because there were other countries that were even more exposed that simply did not have the redundant capacity to cope with a sudden spike of illness and that explains quite a lot of the excess mortality so this is a really important uh point that we we over optimize systems as if the world is this normally distributed world in which there's a sort of average disaster and we can we can think about risk the way we think about automobile accidents or human heights as something that is essentially distributed in a bell curve the key lesson of history and i i think this is what i took away from writing the book is that unfortunately disasters are not normally distributed there's no way of predicting them you can model your yourself uh into an exhausted heap you will not get the future right and the more you carefully try to build a model and try to attach probabilities to everything from a pandemic to an earthquake to world war three the more disappointed you're going to be because it just won't work the way the model says so rule number one live with the uncertainty stop seeking false certainty and rule number two be paranoid in a general way rather than meticulously prepared for a couple of scenarios uh when you might possibly get neither interesting i'm going to tell my husband that because i'm i'm a very paranoid person and he criticizes me for this but maybe it's a good thing um just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're out to get you i discovered recently it's not in the novel catch 22 it is only in the original movie and was added by some bright scriptwriter but it's a great line and i think i should have made it the epigraph for the book because ultimately the reason i'm jumping the gun here but the reason taiwan and south korea and to some extent israel did much much better than us is that they're paranoid and for good reason they don't know what the neighbors are going to try next and so they're much quicker on the draw when something like a new coronavirus shows up well okay so you were leading i was going to go to geopolitics next and the taiwan example is particularly fascinating because paranoid yes you've got china you know ready to annex you right next door potentially but also decentralized which actually picked up on some of your previous book which i love the tower and the square you know this idea of decentralized systems versus very centralized systems and one of the true the truisms i think or at least one of the story lines in geopolitics right now is that it's going to be a goliath v goliath battle going forward between the u.s and china you're saying no that everything you've seen in this book is saying that actually smaller might be better decentralized might be better yeah well yes although i wouldn't want to you know pin all my hopes on on being in one of those small nimble countries you are in the end a lot smaller than the goliaths but i think we made a couple of mistakes last year actually we made more than a couple but let me focus on on two number one we copied the wrong china so when things really started to turn pear-shaped as they say uh in england uh in mid-march and we suddenly realized that the thing was already spreading out of control we decided we would copy the people's republic of china and do the drastic lockdowns that they had done from late january onwards and the other neil ferguson because it turns out there are two of us the guy at imperial college who spells his name neil recently gave an interview in which he said yes the reason that we we recommended lockdowns was the chinese example and we weren't sure if it would work in a non-communist in a non-communist setting now that was not the right china for us to be copying we should have been copying the republic of china taiwan and looking at the ways in which they had responded very quickly with ramping up testing uh with digital contact racing and then with isolating the infected people and protecting the vulnerable and they did all that really quickly so did the south koreans and really hardly anybody died in taiwan i think it's like a dozen or so people have been uh classed as having died of covert despite being right next to china if you think about our problem of centralization it was beautifully illustrated by the way we got testing wrong now we'll never know at least i'll never know if i was a super spreader back in january february because you could not find out right into march if you had covered yeah but no tests available even on the stanford campus which is supposed to be pretty fancy and that was because cdc the centers for disease control and prevention had said at the outset we will control testing nobody's allowed to do unauthorized tests and then they sent out a test that didn't work and you couldn't ask for a better illustration of how centralized bureaucracy can really screw things up than that it meant that we lost the opportunity to do what they did in many east asian countries which was just to use testing and tracing and isolation to avoid the lockdowns and they didn't have a lockdown in taiwan in fact they had about the most relaxed regime in terms of individual mobility individual freedom of any developed country yeah it's so interesting because there's another way in which conventional wisdom might have told you okay well europe's got this centralized national health care system in many countries maybe they'll do better i mean they're still on lockdown they're going into or they've just been through round three so it is amazing um just thinking about the usb china too brings up another point that you make which is this really wasn't about democracy versus autocracy i mean the u.s got things wrong mainland china got things wrong um in some ways it's not about the leader be it trump or she but all the bureaucrats living in the middle and and this idea of problems in the middle problems in the operational levels really resonated with me because somebody that thinks about business you know the the pinto exploding it's always the the mid-level designer that took some decision for a reason that was three steps away and that's that's how you get to these places can you tell us a little bit more about that maybe give a couple examples yeah i was thinking a lot about this problem early last year and one of my most brilliant former students uh manny rincon cruz said hey you need to read this book and he handed me richard feynman's book about the the challenger the space shuttle challenge of disaster and uh and it's a fantastic book that everybody should read because feynman shows where the point of failure was in that disaster this disaster is in the book because i covered disasters large and small partly because there's a sort of fractal geometry a small disaster can have a lot in common with a big one so what did feynman show he showed that the engineers at nasa knew there was a one percent chance 100 chance that the thing would blow up on launch because of leaking fuel and the faulty o-rings but the bureau some bureaucrat in nasa uh turned that into one in a hundred thousand because that just sounded better and hey you didn't want to get the money flow cut off to keep the space shuttle program going and i thought a lot about that person who made that change and made it multiple times because the engineers kept saying but but it's actually one in a hundred that guy in middle management he recurs throughout history and that point of failure somewhere in the middle is always worth considering last year a lot of people for obvious reasons jumped to the conclusion that we were having a disastrous pandemic in the united states because donald trump was an imbecile and if donald trump had not been president therefore we would not have had such a bad experience and i wonder about that the book shows i think all the significant mistakes trump made and the word a dozen at least but i also question whether it would have been a radically different experience with a different president because it wasn't trump who was telling cdc hey go screw up testing i mean they did that all by themselves there's a guy whose job it was to be deputy secretary for preparedness it was his one job his name was robert cadleck and he reminds me of the nasa guy because i came across this amazing lecture that he gave in 2018 philip zeliko attracted my attention to this in which he said you know if we really don't do something about getting our pandemic preparedness uh right we could be sol if there is one sol i didn't know is an acronym but you you will i mean out of luck and so the guy whose job it was knew that the system wouldn't actually work and was kind of casually saying this in a texas lecture room i mean again it's not like trump knew any of this so i think we we must not tell ourselves a fairy story and i've heard it all too often that with a different president none of this would have happened and before anybody listening goes crazy because some people go crazy when i say this i'm not defending trump he did a really bad job so did jaya bolsonaro so did boris johnson so did narendra modi but guess what there are lots of countries that have really high excess mortality who did not have populist presidents or prime ministers try belgium peru disaster but you can't claim it's because of populism so we've got to i think we've got to move away from this simple fairy story that it was all wicked populist trumps or johnson's fault and recognized that the point of failure was almost certainly lower down the chain of command and we need to recognize that because if we don't we're not going to fix this problem and we're just going to be blindsided in a similar way by the next disaster yeah no i mean it's it's a really important point about nuance because i you know i personally think that presidents get too much credit and too much blame for almost everything i mean trump's greatest mistake really was just to put himself front and center of something that he had no clue about if if he'd been smart he'd have done what obama did with the opioid epidemic and just pretend it wasn't his problem and you know nobody's i think ever written an article saying that the opioid epidemic was barack obama's fault but i mean an enormous number of people died during his presence from overdoses and they didn't come up with a fix so i do think we need to change the way in which we frame these questions and one way of doing that is to recognize that we have a habit that tolstoy identified in war and peace we want to blame the person at the top or give them the credit we want to exaggerate their importance but they are only one node in the network an important node but not necessarily the crucial one particularly when a disaster comes along and there's lots of contagion and cross currents leading to unanticipated outcomes so you know speaking about nodes in the network social networks um obviously played a big role in in things good and bad around the pandemic um is it different is this time different i mean is the depth and breadth of the network that we are dealing with not just with social media but with i mean i'm thinking about the pipeline disaster of just this week you know the the internet of things the fact that you've not now got ransomware attacks constantly on hospitals infrastructure you know financial services is this time different in some fundamental way it's definitely faster qualitatively i think we as a species have been vulnerable to contagion for a remarkably long time even independent of technology i i was really struck as i was writing the section on the black death by how swiftly that spread especially once it reached the more commercialized parts of of europe and and that's the 1340s obviously everything happens much faster but the spread of the asian flu in 1957 when most travel was by still by sea rather than by plane was actually almost as fast so i think we slightly exaggerate how totally different our time is but you're dead right about one thing that the internet and the the ways in which we use it not just for email but for now managing critical infrastructure has created a whole set of new vulnerabilities that really weren't there before and when people say to me well what's the next disaster i say well first of all the whole point of the book is i can't tell you so don't ask that silly question but the second but the second point is you know we we kind of want it to be climate change because we've done a lot of work about and thought a lot about that and have a model that says it's going to do this and that so that's the kind of preferred disaster but clearly a massive cyber attack on the united states or any major country is is conceivable would be much faster than climate change and i hate to think what this country would be like if we had a massive outage and as you say the pipeline story that's just a bunch of east european creeks as far as we can see taking out a huge part of the energy infrastructure of the united states so i think that's the very very important novelty about our time and it illustrates the point you made earlier that we have ever larger and more optimized network structures that work 99 of the time but they're very fragile and i worry that our infrastructure probably is our biggest vulnerability now in the event of of a geopolitical escalation between the us and china that this this will be a feature of cold war ii quite unlike cold war one that's interesting i i have no doubt you know on that note i was speaking to someone this past week in government um about the the food shortages i mean this sort of bizarre situation post pandemic where all right suddenly every restaurant is shut and yet there are lines at grocery stores because they're two separate supply chains never meeting turns out that you've got you know 90 of the country's food supply going through five different counties these happen to be very poor counties counties with housing crises uh financial risks et cetera all these risks risk hugs seem to be emerging if if you were advising the buy administration and maybe they'll read your book um what should they be doing right now i mean what can one do particularly given that as you say you don't know where the next problem is going to be well i certainly am unlikely to be asked to advise the biden administration so let's just get that out of the way but if in in some strange parallel universe uh i were asked that question i would say well first of all could you get the the key network scientists people like laszlo barabasi and people like nicholas christakis who think about contagion and could you just get them involved here so first of all if you don't have and i'm pretty sure you don't have a network scientist feature you need to have that it needs to be permanent um i won't offer the services of a bunch of historians but applied history would not hurt but but the key thing i would say would be if what happened at cdc were to happen in our defense of infrastructure we would be so screwed in other words look in every part of the administrative state of the federal government for these pathologies of a bureaucratic dysfunction you will find them because i think one of the striking features of the federal government's history really since the administrative state was born in the 1970s there's in every domain you find the same phenomena and that is to say the illusion of preparedness and a bureaucratic legalistic mindset that says well if there's some risk that we can attach some probability above zero to let's devise a 36 page preparedness plan for it and those plans exist in such profusion that no human being in a lifetime could read them all it's just i suspect they're all useless so you need to sort of do network science and rethink the problems that you confront and then you need to actually look at the bureaucracy and ask is any of this actually going to work because i i suspect whether you look at oh let's let's think back to katrina look at all the disasters that we've seen in the last 20 years the common factor seems to me to be that people knew that they were non-trivial risks it wasn't like they'd never been discussed they really weren't black swans and yet it turned out that when the crisis came the preparedness the preparations were very very very defective and i fear that's probably true everywhere i'll add one think about the earthquake in california scenario now we know a really big earthquake in california will happen at some point that we just don't know when we don't know how big but can you imagine the california of 2021 dealing with the big one i mean this is a this is a place that can't even keep its public schools open it's it's a place where as far as i can see that there's going to be a wildfire disaster annually i really i live in california i'm kind of scared to think about how that would go given what we now know about about the state's competence in the face of a pandemic that's interesting too because i mean california throws a heck of a lot of money at problems but that hasn't necessarily fixed them um that makes me wonder about incentives both for the private sector and the public sector and whether or not we need just a total rethink of the incentive structure because we've already touched on some of the problems in the in the private sector that you know you have a system maximized for share value efficiency that creates certain shortcuts that may work 99 the time but not the 1 what about in the public sector what about for government and leadership do we need a whole different structure there i have one more piece of advice for the biden administration and that is send a bunch of people to taipei to spend a month with audrey tang oh yeah audrey tang is one of the heroes of the book uh the transgender minister for digital affairs in the taiwanese government who was a kind of cyberpunk critic of the government that they brought inside the tent and said okay if you're so smart you do something about this and and i think she's one of the most interesting people in the world thinking about how you use technology to empower citizens and this is a key distinction between what the republic of china does and what the people's republic does in the people's republic in beijing the technology empowers the party empowers the state and it significantly reduces the power of the citizen and the opposite is true in taiwan by chance i was in taiwan at the very beginning of the year before the pandemic really got going and i was learning so much about how they thought through what the digital revolution can do for government and it was wonderful to see it work they thought the problem was election uh sabotage so when i was there they were running up to the big election of january in 2020 and the the people i was talking to were concerned about chinese cyber attacks on the electoral process which were difficult because they keep their electoral process simple and vote with pencil and paper but they were thinking a lot about ways in which the chinese might disrupt the process and then the pandemic came along and that same nimbleness which i think they're building into their system kicked in and they were able to do all the things that we failed to do so i do think there's an answer to this question and it's a little bit about making the government accountable to uh its consumers who are the citizens and and that's that's the thing that we really don't do here we didn't use technology at all competently in in this crisis i think one of the kind of unexplained things in the story is why the big tech companies decided against doing contact racing because they didn't have the option to do it and if you think back rana and you may maybe notice this too because it's kind of your beat there were a couple of stories in april 2020 google and apple discussing contact tracing app and then it just went very quiet and then two months later is google and apple decide that this really needs to be done on an international level long pause google and apple decide that this should be done at the state level by state governments now if you wanted to kill something that's what you would do i think they killed contact tracing in the u.s for reasons that i don't know i can't fathom maybe they just decided there was too much downside risk at a time when they were already in the spotlight for the power that they wield in other rem in other respects but at any event until we learn how to use technology to empower uh citizens and make government accountable then these bureaucratic pathologies will will i think continue that's interesting i suspect that you're right that they knew that contract contact tracing would make them seem even more powerful not seen but actually be quite powerful and it would bring up issues of data ownership and all the things that they were already struggling with but but taiwan is such an interesting example i've actually spoken to audrey chang and i completely sorry tang and i i completely agree with what you say that she's so interesting um and she made the point to me that this the way that taiwan works is really about a chicken and egg cycle of trust where uh the government is trusting citizens to report things to be a you know very much participatory in governance uh and then when things go well that builds trust in the government which allows more freedom to to maneuver and it's sort of the opposite of what we have uh in the us at the moment with with the polarization and the party system and the primary and the kind of extremes um that are rewarded in our political system i think if everything gets politicized if every public service issue becomes a partisan issue it's very very difficult to arrive at consensus and remember the united states was not always like this in the 1950s when the us led the world in in vaccine technology uh everybody was happy about the fact that the u.s was good at developing vaccines and rolling them out and that was one reason the 5758 asian flu pandemic was so well managed the guy the fascinating figure of morris hillman got a vaccine incredibly fast and they got it distributed even faster than we've been able to do with the covert vaccines so something's changed the us was was a society once that was at least on some issues capable of putting partisan divisions aside now this was something i wrote about a bit in the square and the target the ways in which the internet feeds our tendency to cluster into hostile uh partisan groups but i i think 2020 revealed that this is really a major problem because if you start politicizing everything from face masks to hydroxychloroquine to the vaccine then any kind of coherent public policy becomes impossible and the trust which you rightly mentioned in the context of taiwan just keeps sinking until every institution is not trusted by the public and that's a problem i think for any society yeah let me ask you just before we throw this open to some audience questions just a couple more things lots of talk in in op-ed circles uh and amongst the davos uh davos class about which of the many changes that we've seen post covet are going to be permanent you know work from home shifts in the real estate market the geopolitics the the nature of capitalism are we seeing a shift from capital labor what do you think any any bets given your research on what's going on history leads leads us to expect not as much uh changes seems imaginable because there's an amazing mean reversion that happens after much worse plagues than this uh and and that's one of the things that i i got from looking at the british experience with with the bubonic plague the current problem from the 1340s to the 1660s and you would have these tremendous peaks of excess mortality and then london would just carry on and very quickly uh behavior would revert so i think there'll be quite a lot of of mean reversion and the handshakes and the hugs i've already started to come back here in california faster than i would have expected so that's interesting i i think the masks will soon be in the drawers of our desks um and will only come out if we get some further wave uh in the winter what's clearly going to stick is the working from home shift and i agree with nick bloom at stanford that this was already detectable prior to the pandemic and the pandemic has accelerated a transition uh to to working from home for a very significant proportion of us and that will therefore have knock-on consequences for for cities and and the ways that people live i i i could see that being one of the enduring changes but there's a bunch of other stuff which maybe is less obvious i mean it's it's clear to me that we are going to have trouble going back to globalization as it was if we've only vaccinated the developed countries of the west and can't really figure out how to vaccinate latin america and south asia now that that's really going to make it difficult to get rid of of this rather rapidly mutating virus so i think we should assume that long-haul travel as we used to know it will be quite slow to come back and that that's interesting and then i think we have to take take a step back and ask what was it really necessary to do such drastic lockdowns and then do enormous fiscal offsetting measures and monetary offsetting measures like it was a financial crisis um and and what will the consequences of that be because in the we're in the midst of a strange uh moment in american economic history with that extraordinary growth that's really being driven by vaccinations and and on top of that that kerosene is being poured in the barbecue with wild abandon um and i i can't help feeling that larry summers is probably right about this and we are going to overheat this thing faster than we we think and and i don't buy the roaring 20s analogy i buy the late 60s analogy and every time i hear them saying he's lyndon johnson i'm like are you sure you want that analogy for joe biden because i you may not remember how the johnson presidency ended but one thing that definitely happened was that inflation expectations took off in the second half of the 1960s well that's a really good point i mean when i think about that 60s comparison i think about guns and butter and the idea that we are at some point going to have to choose between interest groups and and i personally don't believe you can just keep throwing money uh at the problem indefinitely um and it's gonna be it's gonna be some tough choices i think when we get to that point let me ask you a final question before we throw it open how things changed for you personally in the last year oh it's been wonderful and i feel guilty about it i mean i i hated all that travel and uh don't intend to return to it spent an idyllic year with my wife and two small younger children in in montana reading scott and prouston writing this book i i am in fact a rather anti-social person by nature i'm a repressed misanthrope who only became gregarious to sell books and so it's all been rather wonderful i'm ashamed to admit it obviously this is a disaster that's killed more than three million people it will kill more before it's done but i have unquestionably been one of the lucky ones i wasn't just able to carry on doing my work it was much improved by getting off the davos circuit and just sitting in one place not jet lagged reading thinking writing that's what i'm good at and it's been just unmitigated joy to be able to do that for 12 months barely traveling more than five miles until i was forced to return to california i couldn't agree more and i it's been wonderful to have more time to read books like yours um ted i'm going to hand it back to you i think you've got a few questions yes i do thank you rana first question um gentlemen asks could you tell me about the cover of your book that image and how that was chosen well that was my choice in case you're wondering what this refers to um i saw this photograph i think it was taken in 2017 in oregon of a golfer sinking a pot with a wildfire raging behind him and i just fell in love with it because it was the metaphor that i'd been looking for for trump's america and uh i'm amazed that more people haven't made use of this wonderful image so we were sort of arguing back and forth about the book jacket and of course the brits wanted a history jacket and so they went for bruegel's triumph of death because the the british views that a history book should look like a history book this is america and history is innately boring so so we went with the golfer and i i wanted to signal that it's not a book about covert it's a book about disaster in all its forms and our strange relationship to it which is that we can simultaneously be fascinated by it and totally ignore it just as the golfers ignoring that wildfire and i'm waiting for the email because i he has to get in touch at some point and say that was me and let me tell you the story of that putt but it hasn't happened yet next question uh correct me if i'm mistaken but you lean conservative am i right uh my question is how do you feel about the conservative movement in the united states right now and compare that to the conservative movement globally well i wonder about that i've never been a member of the conservative party in britain and i'm not a registered republican i am conservative relative to most academics but academia academia is is so far to the left that you don't have to try very hard to seem conservative i'm a classical liberal steeped in the principles of the scottish enlightenment more than i'm a conservative but when i'm confronted by wokism in all its lunacy then i definitely turned conservative so okay i'll i'll come quietly it's a fair cop conservatism in the united states if you're a proper british tori is a contradiction in terms i mean how can a revolutionary republic which is committed to uh fundamental principles uh derived from the enlightenment really have conservatives it's a revolutionary project from the outset and so american conservatives are to to british eyes a sort of strange uh community um and they have to do ultimately what buckley bill but william f buckley said which is just to stand in front of the progressive forces in the united states and say stop or at least slow down and try not to get run over too often by them and that's that's really the story of american conservatism it it has it's always had it's it's shadow side if you read buckley's biography you realize that part of the point of william f buckley was to try to get the crazy right out of conservatism and have a kind of respectable conservatism that wasn't identified with for example opposition to civil rights and i think that kind of uneasy relationship between respectable conservatism and uh distinctly not respectable conservatism uh came back out into the open when donald trump ran for the republican nomination and all the non-respectable elements rushed to his standard and and trampled the respectable conservatives under foot i i wrote a lot about trump over the last uh four or so years uh first for the sunday times in london and the boston globe and then for bloomberg opinion and ambivalence doesn't capture it i had a certain sympathy with the people who voted for him because i could understand why in 2016 they did just in the same way that i could understand why their counterparts in britain voted for brexit but it was hard for me to see anything other than a bad ending for the trump story my own inclination i remember saying this to my wife at the end of of 2016 after it was clear he'd won and there was a transition in progress that this will end in a welter of litigation was my prediction and um that litigation is not yet over but that's pretty much how it's how it's ended so i have found the last uh four years uh painful in many ways and i will continue to find them painful until sane conservatism has kind of managed to regain some control over the republican party and that will take some some time for obvious reasons globally i think you've seen the same problem i mean it's there in britain it's obviously in a number of countries where the populist right has simply taken over from what had been as relatively centrist conservative tradition so as somebody who was came of age in the thatcher years in britain in the 1980s and was attracted to thatcher because so much was wrong with 1970 socialism in britain i am i'm not in a comfortable place there isn't really an obvious comfortable place in american politics for somebody like me you just end up being getting hated on by the work left and the trump is right it's i mean maybe maybe the sign that you're doing something right is if they both hate you but it can be harrowing as an experience another question on uh preparedness for disasters the gentleman says allocating resources and time towards something that hasn't happened is competing for resources against things that are happening would you comment on on on how the case for that is made and and how it gets handicapped against sort of the electoral timetable of when is when is it good and not good um it's a great question when i was writing the first volume of the the henry kissinger biography i came across his problem of conjecture which essentially says that in a democratic policy the the politician the statesman has a choice between doing the thing that requires least effort what we would now call kicking the can down the road and hoping that nothing goes wrong and then doing something that requires an effort to avert some disaster that you you fear might lie ahead and as kissinger says there really are no rewards for averting disaster because nobody's grateful for the disaster that didn't happen and so there's an asymmetry that leads you to kick the can down the road rather than make sacrifices that you'll be blamed for and you won't get the credit for whatever it was you averted i think that's a very astute point about the nature of of modern politics of democratic politics generally my sense is that we have the resources i mean we have abundant resources the government takes a pretty big chunk out of our paychecks but we do waste a colossal amount of the money and that's why i think the most important thing we can do is to get our large government with its 60 plus different agencies to change their mode of operation away from that bureaucratic uh process that rana and i were talking about earlier towards something more taiwan like something that is nimbler that is more responsive uh that uses technology better you can't prepare for every single thing that every cassandra warns about because there are hundreds of cassandras all predicting the end of the world in a host of different ways and you'd go mad if you paid attention to them all i think it's better to get the governments that are responsible for each different domain of public service and say look there's a range of different things that can go wrong in your space and we do not expect you to take out an insurance policy that is so enormously expensive uh that it covers all risks that bankrupts us you've got to have some system in which you calibrate your responsiveness and prioritize rapid reaction and i can't emphasize that enough as we cannot predict disaster we really really can't it's much better to invest in the speed of your reaction and let me take another example from finance rana will enjoy this lloyd blankfein ran goldman sachs through the financial crisis and he once said to me we were no smarter than the other investment banks we would we were no better at seeing this coming but when it came we were faster and turned on a dime i think that that's the spirit turn on a dime when you get that first signal that there's a novel pathogen in wuhan that should set the alarm bells ringing and from that moment on you should act like it could be the black death and that was a point that yanir baryam and nasim talab made in in january of last year just treat this like it could be the big one and and that's the time for frenzied activity at the beginning and you know if it turns out not to be so bad you won't regret those early moves that you made would you talk about the deployment of technology both in anticipating disasters and managing disasters uh and compare the us versus uh globally um it seems to me we are the privacy current concerns in the u.s put us in a limiting position um [Music] and other countries um sorry do we have privacy in the u.s that that comes as news to me because in fact we don't uh all our data belong to mark zuckerberg uh and jeff bezos um and we don't have privacy so when people say oh what about our private business i'm like really you you have privacy because we gave it all away years ago the only good news is that it doesn't yet uh belong to the government at least we don't think so or at least the government seems only to get access to it with a good deal more difficulty than the chinese communist party gets access to alibaba's data but we've got to stop kidding ourselves the problem we have and we have not confronted is that our personal data don't belong to us anymore and getting them back will be really difficult though i think we should strive for that one of the things that i loved when i was in taiwan was the guy who was explaining to me we can create a blockchain uh based vault in your phone that keeps your private data and it's really private and i'm like yes why didn't we think of that 10 years ago when the iphone first came on the scene so yeah i think we've got to stop kidding ourselves we don't have privacy in fact we are to a degree that is deeply deeply shocking completely and utterly without it and we've been in denial about this for years i mean the square in the tower was a book that said we have to do something about internet regulation the situation is nuts the big network platforms have far too much on us and far too much power and we did nothing we did nothing at all and we reached the point at which these platforms know our every move um and have the power to cancel the president of the united states if they feel like it i mean this is not okay even if you really really loathe trump to be cheering a few companies for deleting the elected president united states we've all gone a bit crazy and i think we're all in denial about about the nature of our technological predicament two more questions uh and and this one you have already briefly addressed but i i guess that let's go into it a little more is the management of disasters the handling of disasters from the state level versus um uh federally uh when does it work and how can it work better well federal system has many many benefits it's not perhaps the best system uh in a major emergency i mean you wouldn't want to fight world war ii with each state doing its own thing i think uh one of the obvious things that we didn't really get right was that we completely failed to make any meaningful use of travel restrictions uh early on in in the pandemic and the united states allowed the virus to spread to every state uh by doing zero to limit the the spread from the places where the virus was initially established and you could say well that's the that's the nature of the federal system deal with it but that was a pretty expensive that was a pretty expensive mistake to make in terms of of human life i do think though that the federal system showed its strength when uh some states did really dumb things california did some of the dumbest things i have to say um the the dumbest being the closure of the parks and beaches now it's cr it's finally being admitted by cdc that almost nobody catches covert 19 outdoors that was obvious a year plus ago from the chinese data i mean i remember reading the papers from china showing that there were no cases of outdoor spread like none in wuhan and all the data was showing over a year ago that the covert spread through super spread are events like conferences and swiss resorts indoors it's like indoors in restaurants indoors on cruise ships it's it we knew all that and then these crazy people decide because they just like restricting mobility we're going to shut down the parks and the beaches and that was a disastrous mistake it was why i one of the reasons i i got my family out to montana because in montana sanity broadly prevailed and there were really many fewer restrictions on on what one on what one could do so the federal system at least meant that we didn't have the californian policy nationwide which really would have been would have been disastrous florida and california two very different paths they ended up with very similar outcomes in terms of public health but clearly people in florida were far less constrained so i i think that ultimately i'm a fan of decentralization i think there are many many things that are better done not just at the state level but at the local level the trick of good governance is to get it right which things are appropriate for the federal government to do and which things are appropriate to to be done at a more subsidiary level and i think that's really going to be one of our superpowers if we can only leverage it that the chinese who are principal geopolitical rivals now have an excessively centralized system and at some point those systems malfunction indeed it did malfunction that's why the pandemic began because you had a one-party state that couldn't deal with the outbreak in wuhan without lying and lying and lying until the thing was actually global it was like chernobyl on steroids so i'm you know i'm ultimately convinced that decentralization is the way to go particularly in a world of technology such as the one we have today but there are times in emergencies when certain things need to be done at the national level and even at the international level and we shouldn't delude ourselves about that our final question gentleman says any medical researcher would tell you how imperfect medical research really is and typically most of that discourse is taking place in the confines of the medical community with the coronavirus everything came out in the open um on the one hand making medical researchers look inept and on the other hand making those who are spreading the various articles and stories about it as contributing to uh not a solution but noise would you comment about that well i think that if there's one thing that gave me hope in the last year and a half it was the extraordinary way in which uh scientists around the world in multiple different fields worked collaboratively to try to figure out what the hell was happening and it was ultimately a deeply impressive thing to witness i tried my best to drink from the fire hose i'm an historian not an epidemiologist not any kind of doctor other than a philosophy so i work very closely with with people with the right kind of expertise my dear friend justin stebbing a brilliant uh british oncologist who is an omnivore in terms of consuming medical science literature was my guide through the the highways and byways but i think what it convinced me of was there is no such thing as the birth science and this phrase should be this phrase should be abandoned because there are multiple sciences uh they're often in collision the epidemiologists were not necessarily in agreement with people working on the the virology side of the problem and you need to recognize as an informed citizen that science is highly dynamic uh highly competitive and there are often wrong papers that appear as pre-prints and don't survive the scrutiny of peer review and therefore you have to pick your way especially if you're an amateur very carefully through this incredible jungle of research much of it brilliant some of it wildly wrong and a bunch of stuff in the middle that's just mediocre i think this is a very important lesson for us i don't think the media with all due respect to rana's profession did a brilliant job of covering this not even the people whose kind of beat was science reporting to understand what was happening you really did need to get to the fire hose and try your best to keep a hold of the the rapidly changing picture of the nature of the disease so i thought it was humbling it was a reminder to those of us who work in humanities that stem is really very very cool but what makes it cool is that it's fiercely competitive there are rigorous standards and when something's wrong then you have to admit it's wrong and the constant attempts during the past year to assert certainty and high confidence in statements that were innately provisional about something we were studying on the move i thought did a great deal of of harm and ended up confusing the public well thank you very much neil thank you rana again neil ferguson's book is doom the politics of catastrophe and it is available wherever books are sold thanks and go on gently

Channel: LiveTalksLA

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Keywords: Niall Ferguson, Rana Foroohar, Live Talks Los Angeles, TED Talks, Penguin Press

Id: x9elMwEuJ6s

Length: 60min 40sec (3640 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021