Niall Ferguson on the Politics of Catastrophe

hello thank you so much hannah and it's a huge pleasure to be here thanks to intelligence square all the team there i think worked very hard to bring this event uh together and it's a particular pleasure to be able to do that because we have uh an old friend of intelligence squared and i have to say an old friend of mine in the chair today it is of course professor neil ferguson who is one of the best known historians working in the world really today he is currently a senior fellow at the hoover institution at stanford university although as i think we may gather in the conversation he has uh been more locationally varied during the course of the last year he's also senior faculty fellow at the belfast center for science and international affairs at harvard university and he's the author of 16 books and counting one must say they include classics such as the pity of war the house of rothschild empire civilization and the first part of a definitive biography of henry kissinger the first half called the idealist and we're very much looking forward i think to to part two recently he also published the square and the tower he writes a column for bloomberg opinion and he's the founder and managing director of the advisory firm green mantle llc and the most recent of that long run of books is the one that hannah just mentioned doom the politics of catastrophe and i'm looking forward very much to talking about that with neil and also with all of you who have joined us tonight for this event we're going to have an hour together for the first half an hour or so neil and i will be in conversation and then in the second half we will be taking your questions and you don't have to wait till the half hour is over to start asking them please use the question function which you can find on the bottom of your screen the ask question button just click it pop in your question if you'd like to put in your name and where you're located please do that if you'd rather ask anonymously that's absolutely fine as well uh but please make sure whatever you do you press the send button otherwise we will not receive your question and won't be able to put it to our speaker today so i hope that is all clear and also if you are a tweeter please make sure that at all times you are uh tweeting iq2 as well that will be fantastic if you were to join us in that way also so i think high time we got to the uncompromisingly uh termed doom and find out what exactly the politics of catastrophe are um neil um it's a great pleasure to be uh with you this evening um i have to say you've got a fantastically sort of undo like setting behind you there you look like you're in my circumstances at the moment i i hope that actually accurately reflects where you are at the moment well thank you rana it's a pleasure to join you and everybody at intelligence squared uh i am in california and california gives the impression uh of being paradise uh except that it bursts into flames annually uh and each year on a larger scale and on a wider extent so while it may look like uh paradise and i'm sure if it's still hailing in oxford it does uh in reality i'm in a very combustible neck of the woods i'm also a very short distance away from one of the great fault lines at san andreas fault and at some point there'll be an absolutely huge earthquake here i hope not during this broadcast so there are lots of ways in which disaster looms even when things look absolutely idyllic as that i admit they do behind me well let's say not so much paradise lost as paradise possibly imploding but we very much hope that we'll hold off from that in the next uh hour or so um the book is about covert amongst other things and it's of course not a coincidence that it's uh come out during the middle of this current pandemic and we will of course talk about that but it's about much more than that as well the bigger question of why some societies and some types of political systems respond better than others to catastrophe and without having you spill the beans at the beginning i am going to ask you to spill the beans a little bit at this point what's the overall thesis of the book what is the answer to the question about what kind of societies do respond better to catastrophes of all sorts well the thesis is that disasters whether they're natural or man-made are all to some extent politically mediated it's a function of politics uh how great the excess mortality gets to be when a novel pathogen suddenly sweeps the world uh and so that's part one of my answer that's that's why the subtitle is is important even the things that we think of as completely natural uh like a pandemic uh in fact require politics to become disastrous because covert wasn't disastrous everywhere and the same applies when you look at all of the great disasters in history including including wars uh and wars can inflict devastating casualties uh on a country and the country can hold together or relatively mild uh impacts can somehow lead to collapse there's no straightforward correlation in other words between the body count and the resilience of a society and what interests me is that there are clearly in history some societies that are remarkably resilient can cope with successive disasters of of multiple forms and still carry on functioning and this seems to be partly to do with state competence state structure and how the institutions of the state function uh in the face of disaster but it's also to do with social cohesion i think and how far a society hangs together when there's an enormous stress test going on so that that's broadly speaking the the overall argument uh i haven't told you the answer i think the answer is that societies need to be and institutions need to be quite nimble it's it's flexibility of response that seems to me to be the key and often speed of response and societies that look on paper to be tremendously well prepared for disaster with 36 page reports of pandemic preparedness can turn out not to be because they've got an excessively rigid approach to crisis management and that that i think is the the answer to the question that it is much better to be a resilient nimble rapid responder rather than to be kind of over prepped bureaucracy when when disaster strikes just to follow up on that thought term neil one word that you left out of that string of adjectives was democratic and reading having read the book it doesn't seem to me that you necessarily feel that the argument is about democratic systems versus authoritarian ones in terms of dealing with the most recent pandemic is that is that not a factor particularly i don't think it is i mean a lot of of the kind of naive commentary last year uh said oh look how badly the democracies are handling this and look how well china has handled it with its uh draconian lockdown i thought that was a complete misreading of what was happening a the disaster had begun in the chinese system because rather as after chernobyl there had been lies and uh and deceptions and delays which caused the the crisis to get much much worse but also the draconian lockdown that china imposed on itself in late january wasn't the optimal solution the optimal solution was what taiwan did a democracy and what south korea did a democracy that those were the countries that rapidly tested large numbers of people and used contact tracing to figure out who might have been infected and then quarantined or isolated the people who were so that the best performances came from democracies and the worst performances came from democracies a lot of naive generalizations also followed the form populist leaders are to blame for disastrous excess mortality well in some countries they certainly didn't help matters but there were plenty of countries that had non-populous leaders that did even worse belgium did terribly well terribly badly last year and its prime minister for most of the year was a liberal woman sophie wilmers peru has had about the worst excess mortality and it's not a populist who was running uh peru last year so i i kind of came to realize as i picked my way through some of the commentary last year how tempting it is to jump to conclusions about which political system is doing best it's a lot more complicated than that and you've raised in my mind a really important point that the book delves into and that's a martial sen's argument about famines and i'm sure you're going to ask me about that because it's it's right up your street as a historian of of china amateur sends path-breaking work on on famine argued that ultimately one shouldn't think of a famine as a natural disaster that it was essentially a political failure and in one essay he argued that democracy he had india in mind would would never have tolerated the kind of famines that mao's china suffered largely as a consequence of the crazy policies that that mao pursued in in the 1950s and i i was tremendously impressed by that argument when i first encountered it but when i was writing doom i find myself saying well if if that's true of famines is it shouldn't it be true of all disasters and then i began to realize that it might not actually be true of all disasters and it doesn't seem to have been true of this one of the of the covert 19 pandemic well it quite right now that we will come back to some of those questions of how the world outside the west and indeed china have dealt with these questions so we'll put a pause on that but but one that we will certainly come back to before we do that though i want to dive into some of the historical examples that you give in the book and just because most commentary which looks at the history has been looking at the 1918-19 flew pandemic and yeah that is very very important i want to choose one of the other pandemics that you look at and it's one that's known but not as well remembered the so-called asian flu those days are still allowed to give geographical locations to diseases the asian flu of 1957 and you look at it from the point of view of the administration then of president eisenhower uh you know the post-war era in the united states when we think of actually as a time of prosperity one when america was beginning to rise or had risen to the global power in the cold war but looked at through the lens of that particular disease you tell a somewhat different story yes i i got very interested in 1957 58 precisely because i hadn't known about it before and indeed no one had ever mentioned it to me until last year when my good friend nicholas christakis one of the world's leading authorities on pandemics and network science mentioned it i think in a tweet my ears as it were pricked up in 5758 the world was hit by a pandemic a new strain of influenza comparable in scale to covert 19. much more like it than 1980 1918-19 the so-called spanish influenza which was a devastating disaster killed about 39 million people if if if something like that happened with our global population you would be looking at a death toll in the hundreds of millions uh but 1957 58 uh killed about the same proportion of the world's population as covert has so far which is around about 0.04 percent uh it's not the same disaster it wasn't as big a disaster in the united states as covert has been but globally it seems about in the right ballpark and also interestingly unlike covert uh the the asian flu of 5758 killed a lot of young people and affected the very young as much as the very old and it also affected and caused a great deal of of illness and mortality amongst teenagers so if you do the calculation on life year's loss considering that 80 percent of the americans who've died of covert have been over 65 actually about roughly the same number of life years were lost maybe a bit less in 57 58 so what's interesting about this what is interesting is the completely different reaction of the eisenhower administration and american society at large to this disaster uh there is no lock down uh schools are not closed uh there isn't even a state of emergency the public health officials know that the virus is going to sweep through the country and and cause excess mortality but they they tell the president that we can't really stop this and so we're just going to focus all our efforts on finding a vaccine and remarkably because we've been telling ourselves that what happened last year was a a feat of medical science without precedent well unfortunately that's not true there was a precedent maurice hillman found a vaccine against the spanish flu in just a matter of months and not only found it but the earth government was able to deploy it even faster than we've deployed the kovy covert vaccines so it's a remarkable story more i think for the very different way in which uh government and society reacted in in 2020 as compared with the way they reacted in 1957. well one of the other things that i think was fascinating to me about the story and i knew you know very little about the the events uh as well so it was it was a real eye-opener was the way in which as you point out attitudes towards risk were also rather different at that point one of the things that in many ways quite rightly that has happened during the most recent pandemic is that there has been a pretty strong precautionary principle certainly amongst developed countries in uh europe in north america and those sorts of uh of areas you could argue actually the same about china i suppose in the grounds that massive brutal crackdowns are precautionary if if nothing else whereas the impression i get from you know what you say about that 1950s period is that it's an era when polio is still you know running pretty rampant uh amongst the the the the youth of that country that we had a president just a decade before president roosevelt who had suffered polio in his youth at the same time of course this is still a generation just a year out of the most devastating global war and overall do you think i mean in a way that's become rather politically incorrect for for uncertain reasons perhaps in our most recent pandemic a lot of people were there simply saying well you know a lot of people will get this a lot of people will die and that's just the way that the world works i think it's clear from talking to to people who lived through it that that was the mentality then people actually worried more about polio in the 50s than they worried about influenza though they probably should have worried more about influenza in terms of its uh its overall mortality uh that they had been through not only world war ii but the korean war there was a sense that life uh was bound to deal you uh some bad hands and uh this was just something you had to take in your stride but since i first started writing about this i published a paper about it last year when i first was working on it i've had lots of response from people who lived through it including a friend who said i actually had the biggest worst illness of my life at the age of 10 during that pandemic and he said and you know what strikes me looking back is is how we just got on with life and i've heard that from many many americans who who recollect the pandemic but but recollect also the the way in which people was stoical about it and clearly that wasn't what happened in 2020 in 2020 there was an extraordinary polarization along political lines in a way that's completely unrecognizable because in the 1950s a public health crisis was a public health crisis you didn't politicize it nobody attempted to do that in 2020 every issue from the virus itself to mask wearing to vaccination became politicized and democrats broadly speaking were extremely risk averse exaggerated the the risk that they faced personally and republicans were completely the opposite and understated the risk uh that they faced so that's how one of the ways at least in which in in which the united states has changed by the way as this is likely a mostly british audience 5758 was not especially bad although it did affect the united kingdom 1951 was much worse now and the 1951 influenza really shows up if you look at the long-run u.s uk mortality data it's actually one of the worst years in the past century or so for high mortality along with 1918 uh 1940 and and 2020 and almost nobody remembers the 1951 influenza uh pandemic unless you were kind of elderly liverpudlian because liverpool had an especially torrid time of it in that year and it's a reminder that quite often things which are utterly devastating at the time can sometimes really fade from memory quite quickly in certain ways although they turn up in slightly different sorts of ways i mean one of the notes that i really liked about the 1919 uh pandemic that you talked about was the fact that it affected the culture of the 1920s and i'm thinking here particularly of a jazz song i was not previously aware of by huey smith called rocking pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu i must say that's not on my list of of curtfile classics but maybe you've been spinning it uh in your uh pandemic hideaway there really well actually rana the rock and pneumonia in the boogie boogie floor was a 1957 hit um it's uh it's actually and it's a rather a good number made made the charts though not quite up there without elvis's uh teddy bear which was one of the big hits of of that year uh but but i think the interesting thing about the song is that it makes light of a disease that was very threatening to teenagers one of the points about this is that teenagers were the most gregarious people uh in america in the 1950s and they were probably the most gregarious people in in the world because this was the age of uh of of just teenage heaven non-stop uh parties uh camps it seems to me that being a teenager in 1950s america was probably more fun than being human had ever been before certainly looking at the movies from that time you get the impression that that was so and yet they were all running tremendous risk by being so convivial in 1957-58 and yet to the boogie woogie blues also the boogie-woogie flu is probably an exception on the grounds that most teenagers if they were imbibing popular culture would be more worried about being smashed up in an automobile accident like james dean they were less worried particularly about sniffling themselves to uh to an early grave and that's that's something that that there hasn't been nearly as much of in the in the last year where even the british sense of humor has seemed to falter uh in the face of of excess mortality and that probably has something to do with the fact that people are still very close to in this country over a hundred thousand deaths and it will take time to come past that we're going to carry on a discussion but just a reminder to our audience please do join in as well do send in those questions do tweet on iq2 we're very keen to get your questions for neil about not just covert but also the wider question of the politics of catastrophe and let me move on if i may to take up some of the wider ideas that you put forward in the book um some of which i think drawn on previous work that you've done which talk about how we learn from history or don't because you do use the phrase failure to learn for history as one of several points that you make about what we should try and put forward but you know we all know that history is not a simple textbook which you can simply uh draw that's political science no not really he says uh apologizing to any political scientists in the audience um but what does it mean in practice to learn from history whether it's this particular catastrophe or maybe maybe another one how would you do it in practice well i've been beating the drum for applied history for some years now in the belief that certainly in the united states far too little regard is paid uh in the government to the lessons that can be learnt uh from from past experience now i'm not saying this is easy but one must at least try and i think the council of despair i remember being given at oxford as an undergraduate oh you can't learn lessons from history that's journalism dear boy that council of despair has actually led to a kind of uh fatalism uh and a neglect of of the things that can be learned i'll give a concrete example i think that one of the big mistakes that was made by the public health bureaucracies in most western countries was not to pay much attention to what had happened in the cases of sars and mars which were both coronav virus uh outbreaks they didn't become uh global because uh the the virus was so lethal that it couldn't really spread very far uh but that was something that the taiwanese and the south koreans studied pretty closely and and we didn't uh so there's a clearing example there if i look back to work that i did uh in the ascent of money on financial crises it was staggering to me how few people when the financial crisis began in 2008 had any real understanding of the financial crisis the biggest previous financial crisis of of 1929 to 32. so learning from history doesn't give you a kind of cookbook recipe this is what you do in case of a pandemic but i think if once aware of past disasters uh one has a sense of at least some of the pitfalls that policymakers can fall into larry brilliant gave a wonderful ted talk he's an epidemiologist based here in the u.s back in i think 2005 where he said the key to pandemics and he'd worked on the eradication of smallpox the key said is early detection and early action that's the real lesson of of of the modern pandemic and and and that lesson was was completely lost as far as i can see on on the public health bureaucracies in the us and the uk uh who kind of dithered around in january february and uh in the case of the u.s made no successful effort to increase testing actually the cdc centers for disease control and prevention made it harder to get a test not not easier well actually that reminds me of something else that i think is relevant to that which you pointed out that maybe having looked at the public health systems of taiwan or south korea or other places in east asia might have given a very important object lesson of course the fact that most of what was going on there wasn't going on on in english was perhaps relevant remember i recently actually talked to malcolm gladwell who's published a book actually about the history of bombing and the ethical lessons from that in the second world war but one of the almost sort of observations he made in passing was that certain scientific discoveries relevant to world war ii bombing by the americans were not noticed by them because they'd only be published in japanese well actually not even japanese by japanese scholars in esperanto which i'm pretty we know was oddly enough quite common in early 20th century japan for reasons we we won't go into uh to here but the point remains that there's an awful lot of information and knowledge out there but not all of it is easily accessible from the point of view of say anglophones in north america and that's very good example for globalizing history and applying global history as well it is although it must be said that if one looks in to the major scientific disciplines that are relevant to a problem like uh a pandemic to a far greater extent than was true even 20 years ago and certainly to a far greater extent than in the 1930s and 1940s they are in english i mean the literature that was coming out of wuhan uh in the very early stages of the covert 19 pandemic uh was in english because chinese scientists have long been accustomed to publish their their pre-prints uh in english so so i i can't offer that excuse to the people in in key positions at the beginning of 2020 who who i think flunked this quite badly but you're right to raise the question of how do we learn from history because that's certainly the motivation behind writing this book i wanted to write a book that that dealt with disaster as a general category a phenomenon that can come in in all kinds of different shapes and sizes because we have i think developed a tendency to focus excessively narrowly on just one or two scenarios that we find appealing so we're very fascinated as a species right now or at least the elites of uh of humanity are with the prospect of disastrous man-made climate change and uh enormous amounts of uh of hot air are emitted by people talking about this problem uh but it's only one of a wide range of disasters that can conceivably befall us and it might not necessarily be the the most clear and present danger because as we saw last year novel pathogen can move a lot more rapidly than climate change and there are other things which we aren't paying much attention to uh which could be just as catastrophic and again faster acting and i'll throw out one example of of the kind of disaster we don't think about nearly enough that if we had the kind of volcanic activity that the world had from the late 1100s to the late 1200s or even right through until about 1815 which was the last huge eruption uh mount tambora then we very quickly would be having a conversation about global cooling uh so enormous the of the the effect would be it's just that recently and i'm talking about for the last couple of hundred years there haven't been really big volcanic eruptions and so we've kind of forgotten that they can happen uh and you know one could make a similar argument about changes in sunspot activity so i conclude the book by trying to offer a much larger menu of potential disasters that we should think about because i fear that we might spend a great deal of effort on one disaster and end up being given a completely different one to deal with so one of the ways in which you use this wider category of catastrophe is to look at some longer-range historical phenomenon i want to pick up on one that we've mentioned a couple of times before when he said actually now that uh just now that a lot of the first scientific research uh coming out of warhan in china was actually in english i point out that from reliable sources there are other areas of chinese research possibly in artificial intelligence which are possibly in chinese only and restricted to certain readers but we will possibly get that get back to the the present day aspects of that in just a moment china's rise is something that you've written about on various occasions you know you have been teaching at ching hwa university in china in in recent years and you bring it up in this book as well in a variety of different contexts i mean could i ask a mischievous question which is is the rise of china in the modern world a catastrophe not in itself that's to say the reduction of poverty the growth of the chinese economy all of these things are by themselves good nobody wants china to be trapped in the kind of poverty that characterized it in the 19th and 20th centuries the problem is the rise of china under the chinese communist party is i think a potentially disastrous outcome uh because it's not a disaster's outcome for the chinese communist party or the millions of people they rule out well that remains to be seen because one of the things about communist parties if one just learns from history is that they have a very bad habit of inflicting disastrous mortality on their own peoples periodically in that that that of course uh is the same chinese communist party we're talking about that inflicted the biggest man-made famine of them all during the great leap forward that inflicted the cultural revolution on its own on its own people in the late 1960s and and so one has to remember that if if a totalitarian regime has a good run uh in raising uh living standards which this one certainly has that that doesn't protect its people uh from that party uh put committing future disastrous mistakes because the party's entirely unaccountable it is functionally above the law uh and it has no uh opposition it cannot be criticized and as you know uh rana since xi jinping came to power the clock has been turned back in many ways in china not least in the universities where the relative freedom i first encountered when i started traveling to china has really gone and uh there's a great deal uh more of that old chill in the air that i remember uh from my visits to to the soviet union the thing things have become a great deal more ideological more explicitly anti-western uh this is a regime that is essentially telling schools no more books that extol the virtues of foreign systems from now on you'll study xi jinping's speeches uh and i think we we are a little bit reluctant in the west to recognize just how much china has changed and for the worse under xi jinping so it answers your question the rise of the ccp led china poses a potential threat to china's own population i don't rule that out but it also poses a threat to everybody else because as china expands it's reached technologically and economically it's able to exert pressure on the free societies of the world uh in all kinds of ways that uh are perhaps more obvious right now in australia than they are in the uk but i think are relevant uh to everybody one of the big takeaways of the book is that totalitarianism is a very bad thing it caused some of the highest levels of excess mortality in the 20th century whether it was stalin's version uh mao's version or for that matter hitler's and we shouldn't be happy to see the growing power of a one-party state even if it says oh we won't do that kind of thing again because what happened let's remember what happened in in december of 2019 january of 2020. it was like a vast chernobyl in the sense that a disaster occurred and the immediate response of the ccp at the local and the national level was to cover it up and to deny that this problem was real to tell the world health organization no there's no human to human transmission and only when it was too late uh when the genie was at the bottle and the virus was everywhere did they finally acknowledge what had gone wrong that's not a great advertisement for this system i think no fair enough and i don't think anyone certainly not me is advertising the uh putting forward positive advertising for the system but i want to just push back a little bit against one of the analyses in your book again drawing if i may on on your own work and what we're doing again just a reminder to everyone i see some questions coming in and we're going to turn to q a in just a moment or two but please do keep more of them coming in and please do make sure that you are tweeting away on iq2 so let's talk briefly about the historical uh context of the belt and road initiative which uh you point out and others here may well know is this sort of very large projected idea which brings together economics and geopolitics the idea that china is going to be sponsoring through huge amounts of debt for other countries essentially uh the building of bridges but also uh you know power stations but also of course the new tech infrastructure which is going to underpin 5g the internet of things and the new cyber enabled world that we're uh we're moving into and you characterize this in terms of empire something which you've written about you know more than once previously and obviously um it's it's a model that's that's very um persuasive in terms of thinking about what china's doing but let me give you perhaps a less apocalyptic vision of how over time comparing what china's doing now might make us a little bit less nervous than we might be in the western world but first of all this type of empire that china's putting forward doesn't seem really like a kind of classic empire on the grounds actually it's lots of different private enterprises sort of bumping up against each other sometimes succeeding sometimes failing you know even the debt traps which people talk about are often happening because actually the chinese thought they were onto a good investment which turns out in the end surprise surprise to be a rather rather bad one the amount of lending that china has done under that initiative actually really plummeted in the last year or two as they found themselves really not in a position to spread too much largesse at all they've largely moved towards actually sending out vaccines and putting forward a um kind of uh intentions about potentially enabling people's cyber capacity in future years in other words if this is an attempt to build a global empire it's actually a pretty ropey one isn't it well empires are always a bit ropey when you study them up close and the description you you've just given of chinese expansion reminds me vividly of the early stages of of british expansion that sort of strange combination of of competing private agencies and then the bad debt problem that you weren't quite expecting but i don't think the belt and road initiative or one belt one road as it's sometimes called is really the the biggest worry that china poses uh our our friend and uh a student like fryman has written a terrific book on this which shows that really this is as much propaganda as it is a grand design for world domination but i when i look at other aspects of of china's expansion and uh and also the tone of the the new wolf warrior diplomacy uh i i find myself a great deal less uh easy in my mind first of all china has a capacity thanks to its development of artificial intelligence and the expansion of its payment platforms to extend its model of surveillance beyond its its borders and the fact that the smart city technology based on facial recognition is now being available is being made available in in dozens of countries around the world should i think give us pause in fact i i think that is a more serious uh risk than one belt one road infrastructure projects uh financed in ways that turn out to have been somewhat imprudent uh so yeah i think i think one one's thinking about future challenges and future dangers the way i put it is this that china is certainly expanding in empire-like ways uh it is also clearly a much more serious competitor technologically than the soviet union was particularly when it comes to information technology and the vision of a surveillance state which orwell had in 1984 is far closer to being realized in xi jinping's china than it ever was uh under mao or stalin because the technology really does allow the party if it wishes to monitor citizens uh everyday lives every day transactions now that in itself uh is not a reason to expect at the end of the world we're not doomed because of the rise of china but we will be in a very difficult position if the superpower rivalry that we currently see which i think merits the name cold war ii escalates into hot war and that's really the scenario which i i worry about a lot because it seems to me that a lot of the ingredients are now in place for a superpower conflict in asia that will come as as as much of a surprise as as the korean war did in 1950 so i i end the book by offering reflections on the way in which things could blow up over taiwan uh in in a relatively near time frame and after all wars historically are second only to pandemics when it comes to causing really large amounts of premature death so that's something i think we should worry about a lot more and of course it's worth remembering that china did fight a war previously about taiwan but it was in 1895 with japan on that occasion the japanese won in slightly different circumstances i see we've got a whole variety of questions coming in uh based on your ideas neil so i will start putting those to you this one relates to where you're sitting right now and as i say we're crossing our fingers that the catastrophic earthquake that you talked about doesn't uh hit any time soon but the question comes to you neil you mentioned this will inevitably happen at some point on the west coast then yet there's no mass flight from california is that not our question asks a sign of remarkable resilience and bargaining an indication that we do all know that catastrophe is part of life and essentially it's part of life that we're actually okay with yeah that's a great question in a way that's that's one of the themes of the book that we we have to live with this thought of impending doom and i give the example of the british soldiers on the western front in the first world war singing the bells of hell go tingling for you but not for me uh a song which when i first heard it struck me as as fascinating because it gives you an insight into the way that that young men think about the very real danger that they all faced i mean basically people underestimate the risk that it will happen to them and one saw that again actually during the pandemic we have to think in that way i think in order not to be crippled by anxiety and if you if you're living in close proximity to a fault line you can't really uh jump at every uh every tremor because you will very quickly find your life as miserable it's a little bit like during the cold war we we knew that there was a risk of thermonuclear war but we didn't live our lives with that thought prominently in our minds uh and i think that's part of the coping strategy of being human on the other hand uh when you look at the probabilities of geological disaster uh in parts of asia indonesia for example in japan i think it's different and i think one conceived one considers the japanese history a much more intense preoccupation with what you'll do in case of of an earthquake or a tsunami than we have here we've only just this week rolled out a proper california-wide alert system only this week that would actually let people get on their phones an earthquake warning and that tells you that we're not really as focused on this as we as we ought to be earthquakes for some reason and this is one of the mysteries of humanity fault lines seem to attract us we love to build our cities on them a map of the world with fault lines and conurbations would make you think that human beings enjoyed earthquakes and were drawn towards tsunamis so i think this is one of the puzzles my sense now i've lived here for four years is that we're all a little bit in denial about this and nobody truly has a coherent uh game plan for the big one and we could see that when the wildfires became much much worse last year i i did not see a society that had a realistic risk assessment of the danger of wildfire on the contrary the californians have been in denial about this problem for the last 20 years and i'm afraid it's only going to be getting worse because nobody has a solution well i wonder if that leads us rather nicely into the question that's just come in from christopher uh and he asks he says hello neil what do you see as the three greatest dangers in the modern world apart from climate change so it's rather specific on that i've always loved taking notes for the state department or something and do you think that too much effort is being directed towards climate action of those those dangers what's your thoughts about that that's a great question christopher i do think that we are focusing too much resources and attention on the climate change risk that's not because i'm a denier i think there are very obvious dangers and that the probability of the worst case scenario uh that the international planet climate change envisaged has gone up not down by the way one reason the risk is going up is that for all their fine words the chinese continue to build coal burning power stations at a terrific clip did you know that 48 of the increase in co2 emissions in the last well since paris are due to to uh to china and china alone so i think this is a problem but it's not the only problem and it's a relatively slow acting problem as bjorn nomberg argued in his his most recent book compared with some of the other things that could conceivably go wrong now i've already mentioned that a u.s china war would be a whole different ballgame from war in iraq or war in afghanistan we've forgotten what great power conflict can look like and if you want a sense of what it might look like jim stavridis has recently published a novel based on his uh extensive knowledge as uh as a former admiral uh in the u.s navy uh 2034. uh so that would be my number one risk let's not forget what a really big war could do uh number two which is kind of a subset of this would be full-blown uh cyber warfare causing an outage of the internet we are now heavily heavily reliant on this technology that we're using right now for this conversation full-blown outage would plunge our systems into chaos uh even if if there was no other war going on uh and cyber warfare is already underway on a very fairly low level it's a sort of permanent state almost hobbesian state of conflict but if it were to escalate in such a way that critical infrastructure was disrupted i don't like to think how u.s society would cope with that i'm very doubtful that we would prove uh resilient in the face of that kind of catastrophe and i'll i'll throw in just for fun the super volcano scenario because nobody thinks about that but actually spending a year in montana which i did to get away from not only the pandemic but the crazy regulations they introduced in california was a good reminder because the yellowstone super volcano was one of the most cataclysmic uh events of the distant past something like that would completely transform our sense of of the climate risk and i i do think that we talk about man-made climate changes if it's the only sort that really matters but historically uh we've seen periods of uh of of abnormal cold in the wake of massive volcanic eruptions we've forgotten that that can happen i can't think of a single reason why that couldn't happen in the relatively near future we've just had a quiet 200 years but would the point be neil not that it's the only type of climate change that could happen but it's the only type man-made is that all human-made is the only type that we can actually do anything very much about yeah but i mean i think that if if you're asking me what are the things that we should be thinking about other than man-made climate change that the list is is quite a a long one and i i think that's part of the point of doom uh to point out that if you're very very well prepared for one particular form of disaster you shouldn't be surprised if history slaps you in the face with a completely different disaster you almost never get the disaster you're well prepared for that's that's the lesson i think of of a succession of presidencies that i i i review towards the end of the book uh because i think that that's the inherent problem of the way that we think about problems we tend to focus on the last one i noticed last year that many many policy makers uh responded to the aftermath of the the onset of the pandemic because if it was a financial crisis and used the same tools that had been deployed after 2008 and that was a kind of category error in many ways because clearly a pandemic's not a financial crisis it's very very tempting both in military and civilian affairs to want to fight the last war or to fight the war that you've spent a lot of time preparing for and history is just not kind that way in fact history seems to quite like playing the trick on us of giving us a disaster that we really didn't think that much about until it happened well that actually um i think leads into well a couple of questions which i'm going to bring together because they're on on a similar topic but they get to an aspect of what you've just said neil which is the way in which you know governing parties governments can use catastrophe as a means of forwarding their own nationalistic aims uh i mean we've talked about china before it's also i think fair to say that plenty of countries around the world are using their covet response as a way of defining themselves until recently india was portraying itself as someone that had done very well and this had reflected better on the society now of course it's put itself into into reverse mode on that do you think that we're going to see an era of political opportunism which essentially draws on capacit the capacity to deal with catastrophe as a way of defining the polity well maybe i think politicians showed themselves by and large to be rather inept in if if they try to instrumentalize uh the crisis last year it usually blew up in their faces so those who wanted to cast themselves as wartime leaders very quickly turned out to be doing about the worst you would have thought that a pandemic that originated in china and strongly argued for border controls would have helped donald trump i mean in a way it played to his populist agenda uh but he completely screwed up uh his handling of it and by putting himself front and center uh of the uh us government response and then and then bundling it so i think the attempt to instrumentalize the crisis has generally led to to failure but what i think is true is that lower down the chain of command for those people whose whose lives really revolve around devising regulations and then imposing them on people it's been a terrific opportunity now i think there is a a really important theme in the book that we haven't touched on which is that the point of failure is often in middle management rather than at the top that it's actually the bureaucracy rather than the commander-in-chief that can bundle things i think it's also true that the bureaucracy in many countries has seized the opportunity presented by the pandemic to extend its power in all kinds of different ways and one sees this in almost trivial forms in california which has a one-party system of its own because the democrats have been dominant for so long the kind of mentality that i was struck by was the one that introduces regulations even when there's no scientific basis for them at all there was a moment when they closed the the parks and beaches here last year which i found completely bizarre since there was a single reason to think that covert spread outdoors almost all the research coming out of the early phase of the pandemic showed that it was spread indoors and therefore to close the parks and beaches just seemed potty but there they were officials were going to california beaches there was one man who stopped from paddle boarding in the middle of the pacific ocean uh because of uh of covert so i think the real winners here have been that the petty regulators who've had a field day it reminds me a little bit of the you know the air raid wardens uh who were satirized in bbc's dad's army you can remember the insufferable man who was constantly telling people uh to to pull their curtains and those people have had a terrific opportunity to exercise power and they're still doing it even when it's clear that most of the regulations that remain remain here are kind of superfluous well the dad's army phrase of course is don't you know there's a war on so you could say there's a there's a pandemic absolutely just to take that point for a moment about middle management i mean you've expressed in terms of where we are now with the pandemic do you think that operates historically as well looking at the past disasters over the last you know 200 years or so as modern governments develop is there always that sort of bureaucratic layer that essentially messes up what's happening from from the top or is it something peculiar to this current crisis to do with disease science and so forth i think if you compare us with the 1950s uh we we have become more bureaucratic and the the striking thing to me when i look at the uh the pandemics of the 1950s is the nimbleness of the the government's response uh that cdc in the us was of relatively recent origin in 1957 there wasn't an enormous sprawling department of health and human services as there is today and yet when you look at what the advice was that the public health officials gave eisenhower it was it was remarkably uh pragmatic and clear-headed and my sense is that in the us at least and it may be true of the uk and i'm sure if dominic cummings uh were here he he'd say it is that there has been a decline in the competence of of government and that's a view that francis fukuyama has has put forward too so i'm not alone in making this case uh mark andreessen talked about it uh during the pandemic there's a hideous word claudiocracy that somebody coined to capture the ways in which uh the so-called administrative state deals with uh the the risk of disaster and then bungles the disaster when it happens i'll i'll throw out one anecdote just to illustrate the point uh that there was and indeed is uh an under secretary or is it a deputy secretary for pandemic preparedness in the department of health and human services it's his one job uh and one of the mysteries to me of last year was where he was because he was almost completely missing in action and i delved into uh the the role of of robert uh cadillac and found a wonderful lecture that he'd given in 2018 in texas uh in which he reflected that if uh if we really didn't prepare a bit better for a pandemic we'd be sol but i didn't know what sol stood for it's a u.s military speak for out of luck and this was the guy whose one job it was to prepare for a pandemic there are 36 page-long pandemic preparedness plans ultimately there are there's almost a countless amount of of paperwork on this it's just that none of it worked and that's the thing that interests me clearly not the bureaucracy's private uh finest hour but just to go back to the 1950s for a second between then and now one could perhaps argue the other way that over the last 60 years or so that same health and human services behemoth has also been responsible for one of the biggest changes that's improved people's standard of life which is stopping people smoking it's something done through regulation it's done off the back of research which is mostly paid for by the state by people like the brits or richard dole on the grounds that private enterprise didn't want to pay for things that would reduce profits so smoking and people dying in their millions from smoking was also a catastrophe over years isn't that that's the example of how the bureaucracy can also get it right oh i think that's clear and one of the striking stories that i i tell in the book is is all the kind of imperceptible not necessarily much celebrated improvements in public health uh that long predated the campaign against uh tobacco going all the way back to the the improvements in in basic hygiene in in british cities that can be traced from the victorian period uh it was actually improvements in in basic hygiene that that did a lot of the reduction of uh of mortality and the extension of life expectancy more really the great scientific medical breakthroughs that we tend to to make much more of so i don't disagree with that my point is is generally not specifically about uh public health but generally about about bureaucracy what i think has evolved and it's really from let's say the 1970s is a somewhat legalistic state of mind in which if there is some probability uh greater than zero of a particular uh negative adverse outcome you need to have at least a 36 page document spelling out a whole series of measures to be taken preemptively or in response great detailed regulation that doesn't work when the crisis happens think of all those pages of regulation of bank capital uh back in the 2000's the basel uh rules and back capital adequacy which proved utterly useless uh when the financial crisis struck in 2008. so i don't think this is a peculiar problem of public health actually public health has achieved a great many victories uh over the last century but more recently i think we've seen a major failure of public health bureaucracies and i think it's because the legalistic bureaucratic mindset has come into that world from other domains for the media it's much easier to say was all the fault of boris it was all the fault of trump that that's been a recurrent narrative over the past year but i think that gets us away from the real problem which is a rather more profound one and actually rather harder to fix i mean you can replace a president we did but you can't overnight transform the culture of a bureaucracy like cdc which very clearly failed for reasons that had nothing to do with trump i'm going to squeeze in a couple more questions here which are almost sort of opposite sides of the same questions i'll put them both to you uh neil one of our questions is asked without the internet could we have had lockdown in 2020 well i guess we could have had lockdown but it wouldn't have been quite the same sort of lockdown and the other question is what role does 24-hour news have on the way that people react and therefore politicians respond is this why compared to the 1950s it was unpoliticized then and politicized now and that relates of course to your wider questions about networks and information so two great questions i know we're running short of time so i'll have to give brief answers yeah it made a huge difference we couldn't have done the lockdowns in the 1950s even if the asian flu had been far worse because hardly anybody could work from home in those days whereas uh if you look at nick bloom's work terrific british economist at stanford about a third of all jobs in the us can be done just as well 100 as well at home as in the office and that's because the internet and therefore i think lockdowns were possible in 2020 in a way they never really had been before and that's important because their possibility tempted us to do them without really doing that good a cost-benefit analysis of the downsides of of what we were doing on the second question i don't think it's just that it's 24 7. the problem is the way in which news has been polarized and in particular the ways in which news has shifted onto the internet and become a domain uh for clickbait remember that the primary objective of the network platforms is to get your attention and retain it for long enough that you see ads the thing that does that is sensational stories that don't necessarily have to be true and what what i wrote about in the square in the tarot book that you and i discussed around a couple of years ago has turned out to be pretty prescient that if you leave that status quo if you allow news to become part of this highly polarized public sphere in which the primary motivation of the platforms is to sell ads and engage eyeballs you're going to get a lot of crazy stuff uh crazy stuff about the virus crazy stuff about remedies and crazy stuff about vaccines that's done tremendous harm so it's not the amount of news i think it's the way in which the news has become polarized and polluted with fake news thanks very much indeed neil we're beginning to get to town so i'll throw one last one in for you for a brief answer and i'll combine it actually with it with with the thought that i had about the book as well the question comes in uh saying thank you for a fascinating and terrifying expose so what grounds do we have for any optimism or is there truly bleak outlook for us all and i would point it out as i throw that back to you for a last thought neil that in your book you do say at least you think that the likelihood of an alien invasion from space is a relatively small likelihood so is that the best you can offer us in terms of bleakness or is there anything i want to be clear that doom is a slightly ironical title uh inspired by you'll remember private fraser we're doomed uh in fact we're not doomed the probability of of complete extinction is is is a lot lower than you'd think from reading science fiction just as the probability of an alien invasion is really low because the distances seem overwhelmingly large and the probability of their being aggressive intelligent life doesn't seem to me to be that high at least not within striking distance of earth so it's actually an optimistic book i found it cheering to write this book because it reminded me that this really wasn't by any means the worst disaster that mankind has confronted and it certainly wasn't likely to be an extinction level event i mean 0.04 percent of the world's population is a terrible tragedy when you express it as 3 million lives but in the great scheme of human history uh it is not really anything close to an extinction level event we survive we survive and the majority of us survive the majority of people on the western front in world war one survived it was only a minority of those uh tommy's for whom the bells of hell really did go dinga lingaling and so it's actually contrary to what you might expect from the title it's it's a cheering book that reminds you that at the end of it all most of us are fine and life goes on and and as you pointed out around we quite often forget the disasters i wouldn't be at all surprised if 100 years from now this wasn't uh a major topic in the history books uh in the same way that the 5758 pandemic has entirely vanished without trace i can just expect it will be filmed soon neil under the title it's a wonderful life too judging by the way that you've characterized it there regardless of what you think of the title it is a fascinating read i'd like to thank neil ferguson very much for being with us here i'd like to thank all of you from around the world the audience who have come to us for this event i'd like to thank intelligence squared for organizing yet another fantastic event

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 14,470

Rating: 4.7423315 out of 5

Keywords: niall ferguson, the ascent of money, civilisations, civilisation, historian, doom, the politics of catastrophe, doom the politics of catastrophe, stanford, intelligence squared, intelligence, intelligence squared debates, iq2

Id: mlcw9AE1vsw

Length: 58min 26sec (3506 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021