People, Politics and Prose: Problems of Plenty? Rethinking American Grand Strategy

[Music] good afternoon and welcome to the latest episode of people politics and Pros fpis conversations with authors about their Works their careers and the ideas that drive them I'm Ron grener from fpri and all of us at fpr thank you for joining us live on Zoom this afternoon and later recorded on fpr's YouTube page all politics flows from the struggle between competing groups for scarce resources this Bland truism has shaped our understanding of political life since the Ancients and has been expressed in metaphors such as Thomas hobbs' solitary poor nasty brutish and short state of nature and Carl Marx's Eternal class struggle struggle and scarcity are Central to realism and play a significant role in most geopolitical uh analysis as well but what if I told you that life on Earth these days is marked less by scarcity than by plenty as human Ingenuity has gradually eliminated many of the factors that once limited human life and human potential this is not to say that life is now easy and perfect but the struggles we Face are now problems of plenty of managing the consequences of our success we have entered a new era even as our thinking remains rooted in the old in his newest book The Taming of scarcity and the problems of plenty Francis Gavin considers both the importance of the transition to this new era and the problems that it poses along the way he challenges his readers to consider how the very institutions and intellectual Frameworks that emerged in the age of scarcity and allowed us to control it from our governing institutions to our understandings of international relations and geopolitics that those very structures and Frameworks may keep us from effectively managing this new era whereas the problems of scarcity demanded the mass mobilization and Unity of purpose he concludes the problems of Plenty require nimbleness Innovation diversity transparency adaptability and accountability to maintain governmental and institutional legitimacy but he warns for these new issues traditional Nation focused solutions that worked to conquer scarcity are for the problems of plenty more than ineffective they are damaging or at least they can be so what are the problems of Plenty why are they harder to solve than the problems of scarcity if they are are we or our institutions capable of confronting them these questions and yours will guide us in our conversation with Francis J Gavin Francis J Gavin is the joavan aneli distinguished professor and the inaugural director of the Henry a Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at John's Hopkins school of advanced International Studies he has a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago an MA from Oxford and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and he's pre previously served on the faculties of MIT in the University of Texas before ending up at John's Hopkins he is the author of numerous books and articles especially gold dollars and power the politics of international monetary relations 1958 to 1971 and nuclear statecraft history and strategy in America's atomic age as well as nuclear weapons and American Grand strategy a 2020 Choice outstanding academic title I have to confess uh I have known Professor Gavin for quite some time and I am uh one of the officers in his fan club and I delighted to have him here day on people politics and Pros thanks for joining us Frank thank you Ron for having me and with an introduction like that I suggest we just shut down the show I can't we've reached the Peaks you gave a better summary of my book than I could all those nice things you said it's all downhill here from here so thank you so much for having me and it's so great to see you you bet you bet no it's you know even you know this is the the the beauty of the internet so this is also a problem of Plenty right is now we've run out of excuses for not seeing each other because we can see each other on through electronic so what inspired you to write this particular book I remember when I saw that that that this is what you're working because I knew you're working on other things as well right this is a little bit of a of a of a departure from Grand strategy maybe a little bit of departure from your last two works on nuclear weapons what's the origin of this particular booklink essay sure no and it's a it's an important question and there were several Inspirations um the first was I think like a lot of us we went through 2020 2021 with the covid-19 pandemic and it seemed as if something fundamental had shifted and that you have a major crisis that ends up killing upwards of 20 million people in the world over one million people in the United States uh and I would have expected that this would have been a reordering moment and it struck me that this was a type of problem that was not dissimilar from other types of problems um such as is the climate crisis migration um some of the issues around emerging technology and I thought to myself you know the these are a set of challenges that that that are particularly vexing and in many ways are a reflection of some of our success the second thing though as I as the Biden Administration came into to office and even as the crisis was still ongoing most people in our community instead of focusing on these things were talking about the return of great power politics Cold War II um things like the faciiities Trap all these sort of things that while they were certainly mattered and were certainly important struck me as um part of an older world uh and then finally I had to start thinking about how I taught and teaching courses like the evolution ution of the International System the nature of international relations the kind of things that I grew up on kind of things that you and I are very familiar with didn't necessarily resonate with what I saw as the kind of global landscape and so I started thinking about uh thinking about what it was about how the international relations field looked at the world where they saw the EV they saw the International System as a sort of static as you beautifully put it this hot Oban kind of hellscape of competition uh for scarce resources and it struck me that that while that described many episodes in the past it wasn't as helpful to understand these new set of problems so all of those things came together in kind of generating all right I've got to dive down and think about this and it was a departure for me because it forced me to really upend how I thought about international relations right so so what what is different about scarcity before we talk about the question of how we got from scarcity to plenty what what are the kinds of problems of Plenty that we see that are that are different or new um that that are different than what we dealt with when we were dealing with scarcity right so um I I I have a whole list of of sort of various qualities and characteristics of the problems of Plenty but I think the way to think of it is that our success in taming many of the issues of scarcity most of which took place in the economic technological or informational or even the societal space generated a new set of problems so you know for example most of recorded human history human beings have wondered can I produce enough food basic resources wealth in order to maintain my population right this is kind of the story of human history for any number of reasons some technological some you know organizational we are actually extraordinarily good at producing enormous amounts of material output you know unimaginable amount with these wonderful outcomes in terms of doubling of life expectancy um all these other wonderful things but in the process we release enormous amounts of carbon which poison our environment and may Doom the planet right so the problem of scarcity which was we don't have enough food we need more land uh we don't have enough fuel we don't have the basic resources we can't produce enough Surplus wealth to do things we more or less figured out how to do that in the process of doing that generated these other problems to give another example information most of humanity has lived under this shadow of not understanding how the world Works having very little knowledge either about the natural and physical world or about their neighbors uh or about any number of topics that affect their life right so information was scarce uh Not only was the knowledge not known but it those few people who held it guarded it tight and literacy was low and if you were someone who happened to be literate and you could get access to information about the world you usually got it through some Legacy institution um that was controlling it for its own purposes what we have now is on a device that we all own we can get all the information in the world instantaneously at almost no cost right and if you had told people 100 years ago that that would be the case they would have said we'd ended up in Utopia but now we understand this explosion of information this explosion this unbelievable unmanageable amount of information has generated a whole new set of issues that we never imagined and so the argument is that the institutions or the concepts the policies that were used to tame scarcity quite successfully generated these problems in plenty and not only that there the these institu this institutional framework is not particularly good at helping to deal with these new problems see and and that I find that very interesting to consider right that once you've solved these problems but if you've spent all your time or if the institutions have all been built around solving those problems would you even recognize it if you had solved them or will would and and and there's there's two ways I want to go with this but one thing that comes immediately to mind is when we talk about problems of Plenty that plenty is not the same thing as let's say as uh plenty is not the same thing as Justice it's not the same thing as equality right and so it's like we have all this stuff but now it's a question of how are we supposed to how are we supposed to share it or can we share it um within States between states um and how I guess the the the the big question is is that I would imagine that even the the intellectual Frameworks dealing with scarcity talked about just distributions but they always imagine just distributions was everybody has to have less right um but how do we imagine U dealing with the problems of Plenty um and also being aware that that you know it's not that we're we're going to run out of because well let me rephrase this one more time sorry I've been thinking about this too much because you know we you know I noticed that you know you could talk about how we have plenty when we talk about fuel but still many discussions about energy always end up with somebody talking about scarcity and how we're running out right um and similar with food as people will say we've had we've made this great success with food but if you get in any conversation somebody will well there's always the the Doom element of you know well you know but you know maybe we don't have enough food or we will there will be some kind of collapse and so where does dealing with scarcity required us to have a degree of optimism that we could solve the problems of scarcity plenty in a weird way tends to this this era of Plenty seems to create a kind of pessimism that there are problems that are just that we can't solve them at all so how should we how should we approach that that's a great Point there's a whole bunch of really interesting stuff there in what you said one um obviously inequality has always existed but when you generate unimaginable abundance distributional disputes are going to intensify both between and within States yeah and this is why a lot of people when they take a first cut at this they believe that this is kind of a panglossian or Steven Pinker type analysis and it's not at all um relative gains as we know in international politics are as likely to drive conflict as um as not in fact that's the whole ball game and we we understand through social psychology that we can have everything we want but if someone has more we get angry about it so distri Distributing these gains are absolutely fundamental the second thing I would say is that there is clearly still scarcity around the world and scarcity can return the difference is that we have say 150 years ago or even 100 years ago we imagined there were physical natural limits in our ability to escape scarcity that the idea that you would increase agricultural productivity in the 19th century six times and then in the first 20th Cent Decades of the 20th century another six times basically our ability to produce food produce fuel to make it more efficient um the natural limits that we once believed were there are gone that that and and as part of the argument is that those natural limits were very much connected to population they're totally disaggregated disconnected now that does not mean that there are occasionally going to be scarcities but those scarcities are often reflection of politics they're often a reflection of not the natural limits there's literally no reason why we can't have food and fuel for everyone in the world to the there's no natural limit whereas and that brings to your point about the kind of Gloom one of the things I worry about uh there one of the things that I talk about in the book is that just as it is bad to assume unending progress and solving problems which as you correctly point out was a a feature of the sort of age of scarcity as we're correcting these things Gloom and anticipating everything's being terrible also leads to bad policies right I think if you we're actually on the cusp of another technological Revolution where food and fuel efficiency over the next 20 years is just going to increase dramatically right there I have literally no doubt our ability to produce more and more food is actually just going to increase maybe not at a Moors law type of way but it's not something I worry about but our mindset is such that well through most of humanity anytime we had those increases that was threatened by population increases malthusian curse some other threat so the the inability to update that assumption can generate bad policy prescriptions um and that is not to say producing tons and tons overabundance of food doesn't generate its own problem the climate problems problems with obesity whatever distributional conflicts but it's just to say by get by understanding the underlining underlying tectonic forces you want to orient your policy and institutional solution to that new reality not try to fight yesterday's battle which is actually going to make things worse well and and this gets to the the one of the really interesting intellectual aspects of the argument that you're making here is you deal with the problem of was it anamensis and issues of how well we adapt to our new realities or how and how hard it is to shake off what we brought in you you make several you make several very good references to that classic essay uh lecture by James Joel from 1968 right so uh you know kids ask your parents um about how in in uh in 1914 and in general right that Statesmen political leader when they have to make decisions they they're carrying around sort of a bunch of readymade ideas that are probably the product of their understanding of the past and they will apply them to the present even if it means sort of jamming them into place to apply them they might not see what's going on around them how do we how do we address that problem with uh in both with ourselves but also in creating Future Leaders yeah no so that's a great question I mean I I did a little version of this book for foreign policy and the the the image I use because people are unconvinced by this you you especially town like Washington but I'm sure you encounter it when you talk to people people just assume the world's falling apart everything's terrible you know we're in this set of Crisis and I use this sort of example of saying an alien is sent down to Earth every 50 years to write a report on the state of the planet and the alien she's getting ready to come down on 2024 and she reviews her past reports she looks at the one in 1974 and she looks at the two most populous countries in the world China and India are basically subsistence level economies the largest populace one is led by an complete deranged leader right mous dong the United States appears to be in Decline there's all sorts of issues of uh the world doesn't appear to be going in a good place then she looks at the report from 1924 and says wow 1974 seems pretty good they're between two world course you know violence is a normal thing um you know racism intolerance uh uh you know misogyny between two world wars then she goes back 50 years earlier and she sees life expectancy is 30 years in the planet literacy is you know sort of you know incredibly low and this is not to buy into a wig version of History right because part of my story is that we're generating new problems but you can't argue to me that International relations does not change fundamentally if life expectancy doubles and the malthusian curse is permanently broken right so that doesn't mean things are going to be good but it means it's going to be different and so I mean it is challenging to get this argument through because I have I have launched this in three different places and each place I've gone uh I've tried to chose PE interlocutors unlike in this case people who I know violently disagree with the argument so you know I my good friend and colleague Hal BRS do the last one he's Mr geopolitics at Colin K who was the under Secretary of State for policy who you know sees China as a luming threat and then when I was in London I had John bu who did the integrated review um you know and and some other people involved in this and basically what I'll get is no one will deny that the set of circumstances are different but what they'll one of the problems is that I've come to realize since I've writing it is there's political time and historical time you and I are historians we see things in longer time frames if you're making policy over the short Hall you'll say well these are longer Horizon problems but I've got a real I've got to deal with China right now I've got to deal with Gaza right now you know I know climate's a problem but I gotta lower Global oil prices $20 a baratt barrel I won't get uh reelected um and so and again this is part of our institutions we don't have institutions that are and the nature of these problems are they're longer term they tend to be nonlinear they problems with the commons so Distributing political responsibility right you know you you it's very hard to monitor climate change or Global Public Health in a world of Sovereign Nation States Because unless everyone agrees to do everything the same whatever you do isn't going to matter it's why having a Global Travel ban in the middle of a pandemic is so dumb right it's just not going to work right so but that's what a nation state would naturally do and so we're in this very difficult spot and I don't know what the solution is because one this this this way of doing things um was so successful you can understand why you wouldn't get rid of it right one of the other critiques you know one of the smarter critiques you know my colleague Hal BR makes is well how much of solving scarcity was due to a liberal International order that the US built and constructed and do you really want to unravel that for this other thing that's uncertain right so I mean it's a very very difficult situation I would say one final thing I my experience is there's a generational thing here anyone under the age of 35 loves what I wrote and gets it immediately anyone over the age of 35 the closer you get even people and it's not a left right thing people under the age of 35 are don't have a lot of sympathy for legacy institutions or Legacy insights because they see those legacies have produced 20 odd some years of bad outcomes that don't meet the challenges and problems that they see and they believe are most um pressing so it's I'm not sure what the thing to do but I will say there is a generational difference in how these arguments are are received that's an interesting point the the generational question right if people remember when things were worse what is that does that does that anchor them like if if you ironically yeah you would think you would say oh I've seen progress but my older friends you know I say them I'll say well is life better now or in 1974 they'll say well it's better 197 I'm like that's cuz you were 22 having fun right I mean like first life was life better for the United States in 197 war of course not we're in the middle of in the Vietnam War water grade crime cities were burning the US appeared to be in Decline um the world seemed uncertain of course like there are bad things now but comparatively but young people um you know for them their concern is there's no obvious institutional or even intellectual response to what they see as these pressing challenges having big debates about realism versus Li liberal internationalism doesn't kind of begin to have a cut at these problems yeah well and and that's that's uh this whole question about you know if we're gonna argue about we're arguing about how we're supposed to argue right we're arguing about the terms of our argument or the terms of our analysis and that there is an intellectual value in that but we have to move on to these other things as well which is a is a good moment for me to remind the audience that you are of course all invited to be part of this conversation please use the Q&A feature of zoom in order to uh add a question to the conversation um so the the the more questions you come up with the less you have to listen to me um ask Frank things but I'm gonna ask Frank another question that is you mentioned you use this the um the um extraterrestrial visitor option and it reminds me of my favorite extraterrestrial thought experiment and this was Ronald Reagan had a habit when meeting with Mel gorbachov in addition to saying you know trust but verify is he said to him on more than one occasion if the Earth was ever menaced by an extraterrestrial Force we would all come together against it and that's why we need to understand that whatever political differences we have would be less significant in the face of some kind of planet threatening uh threat and I'm I'm you know Reagan was clearly convinced by this gorbachov a little less so but when I look at say the covid example right we were threatened by a planet threatening Alien Force that we didn't understand that we couldn't reason with and we didn't really come together as we as as we should have right and I guess I'm trying to think so is that and because this was as you say right this is exactly the kind of problems of plent is with with with all the possibility of travel with all the possibility of movement this was not something that individual states could just pull up the drawbridge and protect themselves from and so we were faced with a new problem and we couldn't really get out of our own way to solve it um so I want to I want to ask your opinion on that and related to that is is you know we can talk about how the circumstances of life on earth have changed but we as human beings right we haven't changed right you we're the problem right we're we're terrible right we're shortsighted right we're selfish even when things are getting better we don't see it because maybe we don't want to right so and and so that I think is one of those interesting change in continuity problems right is the circumstances of Life are very different but we're as terrible as we've ever been um this we at the war College we talk a lot about the nature and character of War right the character changes but the nature stays the same so we have this the nature and character of human society the character changes but that but do we change and that's my big problem with Pinker is I don't believe that we've gotten any better as people even if I think life even though I agree with you that like life is better and different and so so how do we then resolve first of all right this this the co example is you know how we dealt with the problems of of of but also how do we deal with the issues of both both as a practical matter but also even as an intellectual matter how do we deal with the issue of human nature and that maybe we're just the problem so these are great questions on the first which has troubled me I talked to some actually this this terrific historian who was a very interesting book that deals with some of these things coming out Neil's Gilman about this recently and his point was that the covid crisis was almost designed to expose Rifts in a way that others wouldn't it it's it's it lethality was high but not super high right if you had had The lethality was you know five out of 100 and unlike say the 1919 flu which you know hit children this one hit older populations um and his argument is that uh because I think we know that another one will appear at some point and The ard's lethality could be be higher his argument was that it was particularly um designed to highlight uh some of these challenges I I don't know if that's right or not um but it gets to this great question of which I don't have a full answer for is what is the governance solution to this right because part of my argument is that the modern nation state and a lot of our governing institutions all the way around down to local governance are reaction to problems of scarcity they resolve them they do a really good job you know if you live in Philadelphia you don't have to worry about getting yellow fever or the city burning down or you know very flooding various other things only if we win the Super Bowl Frank right only if we wi the Super Bowl exactly but um but so short of some cataclysm that forces a complete rethinking of governance which isn't very practical world government is not very practical how do you get around this and I I talk about this a bit in the book um and it's a sort of obvious G2 answer where you can have two terrible ad adversaries that can recognize that they don't agree in seeing the world in the same way but there are certain shared um issues that they can deal with and we do have a historical example uh in the 1960s and I'm one of these people who believes one of the problems I have with the Cold War analogy for today is that you know Ron that the the Cold War was serious right I mean it was the threat of thermonuclear war which would have killed tens if not hundreds of millions of dollar people and might have destroyed whole societies and which was a real threat right and you had an ideological and geopolitical competition and difference that was Far sharper than anything China and the us is going through today and and this is not to diminish the level of of conflict but is you know we forget how bad the Cold War was so really right in the midst of it at the height of it the Soviets and the Americans cooperate on two planetary issues one is nuclear weapons so the nuclear nonproliferation treaty if you had told someone in 1960 that sitting here in 2024 that we would be in a world where the number of nuclear weapon states were in the single digits where nuclear weapons had not been used that their salience in international politics while still there and unfortunately bumping up a little bit lately was Far lower than it was in 1960 and that there were far fewer nuclear weapons in the world somebody would have said what are you smoking can I get some right and a lot of that was the Soviet Union and the United States agreeing in a kind of condominium to sort of screw over their friends and to to work together um to limit the spread of nuclear weapons right and the nuclear nonproliferation treaty it's imperfect it's inherently unfair but it has succeeded well beyond what anyone would have thought possible and the second example which is less well known but has been detailed by our brilliant historian ARIS manella at Harvard the small pox eradication right in 1965 2 million people died of small poox in 1975 zero died of smallpox and the reason is is because through the World Health Organization the the United States and the Soviet Union cooperated to eliminate it and so at the peak of ideological and geopolitical dysfunction and rivalry somehow these two systems which hated each other got together to deal with the aliens problem nuclear weapon which was a planetary threat and small poox which had killed twice as many people up till 1965 as all the wars combined right yeah so we do have a model now it's not looking very promising right now and for my friends who who are suspicious of this I say to myself I asked them let's say the the United States through artificial intelligence and medical technology figured out a cured to cancer Would we not solve say share that with China and let's say at the same time China had figured out a a carbon capture program that was safe that have help climate change but they not share it with us I don't know right because one of that was so disturbing to me about the pandemic is global public health is the lwh hanging fruit of international cooperation and the fact and you nothing that happened was a surprise you know csis had run an exercise in the fall that shown exactly was we knew what to do um was was distressing um there are some hints you know this uh artificial intelligence International um sort of I don't know what it is Consortium conference that started in London in the late fall and has been working at sort of AI risks private sector's been involved China and the US has been involved there has been some cooperation uh but that gets to ultimately you know this there's these problems involve a G2 sort of on technology on public health um not super super optimistic but it's one of the reasons why I want to get away from this kind of simplistic Cold War view which these people don't even understand what the that this happened during the Cold War no I mean I this is something I've been beating the drum on a lot in conversations and in a bunch of lectures uh that I've given lately various places the people fall back on the idea of the Cold War because they think that it provides a kind of Simplicity and yet they and yet by doing that they forget just how complicated and how and how nuan the whole the whole thing was related to this right one we have a question com In from from Alina telia noova who uh asks um we're often hearing about the challenges of both past and present and the failures to launch effective responses and you just mentioned two positive responses um but in the age of new challenge the problem with plenty can you provide any examples of political Society actually doing good and I think this is where we could talk about pepar yeah so pepar is a great example we all I mean I funny I I was talking to some friends about this um it's it was just reading the Steve Co book on Saddam Hussein um just come out which I think is called the Achilles trap and it's you know Steve Call's a brilliant writer it's a brilliant book and um you know the foreign policies and Grant strategy of the George W Bush Administration I think at most generously can be described as as troubled right and I but one of the things that people often forget is in the same speech where the axis of Evil was identified uh President Bush very much out of personal interest talks about pep far right and about the idea of providing uh antiviral drugs to retroviral drugs to anyone in Africa who needs them to eliminate AIDS and which has been estimated to have saved tens of millions of lives right and so um and there's lots of examples of this from ranging from the eliminating the cc fly to doing all sorts of different things that chlorofluorocarbons actually comes to mind as well right right no absolutely so there are models there um and a lot of this involves the need in our world to do historical and international relation studies on what kind of organizations what kind of processes what kind of practices and the CL you know the Montreal Convention like how did that work out so well you know where's the re you know I let's do the really I would rather another IR book I would rather instead of another IR book on the July crisis I would like a book on how why Montreal was successful and worked whereas Kyoto and Paris have failed right you know um what is it about small pox eradication that can give us lessons today what is it about um you know to think of those successes right uh because and this relates to another issue that worries me greatly institutions we're in a period where Legacy institutions have declining legitimacy the reason they have declining legitimacy is because they don't meet these problems right and they don't get credit for you know I always say the postor War II institutions were created to do basically three things avoid great depressions um avoid World War III and handle the massive problem of decolonization in new nation states great on the first two mixed record on the third but not bad when you think about it right um and you think about local governance right you know everyone for the most part gets you know can drive safely on streets gets access to public education their neighborhoods don't burn down typhoid usually doesn't break out you don't we've done miraculously well at these problems you don't get any credit for that nor does anyone think about that no one thinks when their Amazon packages a day late they don't say like what a miracle of modern science technology and liberal capitalism they're like where the hell is my Amazon package just shows you that like the world doesn't work and that's that's my that's my lug lost luggage at the airport right it's a f it's it's it's a wonder anybody gets their their suit suitcases anytime no and and so so one of the challenges we have is now whole new set of problems and our institutions fail at those so people say governance doesn't work and instead you say well governments works so well that it solved these problems but it's not for per for purpose for these new set of problems so what do you do it's very hard that's why identifying and making it clear what the characteristics and qualities of these new problems are so when you design policy and institutional solutions to them they reflect um the nature of those problems and if you're up solving them then you end up developing political legitimacy but if you ignore the problems or use old Scale Models you know when everyone's going on about Biden as the the New Deal pres the New Deal like that's the last thing we need right like what we need is is something that reflects whatever the nature of the and you can think of these are domestic problems too right retinol crisis right the opioid crisis which is the most important domestic crisis we face and the government has failed utterly because of it because the nature of the problem is such that the way we dealt with older problems doesn't fit fixing these problems and therefore governing it government institutions lose credibility and people lose face in government then you have polarization and all the things that follow well and this this actually gets to an interesting Paradox in your work here and what we've talked about here but also in uh in your in your broader work is you've done a lot of writing lately about the application of History to our understanding of international relations and I know you've got another book coming out um on the subject thinking historically which uh we we'll probably try to bring you back to talk about that one too when it comes out but but uh but the interesting tension and I think about this as as historians who who try to relate history to policy questions is we've just been talking about how hard it is to to De anchor people from their past experience and yet we also recognize that being able to make useful comparisons and useful understandings using our understanding of the past is essential to making good policy so how do we get people to sort of appreciate the value of History while also recognizing that this doesn't mean that we have to rush to say aha this is just like the cold war or aha we need a new deal or my my big favorite is the 3m's right everybody says we need a a moonshot a Marshall Plan um oh my gosh I'm gonna lose my I'm my Rick Perry moment it's everything's either a moonshot a a a Marshall plan or a third M that I can't come to which might occur to me later on but but that that everybody but that's we need to have like we're instead of just having a a useful understanding of the past that helps to be humble about what we need to do with the future we're sort of rumaging through the past to find that one thing that's supposed to explain what we're going to do next so this is a great point and it's it's again it's for the thinking historically book but one of the things a historical sensibility tells you is that the present is not always like the past one of the key and the future will be different and so one of the things you want to ask yourself is you know I make you people say what about Russia Ukraine and I say in 1900 controlling the donbass and having its wheat and its coal and its suppliant population in a world where formal colonialism and Wars of Conquest were normal and there were no International institutions and nobody cared what Russia did that added to your power in 2024 when coal and wheat do not add to your power it's not a supplicant population it's the exact opposite land is not a source of power and uh you're going to piss piss off the whole world that even if everything had gone beyond your wildest imagination and you had captured Ukraine you wouldn't be any stronger than you were before you wouldn't have added anything to your strength because 2024 is not 1900 right that doesn't mean you everything is reinvented as you know one of the things that a historical sensibility develops in you is trying to figure out what is new and what is similar when we talk about analogies from the past one of the things we often focus on is we say oh well this thing that we're talking about presently isn't like what happened in the past but what you brought up in your brilliant description of the Cold War is do we actually understand what that past was do we actually understand what happened in July 1914 do we actually know how complex the Cold War was we have this simple-minded view in our head of what actually happened and one of the things historians do is say you know what um that cold war that you think you're comparing it to not only is it not similar but you don't actually understand what happened in the past and a historical sensibility should sensitize you not perfectly no one's ever going to know what the new thing is but you you know if life expectancy doubles and and most people on the planet are literate and if information is available to everyone on on a device they can hold in their hand uninter mediated by Legacy institutions the question you ask yourself is if you told someone that 100 years ago would they say things had changed they say absolutely they had changed now the to your question about human nature maybe human nature doesn't change but certainly the circumstances people find themselves to change profoundly and it's a balancing act right you're not Reinventing the wheel there are some models and some examples we can use from the past like huh you know the Gutenberg Press comes out we have 150 years of religious War maybe that kind of tells me something about the internet age maybe it doesn't but they can be suggestive they're not transferred Whole Hog they're like okay it allows me to test my assumptions it allows me to ask about because what we're doing as historians though we are very we're not very good at it explicitly we're asking where is the action at where is the causality where is the agency why do things change and what is changing them right and historians have all social sciences all Sciences all knowledge does this but historians have this kind of supple ability to say well some things are different than they were in the past some uh are the same but it's all oriented towards asking why are things the way they are and if I want to change them I better ask what is the causal mechanism changing things and who or what is changing it so I can intervene and change it right and that's why updating our assumptions about how the world works is so important and why you know if we're focused on N problems from 1900 and ignoring the problems of 2024 um we could wake up one day and go outside it's 178 degrees and say huh you know maybe all that time I spent rereading Mahan mackinder wasn't the best use of my time right it's got some benefits but you know given that the seas are boiling and the land is uninhabitable worrying about sea power land power might not have been the thing I should have like been obsessing about so could be this is this heretical thoughts here at fpr but I would but I will allow it I will allow it for this conversation right it's all right but but I get the point and well and um we have a couple good questions came in and I want to try to fold them together a little bit I mean one is from B Ben petuk asks this question question about human nature in a different way and that is what if scarcity is sort of hardwired into us um and this is this is one of those you know there's the the popularity of sort of you know large scale historical analysis is this all they try to figure you what is what is essential about us I mean is it just that we can't recognize Plenty when we see it yeah because we're just we're just born to it's like it's because it's a similar argument people make is one of the reasons for the Obesity problem that I see in the mirror every day is that you know that we are physically we are uh we we are attracted to eating the sorts of things that are putting on pounds for us to deal with work that actually we're not doing anymore but we're still sort of we're we're we're we're putting on pounds for against future famines so we' we've soled the famines but we're still P pack I think you look great so I I don't know what you're talking about but thank you Frank that's why thank you I appreciate that thanks everybody so I it's it's it's well beyond my expertise to talk about you know the essential aspects of human nature but what I will say is we do know that prospect theory our fears of losses Drive our Behavior more than our fears our hopes for gains right so there is a sort of a worst case scenario planning aspect that that's boiled into us but I would offer this sort of corrective or not corrective this one thing to think about that that alien who was visiting Earth in 1974 or 1924 frankly within my lifetime if you had been walking down the street and saw someone kicking a dog nobody would have done anything frankly if you saw somebody slapping their kid in 1974 nobody would have done anything right or there's this great scene uh in Madmen where they're all going out in a picnic somewhere and then just leave their garbage everywhere right like right and and over time behaviors can change um now what is the source of that so I am of the view that the notion of Tolerance uh the idea that we don't look at other human beings as necessarily the other is something that over time has increasingly become part of the way we understand in the world right now we see all the violations of it and we get very upset about it understandably so but the notion that there are essentialist categories that Define human beings being race gender sexual orientation eth ethn ethnicity any of those sort of things religion which honor years ago well of course if you're a different color than me or a different religion than me you're different than me and I should kill you like nobody questions this right of course you're a woman and you're inferior man of course we're going to like measure your skull and you know figure out like the and we now know that those are bad things and wrong things to believe and we have changed now so to a certain extent I don't care about the human nature question as much as I care about the actual results the actual results is that we have not in a linear Direction and not always in a constant Direction but move towards the notion that there are certain ways of thinking about fellow fellow human beings that are not acceptable and now could this be tested in a World War III could this be tested in a dystopian hellscape the problems of Plenty might bring absolutely because I do believe that that these these Norms are something that develop over time and our en courage and just and you know there is an I dipped in this a little bit but there's an enormous debate in anthropology as you know about the essential nature of when humans organized societies are they going to be you are they going to reflect these good sides of these bad sides of human well and it's interesting because Greg Bloomquist has a question related to this of uh the notion of thinking in hunting tonian terms here the notion of different civilizations right is is you know uh does do civilizational differences make a difference and does that also shape the way that different people Liv in different places with different backgrounds will'll either view the nature of Plenty the nature of scarcity or how to deal with it so another great question and I was just talking um I was having a discussion with my class when we were dealing with the big three the fukiyama Mir Sher and hunington right and um all of whom I think had important insights my generous interpretation of Huntington is to say that um question of culture and identity matter enormously to human beings questions of belonging meaning and purpose um I think the civilizational model is kind of nonsensical and doesn't make a whole lot of sense but I do think what and they're not static and you know that and I also think the difference is I always tell these this to my you know Chinese students in my class you're more like me than you are like people living in the Chinese Countryside or I am like some of the people I see at an Eagles game right it's the difference is there are a lot of cross cutting but what I think Huntington got right is that human beings are not solely utility maximizers right so the fukiyama S thing and this is why solving scarcity still leaves us unhappy we want to have a sense of meaning and belonging and connection and we're in a very confused State about that now because one of the problems of Plenty is that you can your identity out a card you can make your identity through online connections it doesn't have to be a physical reality you know back in the day you lived in the village and you know you saw people and you understood what you did and roles were defined and part of it might have sucked right if you were if you were gay or you wanted to leave the village or you didn't like the village but there was a level of of of of certainty and explanation that was blown up in good ways at allows us to sort of Express her individuality but also leaves people often at a loss confused disconnected the kind of derim and enemy you know the sort of and and I think that um what Sam got was that human beings they they you know it's like his political order and change they they crave a certain level of order and they're willing to pay a higher price then perhaps we in our American mindset are often willing to acknowledge right yeah people they they they they want to feel like they belong to something I I realize that every time I'm at an Eagles game rooy I hav't lived in Philadelphia for 30 years I don't know who these people are I get like semi violent scream at the top of my lungs I'm like what is this it's my sense of belonging This Is My Tribe these are my people there's no utility Maxim there that matters still enormously and is not covered either in the Mir shimer Balan power model or in the fukiyama utility maximization model that's that's a really good way to put it right to that's part of the the overall complexity which which actually feeds into this nice question from Charles Buran about you know if we try to understand scarcity in abundance right are there cycles that we can identify in history um or and also what could technology do because we talk about technology especially AI right what can technology do to help us to think in these longer terms would it be helpful for us to be able to think in longer terms to get a sense of of are you are we looking at a cyclical element here or if I understand your argument right what you're arguing is we they used to be cyclical in the sense that you literally had cycles of living and dying but that we've actually overcome a lot of those malthusian Cycles right but are there cycles of scarcity and abundance that we can can imagine understanding and using that understanding to shape policy so on the first one the argument is that we shattered that so typically um there were physical obvious limits on what kind of population you could have and as your population started to increase you either needed to produce more economically or you needed to acquire more land and more colonies and therefore the states and Empire pirates that were able to acquire that and have a supplicant population where those that sort of succeeded were broken that cycle um there's no longer a sort of a need um to worry about that um and so I do think there is one of the things I do worry about that is if we through a scarcity mindset do involve ourselves in some kind of World War III type of situation where or the problems of Plenty generate the kind of Crisis and our reaction is one of scarcity you could see you know obvious failures of systems that generate um sort of collapse although I will say one of the things that I think that again we never take the W I think if there had been something similar to covid-19 15 years earlier you would have probably had a lot more starvation right but the access to the internet and the incredible uh unbelievable sophistication of our supply chain networks were such that you were able to shift things around in an extraordinary fashion that you know fiser as a hero but FedEx and Amazon are here in ways that we don't fully kind of understand and that's there's technology behind too and information behind that um the information the technological thing is I mean we are on the cusp I think over the next 20 30 years where a variety of technological innovations will transform the energy situation uh will transform food transer health I mean the kind of stuff that's going to be happening on the the health sector in terms of it won't help us but I think our kids you know they're going to have to get used to living to be 120 125 terms of you know cancer dedu um um cancer cancer identification and developing tailor therapies just extraordinary stuff right um all of which to the alien would seem good I'm not necessarily convinced it's going to make anyone happier for the same reasons that I I mentioned one techn technological thing that I've been thinking about that I'd love to get your thoughts on as historians we both know that you usually don't get a change to underlying unspoken assumptions institutions and practices until you have a catastrophe right you need a World War I you need a Napoleonic Wars you need a World War II you need a horrible sort of situation um the Cuban Missile crisis was a slightly one where we came close and it was enough to shock the system covid-19 was not I had this idea that if you could give everyone a headset an AI headset and play out what various catastrophes would look like various scenarios of say a climate crisis next public health getting us China wrong and people could see it and actually say all right I'd really like to avoid that what are the policies I could pursue because as we all know if it's Jun 1914 you're like everything seems sort of fine you know if you're like if you're a lord living in the countryside of France in summer of 1788 this is great life's amazing you have no you you're not running the scenarios that you're going to lose your head in a couple years um and so I do sometimes wonder if there was a way of using history and but also these kind of new technologies to help people say all right what what would and again you have it's problematic you to assign probabilities with your guess work but let's run a bunch of different scenarios using AI using the past to look at what different plausible Futures would look like look at the bad ones under the precautionary principle say like well how do we avoid that and should we invest a little bit in institutions policies and practices to make sure those terrible things don't happen but I don't know that's just kind of I I I like that I like that thought Frank and and you know when I when I speaking broadly right the thing about studying history is it's a little bit like I like watching horror movies and history is a little bit like watching a horror movie right you know you're watching the movie you're say Don't run up the stairs he's waiting for you right because you know what's happening the characters don't right and and that can put you in a position where you assume that you're smarter than people are in the past when what we really have to get down you know get through our heads is that people in the past were making decisions they didn't know it was going to happen tomorrow and we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow absolutely right so Louis the 14th writes in his journal on July 14th 17 9 nothing because but that's only because the only thing he kept track of in his journal was how what he bagged at hunting that day and so but it's it's this great notice right is this king the kings in versailes saying up nothing special happened today meanwhile they're storming the best deal in Paris because how's he supposed to know right he's all the way in Versa which is now you can get there in half an hour on the re but once upon a time it was a really difficult thing to do right but this I do think that trying to come up with examples of people on the verge of big events not understanding what was about to happen that can have a you know that can have a a salutary effect and I'm I'm I'm thinking about this idea about creating AI uh scenarios for people to imagine what's going to happen I mean there's so many things we could talk about like in your book you talk about the problem of Taiwan and like if anybody stops for five minutes to think about how awful a fight for Taiwan would be and how counterproductive it would be for everybody there's no way a sensible person would want to do that and so what we spend our time worrying about is well what happens if somebody's not sensible right no and that's a great example and I mean I I I wrestle with in the book as you know Taiwan quite a bit because I believe Taiwan is an incredibly admirable country um I think that it's done all the right things um I do think the US has to stand for something I don't like bullying on the other hand I recognize that China really sees this as their own it sees as their Florida this is a terrible problem one of the greatest policies of the last 50 years was to basically keep kicking it down the road which is what we did um I would love to return to that um it was China you know I'm clear about this that decided not to um but it's it's it's a vexing really difficult problem on the other hand um when people talk about you know they this involves different parts of the you know things that I write about they say well we be have to be able to defund Taiwan and I'd say to my American friends well what happens the first nine times China loses you think there's not going to be a 10th time and what I say to my Chinese friends it's like when have you ever noticed the US when they've been involved in a war to just say okay we're done right like and and we're going to sort of look neither side has a a proper appreciation for the fact that this would be terrible for both of them and by the way is a distraction from the problems I mean if you look at we're not entirely sure what the death tolls in China were from when they finally let things loose with covid but they're bad they're really bad and there's the problems of Plenty are going to hit the United States and China as bad if not worse than others and so they have an interest to wrap their heads around these problems and to find some kind of way to work together to help to resolve right and I you know what Frank I was thinking you know we we could go on and on we have spoken for an entire hour uh it's been a real pleasure uh listening to you talk about this book um and uh you know I do hope we'll get you on again sometime soon but for now for our for our listeners are uh please check out the problems of The Taming of scarcity and the problems of Plenty or check out any of the works by Frank Gavin which are available in bookstores through that technological miracle that is amazon.com by all means go check them out um Frank Evan thanks so much for joining us today to talk about your work here on people politics and Pros thank you Ron it was a real pleasure and it was just great to be here with you it was great and fpr thanks all of you for joining us we also thank our sponsors and partners for their generous support and we ask you if you have enjoyed this conversation to please tell a friend bring a friend next time consider becoming one of the sponsors and partners of fpr so because today's conversation is just the beginning the world goes on and we're always here to talk about it at fpr if you've enjoyed the conversation consider joining us again when We Gather to analyze our complex world to keep up with future episodes of people politics and pros and other events at fpr visit our website f.org like us on Facebook follow us on Twitter you can follow the host of this program on Twitter X Ronald grener and special uh thanks in advance to anybody who can go on X and tell me what that third M I was thinking of to go with the moonshot and the Marshall Plan um I will figure out a a an appropriate token uh to give whoever can help me remember that but that's all we have for today until next time for all of us at fpr for Frank gin thanks so much for joining us I'm Ron grener we'll see you next time

Channel: Foreign Policy Research Institute

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Id: jnfQCF2kegk

Length: 62min 40sec (3760 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024