145 | Niall Ferguson on Histories, Networks, and Catastrophes

The world has gone through a tough time with the COVID-19 pandemic. Every catastrophic event is unique, but there are certain commonalities to how such crises play out in our modern interconnected world. Historian Niall Ferguson wrote a book from a couple of years ago, The Square and the Tower, that considered how an interplay between networks and hierarchies has shaped the history of the world. This analysis is directly relevant to how we deal with large-scale catastrophes, which is the subject of his new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. We talk about global culture as a complex system, and what it means for our ability to respond to crisis.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Niall Ferguson received his D.Phil. degree from the University of Oxford. He is currently the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of numerous books, several of which have been adapted into television documentaries, and has helped found several different companies. He won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money, and has previously been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

• Web site
• Hoover Institution web page
• Amazon author page
• Wikipedia
• Twitter

[accordion clicktoclose=”true”][accordion-item tag=”p” state=closed title=”Click to Show Episode Transcript”]Click above to close.

0:00:00.4 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And on the podcast, we’ve talked in various different ways about complexity, about complex systems, and there are few systems more complex than all of humanity, all of humankind. I’m not even sure how best to quantify the total amount of complexity in a system, like is humanity as a system more complex than an individual human brain? It’s not clear to me. I know that there’s lots of different brains in humanity, but the level of complexity need not be higher, but anyway, we agree that humanity as a whole is a complex system.

0:00:34.3 SC: So you can think about it using the tools of complexity theory, using the concepts like networks and interconnections and tiny pieces interacting non-linearly, but giving rise to emerging collective phenomena. So today’s guest is Niall Ferguson. Niall is a very well-known historian, both academically and in the public sphere. He thinks about big questions of global history, Western culture especially, but also the world more broadly, and what I didn’t know before inviting him on the podcast is he comes from a family of physicists and he tends to think about history in terms of networks and complexity theory.

0:01:12.4 SC: So a reason book by Niall is called The Square and the Tower, where he literally thinks about different parts of history that have been dominated by more or less equal kinds of networks between people versus hierarchical networks, and a follow-up book is called Doom. This is a very recent book that he wrote during the current and still ongoing global pandemic about COVID-19, all the ways in which a complex political system can try to deal with a crisis, a catastrophe. Something like the global pandemic is an example, but there are many other examples, from earthquakes to wars, famines and so forth, and it matters how you organize your society.

0:01:53.7 SC: And in many ways, as we’ve seen, there are ways in which current modern societies did okay fighting the global pandemic; certainly on the science side, the discovery of vaccines was a wonderful accomplishment of humankind and some complex system was needed for that, but on the political side, we did less well, we’re not as good in the political systems we have in dealing with big, large-scale catastrophes, the kind that only come along very rarely in human history. So how do you deal with that? What are the lessons that we can learn from this?

0:02:27.6 SC: Those of you who know the work of Niall Ferguson will know that he and I are not close to each other on the political spectrum, but even though there’s a lot of politics involved in this conversation, there’s no partisan politics involved, we’re both trying to understand the system that works and we all want it to work in the same way in the sense of saving people’s lives dealing well with these kinds of issues. So I think it’s a very fruitful conversation, one there really has a lot of important insights that we can put to work both thinking about the world as a system and thinking about how practically speaking, to deal with the future catastrophes that are inevitably to come.

0:03:03.0 SC: So with that, let’s go.

[music]

0:03:22.0 SC: Niall Ferguson, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:24.1 Niall Ferguson: It’s a pleasure to be, an honor to be with you, Sean.

0:03:26.8 SC: I always like it when the guest begins with that. We need to have a contest for the guests to be more and more effusive when they come on, so I’m glad that you’re playing along. And I also… I wanted to start by letting the audience know that you, as we were emailing, without me prompting, you mentioned that you come from a family of physicists, I think that your mother is a physics teacher. I just want them to know, because I’m always having these guests on who do something very different, but then they reveal that they were either an undergraduate physics major or they come from physicists or they’re married to a physicist. I don’t seek you people out, you just sort of naturally appear on the podcast. Does that color how you think about history, which is generally what you do.

0:04:06.6 NF: Undoubtedly. I’m the black sheep of the family. My mother studied Physics at Glasgow University, and she was a physics teacher, science teacher, and my father was a physician. And my sister is a physicist at Yale, who publishes papers, the titles of which I don’t understand, quite apart from the content. She works on the physics of cell membranes with her husband, Mark Lemon. And so I’m the black sheep because I ended up becoming an historian. I think part of my reason for doing that was a kind of fascination with particles that have consciousness, that essentially historians are studying these strange particles called humans, and reading Tolstoy as a school boy persuaded me that that was the path I wanted to go down.

0:05:09.7 NF: To give my parents credit, they never discouraged me from doing this, but there’s no question that the fact of coming from a scientific family had a big influence on my approach to history, and I think set me apart from most historians from fairly early on. For example, I was drawn towards economic history at Oxford because there was this potential for quantification that seemed to be lacking in other fields, and I’d been given a jolly good mathematical training at Glasgow Academy, I was better at math than my English contemporaries, so it was a comparative advantage to do that kind of work.

0:05:52.6 NF: But I owe my parents are huge debt because I grew up in a household where scientific questions were discussed over dinner, and the books on the shelves included books, popular histories and popular science books. And there was never a kind of two cultures divide in our family. It was… You went from discussing questions of evolutionary biology to talking about Shakespeare without the sense that one was somehow crossing a barrier.

0:06:23.2 SC: Well, it shows up in your book, The Square and the Tower, which is one of the books I want to talk about. One of our previous guests here on Mindscape was Steven Strogatz, who did the early work on small world networks, and there was his name right on page 30 or something like that in your book. So if I can summarize it in a phrase, you should correct me on this, but you’re looking in that book at history through the lens of networks, network theory, in particular networks versus hierarchies. Is that more or less right?

0:06:52.3 NF: That’s right. Historians often talk about networks, but they don’t really think terribly rigorously about what they mean. We all use the word rather casually in everyday life, I’m going to network at this party, etcetera. And I’d realized over a period of time that I actually could be much more precise in the way that I talked about networks, that I’d been writing about networks from early on in my career, networks of bankers in 1920s Germany, networks of colonizers in a book about the British empire, but I hadn’t really understood much about network structure, network science, network theory.

0:07:30.6 NF: And so I around about the time that I moved from Harvard to Stanford, I went on a kind of reading binge to educate myself, realizing that network theory had evolved in multiple disciplines, mathematics of course, was where it had really begun, but there were people working on networks in sociology, there were people working on networks in economics, there were people working on networks in medical science, and I got to know one of the pre-eminent physicists working on networks, László Barabási. And between conversations with him, readings of people like Steven Strogatz, getting to know Nicholas Christakis, I was a kind of autodidact network scientist.

0:08:19.9 NF: The point was to try and apply the insights from these different areas to history, and I didn’t think that had been done before, it really hadn’t. So the idea was to write a book in which human history was explained in terms of social networks primarily, but of course, there are all kinds of other networks that are relevant, and I found that a way to simplify the story for the lay reader, because clearly, most people who pick up a book like The Square and the Tower haven’t come across Strogatz’s work, might be coming across it for the first time.

0:08:56.6 NF: The idea was that there are hierarchies that are pretty well established and familiar social structures, governments, states, armies are very hierarchy configured, and they’re important in history and historians tend to gravitate towards them because hierarchical structures leave archives, they’re much more likely to leave written records. But equally important are networks, social networks, but they don’t leave such good written records, and therefore their role is less obvious and much less represented in the written record. Now, you know, because you’re a physicist, that that’s a false dichotomy, that we’re actually talking about two different kinds of network, a hierarchically structured network and a distributed or decentralized network.

0:09:43.4 NF: And the book kinda gets you there, but it starts with the intuitive distinction between hierarchies and networks, and goes from there. I loved writing that book. I found it extraordinary illuminating to rethink, for example, the Reformation as an assault on a hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church by a network of reforming ministers led by Luther, but not really led by him, perhaps he was the catalyst, but the network was not really one that he lead.

0:10:16.3 NF: So I think this is a really powerful tool for historians that needs to be more widely adopted. There are now historians who work on a whole range of subplots, from the Elizabethan Reformation all the way through to the Cambridge spies who use network science more rigorously. And I learnt a lot from those people who’d done that kind of work, so this was a work of synthesis, supposed to kind of show that there was a general approach that one could take and it was applicable pretty much to any historical problem.

0:10:53.7 SC: Yeah. I mean, I’m all too sympathetic to this perspective, you’re absolutely speaking my language and, therefore, let me try to play the devil’s advocate role a little bit here. There is an attitude that says, well, sure. People form networks, and hierarchies also count as networks, and everything is a network, so what? So what do we learn by throwing the word network in there, is there a particular kind of insight or is there a particular kind of quantitative way of thinking about it? I mean, how, given that there was a network of people talking to each other in the Reformation, how do we figure out what the degree of connectivity of a typical node was? That sounds very hard.

0:11:34.6 NF: It’s not quite so hard as you might think. You can graph networks, if you have enough information about the relationships between the people in them, the edges between the nodes. Even for the 16th century, this is possible, and there’s some terrific work that I cite showing that one reason the Reformation succeeded was that the network was sufficiently distributed that you couldn’t actually kill it by making martyrs of the apparent leaders, because the network would survive the removal of key nodes. With the American Revolution, we can actually work out which leaders or well-known figures in the American Revolution were in network terms the most important in terms of centrality, say between the centrality. Paul Revere turn out to be really important from that point of view, so it’s not just a kind of metaphor, which some reviewers thought, it’s actually a way of attaching weight to individual nodes.

0:12:41.1 SC: Yeah, so I mean, I guess the point could be said as sure, networks are everywhere and throwing around the word network doesn’t help us very much, but there are different kinds of networks, and there are kinds of things you can say about networks that apply equally well whether they’re viral or technological or social, and maybe that does actually shed some insight.

0:13:00.1 NF: I think it does. Part of it is, of course, to push against the great man theory of history, that we have for many centuries tended to write history with the emphasis on kings and queens and presidents, and the network approach allows you to show that often network structure, social network structure is different from the org chart. Sure, George Washington’s sort of at the top of the org chart of the American Revolution, but in terms of actually building a revolution, Paul Revere may have been as important.

0:13:37.1 NF: Revolutions after all are not by and large organized by existing hierarchical entities. So what’s interesting about the networked approach to revolution is that you begin to understand why some revolutions succeed and others fail. That’s part of it. I think it’s also about understanding the changing structure of the public sphere, broadly defined, or the changing structure of the global economy. Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Change in the Public Sphere was a tremendously influential work. I began to realize that it was a kind of intimation of this approach. What’s interesting about the Enlightenment, for example, which has been such a huge part of our lives, it’s the birth of the modern in many ways intellectually, is that it’s the product of a distinctive and quite cosmopolitan network of thinkers who communicate partly by publishing and partly by writing letters.

0:14:35.3 NF: And so you can graph that and understand the Enlightenment, which we all have a hazy notion of, as in fact a quite clearly defined network of individuals with a finite number of nodes and edges. I find that tremendously helpful. Much intellectual history is disembodied ideas kind of spread through some magical process, they become dominant through some paradigm shift, but the network science approach allows you to track this and give definition to intellectual change as well as political revolutions.

0:15:13.6 NF: We live in this world of unprecedented connectedness. The pandemic has illustrated the vulnerabilities of such a world, but I was inclined to argue in The Square and the Tower that there were other ways in which a hyper-connected world could be unstable. And the analogy that I wanted to draw was between the printing press and the experience of 16th and 17th century Europe and the internet in our contemporary world. Because it seems to me that the technological change made possible by the internet and the personal computer has had similar impacts, but on a global level, to the impacts of the printing press.

0:15:55.0 NF: Ultimately, hierarchical institutions don’t want information to be that free and they don’t want so many people to be able to generate and share content, so I think it’s a profoundly helpful analogy. A lot of people want to think about the 21st century with 20th century analogies, it’s the default setting for journalists, oh, X is, it’s the 1930s all over again, whatever it is. And part of the point of The Square and the Tower was to say no, because actually the mid-20th century was a time when communications technology allowed highly centralized control, that’s why totalitarianism was possible.

0:16:31.8 NF: We live in a time of decentralized distributed communication, though that has somewhat been offset by the rise of network platforms, but it’s still more, I think, like the 16th and 17th century than it is like the mid-20th century. So that was part of the argument of the book.

0:16:48.3 SC: Well, definitely the connection between distributed networks and revolutions was a very interesting one. Maybe we could bring it down to earth a little bit, if you want to say more about Paul Revere, it’s a provocative claim to say that Paul Revere played just as big a role in the American Revolution as George Washington did.

0:17:07.1 NF: There’s a lovely paper, and I’m blanking on the author’s name because it’s now been three years, I think, since I wrote the book, which shows and graphs quite carefully the network, the social network, of the American Revolution in and around Boston. The Revolution, like many revolutions, had its origins in association life, people don’t hatch plots to establish independent republics just over the dinner table with their wives and kids, this was something that took shape in a variety of different associations, of which the Masonic lodges turn out to have been the most important.

0:17:46.1 NF: And the argument of the paper is that if you look at all the key participants in the revolutionary movement in Boston, only a couple were members of just about every one of these associations, and one of the two was Paul Revere. Revere is famous for his nocturnal ride. I think it may still be the case that school children are taught about that, or perhaps it’s been canceled, I don’t recall where Paul Revere stands in the wokeness stakes, but at any event, people used to know about Paul Revere’s ride. The point about Paul Revere’s ride, which Malcolm Gladwell made years ago, is that Revere was a well enough known person for his warnings to be credible. If a perfect stranger had been riding to Concord or Lexington saying that the redcoats are coming, it might not have been nearly as forceful a warning.

0:18:39.3 NF: What Gladwell missed was the crucial role of the Masonic orders. Now, that’s interesting, because Freemasons have long occupied this somewhat shadowy part in the history of the 18th century. We know masonic lodges were very important, we know that they spread all over Europe and North America, but the people who used to write about them were often, if not conspiracy theorists, certainly writing a kind of history that leaned in the direction of the conspiracy theory. What I was able to show was that there really was a significant over-representation of masons in the leadership of the American Revolution, and that was important, not only organizationally, but also in terms of the ethos of the Revolution, the Washington as a Mason was also, it seems, at least plausibly, a deist, who was depicted in his masonic regalia more than once.

0:19:40.9 NF: So that’s the kind of thing that I think historians have generally downplayed, downplayed because it’s not a kind of official version of events. And I think you can write about that without drifting into the realm of conspiracy theory. I had a similar encounter years ago, 20 years ago, writing the history of the Rothschild family, who feature in any number of conspiracy theories, but when you look carefully into their archives, there was a tremendously powerful network of mostly Jewish financial families and institutions that was crucial to the evolution of 19th century financial capitalism. And so I’m excited by the possibility that one can bring these networks into the mainstream of historiography rather than leaving them with the internet conspiracy theorists.

0:20:34.2 SC: It does sound like these post-printing press networks that you’re saying played such a big role are a little bit in between the completely hierarchical top-down, Washington was the general, he told us what to do view versus maybe a more contemporary view where literally everyone is on Twitter jabbering with each other. So it’s a social network, but it’s a social network that is also still pretty elite in some sense, right, the right people talk to the right other people.

0:21:01.2 NF: Barabási taught me that the social networks that we encounter are typically scale-free or close to scale-free, by which I mean that there is a sort of parallel distribution that operates, and a very small number of nodes have an enormous number of edges and a lot of edges have hardly any nodes, so there’s not a kind of bell-curve shape to the distribution of nodes, and I think, of edges rather. And I think this idea, the Matthew effect, that when people join a social network, they’re more likely to want to be connected to, say, Donald Trump, or… Before he got canceled, that is, than to little old me.

0:21:49.5 NF: I think that’s a really important point, that when you come down to looking at social networks in the wild, as it were, in historical reality, they’re never lattices in which everybody has roughly the same number of edges, they’re always quite like Barabási’s, scale-free networks, if not exactly scale-free. So I think that’s a key point. We think of the internet as this decentralized place, or we used to, maybe we’ve got over it now, but we used to think we were all kind of netizens and we can all speak truth to power and all that stuff, but in truth, the network structure changed with tremendous speed as the network platforms, I guess beginning with Amazon, concentrated more and more traffic onto their sites, so the internet is actually a good illustration of the point that left to themselves, networks don’t in fact stay… I use the word flat advisedly here, they don’t stay truly distributed and they quite quickly form these these extraordinarily lopsided architectures where the fit get fitter or the rich get richer, whatever the appropriate term is.

0:23:00.8 SC: Yeah, I mean, everyone can be on Twitter, but not everyone has the same number of followers. That’s clearly true. Certainly not the same influence. So let me do my last little bit of pushing back here against this idea, because the main distinction you draw in the book is between networks, by which as you said, you mean more distributed networks versus hierarchies, and you make the point the hierarchies keep records so later historians tend to pay attention to them. But I could imagine an almost similar distinction that is not quite the same between institutions and more casual collections. Is the important thing about the state or the corporation or the university or whatever, that it’s a hierarchy, or is the important thing that it’s an institution with some memory, some records, some physical location in space?

0:23:51.1 NF: Certainly, the things that historians tend to write about are the things that, for reasons of their own, have left written records, and that tends to mean that states, governments, to some extent in the modern period, corporations, though they don’t keep record nearly as well as governments, it hasn’t meant secret societies. By definition, the Illuminati did not really want to have a single depository of material where the Bavarian authorities could find all that they had done that was illegal. Same goes for the Mafia, very hard to write the history of organized crime, they don’t really have a Mafia archive.

0:24:36.5 NF: And so I think you’re right, the distinction is partly how far a network became institutionalized enough to have an archive and a well-managed archive that was likely to survive over time. I put it somewhat differently. I think we need to somehow look past the facade of institutions and see that however hierarchical they may be, however pyramidial the org chart, all organizations of human beings, no matter how formal or informal, have a network architecture that we ought to be able to draw, and that network architecture will look very different from the org chart, regardless really of the context.

0:25:26.2 NF: So yeah, institutions are really what leave records behind; secret societies, not so much. But you can still understand an institution using network science, and I think that’s a very important point that not many institutions today fully understand. I’m always struck by how few firms and how few academic institutions know their own network. They have an org chart, but they believe in that orchard, and often blindly, without recognizing that in fact, the true social architecture of the institution is quite different from what the org chart says.

0:26:08.6 NF: So yeah, I think that’s how I’ve come think of it. I’ll give you one other example. It goes right back to my early work on the First World War. In a book called The Pity of War, I was trying to understand why, despite its significant material disadvantages, the German army out-performed in battle the other armies, in particular the British army. And one of the things I learnt from military historians was that although one thinks of Prussian militarism as quintessentially hierarchical, in reality that was the British army. It was in the British Army that you sat in the foxhole waiting for orders, even when it was unlikely that orders could reach you.

0:26:48.7 NF: The German army in fact had a culture of delegated authority to NCOs that encouraged small groups to take the initiative in the battlefield. So although I didn’t know anything about it at the time, I could have written that in terms of network structure, the German army was far more of a distributed network, and therefore, in fact, far more versatile and responsive to changing battlefield conditions. It was the British army that was actually held back by the waiting for orders mentality.

0:27:18.8 SC: The philosopher of science in me wants to draw a connection, which I’m sure that you’ve already made yourself, to theories of evolution and natural selection, where the unit of evolutionary selection is hotly debated, both among biologists and philosophers, is it the gene, is it the organism, is it a group or a family or something like that. And complexity theorists, Santa Fe-type folks have thought about this a lot. And is that the difference between the British and the Prussian armies, like what counts as a group of people making decisions?

0:27:52.8 NF: Yeah, that’s a good analogy that I hadn’t of. In writing The Square and the Tower, as well as in the most recent book, Doom, I have been quite influenced by Santa Fe writers, thinkers. I’ve certainly tried to theorize a lot as a historian about complexity in political structures as well as military structures, and I’ve been influenced by Geoffrey West’s work, for example, which is in scale, a brilliant attempt to think about everything, it’s kind of the key to all mythologies. If one were to try to apply, and it’s dangerous to do this, evolutionary frameworks to human history, first of all, somebody would say stop, that is no longer allowed, do not go there on pain of cancellation, but then you’d kind of step back and say, well, what is the right way to think about war.

0:29:01.6 NF: A hundred years ago, when social Darwinism was a dominant way of thinking, it was seen as some kind of quasi-Darwinian process, and I don’t think anybody thinks about it that way, that way now. I think we probably get further asking the question, which I think applies beyond the realm of war, what form of organization is best suited to a dangerous environment of uncertainty and potentially non-linear change, and I think that’s the right way to put this not so much in biological terms, but in terms of organizational behavior, and there’s no question that having a relatively decentralized architecture, and information flows that go up as well as down, an organization will adapt better to the unexpected shock.

0:30:09.3 SC: I’m not sure if this is a question or a statement that maybe you can comment on, but what you just said makes me think of the following thing, which I’ve puzzled about a little bit, evolution, famously, what it does is it doesn’t look ahead, it just tries all sorts of different things, and some things work and persist and some things don’t, but it’s not teleological, it’s not aiming in some direction. Whereas when we human beings design something, in principle, we can think of all the various things that can happen and try to protect against them, right, but you just mentioned the robustness or the ability to survive disasters of these different systems, and yet I think that evolution is much better than human beings at designing systems that are robust. When I break a leg, it will heal. When my car gets a flat, something has to intervene from the external world, you know, that somehow evolution has this power to plan ahead even though it doesn’t try.

0:31:06.0 NF: That’s right. We as human beings want to optimize, and we rule out multiple experiments that evolution would run ex ante, so we really narrow the range of possible mutations. Ad this is a point Nassim Taleb’s made very well in a number of books, I guess, Anti-fragile being the best, we don’t really like redundancy in our systems, so we optimize, we reduce the number of experiments that might otherwise happen, and we create fragility in the process. And this is I think a fundamental problem of human design, whether we’re designing armies or banks or universities that we don’t, in fact, think enough about resilience, much less anti-fragility in the face of a shock.

0:32:00.4 NF: And we keep kind of learning or not learning, rather, from this experience, think of the fragility that the financial crisis exposed in the international financial system and at its core in banks, I think that problem had been building for some time because of the strong impulse to optimize for efficiency and minimize costs, so you ran down the capital until you had a massively over-extended balance sheet in relation to capital. I don’t think we’ve learnt terribly much, because it seems to be the public health systems of the world were exposed in just the same way in 2020 as very good at producing pandemic preparedness plans, but not actually very good at coping with a real pandemic.

0:32:48.4 NF: And I think that that made me think back to how the banks would tell you in 2006 how tremendously well-prepared they were to manage risk until an actual risk happened and they all were on the verge of insolvency.

0:33:03.2 SC: Well, it’s an excellent point, I think, because these systems that are built by human beings are optimized for something, but somehow they’re even more short-sighted in what they’re being optimized for than the biological ones are. And Taleb’s book Anti-fragile is sitting on my bookshelf but I haven’t read it yet, so I’m not going to pretend, but are there… Does this kind of analysis suggest ways we can do better at building more resilient systems?

0:33:31.6 NF: Yes, I think… I’ll not attempt to paraphrase Nassim’s book, though it’s great fun and in some ways my favorite of his books, but let me illustrate it with some examples from Doom. If you were a highly bureaucratic public health system that optimized for central control and risk minimization, as I think CDC, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States, did, your response to the news of a novel pathogen from Wuhan was in fact to make it harder to test for that pathogen rather than making it much easier. And this was an epic fail that emanated from, I think, an increasingly sclerotic bureaucratic culture at CDC that would have been unrecognizable to the people who founded the institution in the post-war period.

0:34:39.9 NF: By contrast, in Taiwan, the response to any threat from China, regardless of whether it’s authentically viral or it is information warfare, is immediate and rapid reaction, and the Taiwanese ramped up testing, launched contact tracing and had a digital system of quarantining within weeks of the first news, even before the WHO had confirmed it was human-to-human transmission. I take from that that it is better to be generally paranoid, which I think you have to be in Taiwan for obvious reasons, and in South Korea, than it is to be very specifically prepared.

0:35:30.3 NF: The problem about Western bureaucracies is that they are excessively precise in the risks that they are preparing for. This was also true in financial regulation. Financial regulation before 2008 had increasingly complicated: The Basel rules on bank capital adequacy went from a few pages to enormous numbers of pages, and paradoxically the more they prepared for the specific eventuality of a stress test on bank balance sheets, the less prepared they were. I was highly amused to find as I was researching Doom just how many pandemic preparedness reports the American bureaucracy had produced in the years prior to 2020.

0:36:13.6 SC: We were ready.

0:36:15.5 NF: Just endless pages of reports about what to do and PowerPoint decks, but at the point of contact when a real pandemic was happening, the system failed utterly. That’s the key for me, that we were super prepared in a way that was illusory. I mean, remember, there was a ranking at the end of 2019 that said the US and the UK were the best prepared for a public health emergency, and it turned out to be the very opposite. I don’t think people have fully figured out why, because it’s so tempting to blame it all on Donald Trump without our recognizing that there was a systemic problem that had its roots in the way the bureaucratic mind works.

0:36:58.8 NF: The regulatory state deals with all potential problems in a way that appears to be preparation, but is in fact some kind of almost magical warding off of disaster through the generation of PowerPoint slides. We have to recognize that is the pathology, because it will be true whatever the disaster, that’s my kind of general takeaway. So yeah, I think there are ways to be anti-fragile and we need to go and talk to the Taiwanese, who’ve got a pretty anti-fragile system at this point, and the South Koreans who also got this very right, and we need to also have an inquest into why our public health bureaucracies across the Western world got this so badly wrong. That was their one job.

0:37:49.2 SC: Yeah, well, I’m extremely sympathetic to this, despite the fact that politically, I’m definitely on the left side of things, I think the government can solve problems and should help people, but boy, there is a tendency within bureaucracies to imagine that we can guess exactly what the problem is going to be and only allow ourself to solve that, and like you say that that leaves us really unable to be nimble when the actual problems hit, which are never the problems that you anticipated.

0:38:18.9 SC: I remember I was teaching at a summer school in Europe, right when the EU constitution was being debated, and one of the guest lecturers, it was a very broad summer school, one of the guest lectures was from Stephen Breyer, the US Supreme Court Justice. And he was too polite to say it out loud, but he’s like, this proposed EU constitution, hundreds of pages, and he’s like, here’s our constitution, that’s worked pretty well, it’s a couple of pages long, because it doesn’t try to pretend to anticipate every single possible thing, and you have to allow for the system to breathe a little bit. But I don’t know how to actually do that in practice, you can sort of exhort people to try to do it, but there is a tendency, there is something about the evolution of these networks that falls into the ruts when it comes to planning for the future.

0:39:06.5 NF: That’s true. It may be that we just can’t help ourselves, and that things that worked well 200 years ago over time become sclerotic, that was really Mançur Olson’s point, that you therefore need periodic disruption or destruction, so that institutions can be refounded. I take a slightly more optimistic view that it is possible to repair, as it were, without the plane crashing, but I think it requires a fundamental reassessment of how we think about risk. Remember that the way that the regulatory or administrative state has evolved since the 1970s has been that when Congress saw something too tricky, it punted it to a new agency, starting with the Environmental Protection Agency.

0:40:03.2 NF: And within those agencies, which now number north of 60, responsible for all kinds of different aspects of life, I think the same basic mentality exists, and this is a bureaucratic mentality that we’ve understood since the time of Max Weber when bureaucracy was still a relatively novel phenomenon. What we have to figure out is how to de-bureaucratize public services and get away from the mentality of the 1970s and ’80s regulatory state. That probably requires a reassessment of the way in which we teach public servants, because we definitely create a legalistic mentality that our law schools have a lot of answer for.

0:40:50.2 NF: And the mentality that I think arises there, and I wrote about this in a book called The Great Degeneration, is even if there is a 0.01% probability that an asteroid strikes the Earth, we need a regulatory framework that needs to be adopted. It needs to cover multiple pages before we’re really going to feel we’ve done our work, and that’s the disease and it exists not only in the public sector, but it exists in the private sector as well. Every large corporation develops this pathology and every university, as I hardly need to tell you, has it too.

0:41:24.4 NF: So what we need to devise, I think, is a kind of theory and practice of de-bureaucratization and a little bit of a mentality that the German army used to have in its 1914 incarnation, where there is significant delegation to the unit that has to act, and that’s what we lack. We’ve seen this so clearly with the European vaccination fiasco. What went wrong there, power-grab by the Commission to try to centralize control of procurement, and it went horrifically but predictably wrong. Subsidiarity is a word that Europeans use: They just don’t practice it.

0:42:08.1 NF: There is a bit of it in the US, at least we still have a federal system; that didn’t work well when it came to dealing with the initial outbreak, but it did work reasonably well when it came to vaccination. So I think we all need to assess how our institutions work, whether we’re in the private or public sector, and try to give them something of the anti-fragility feel that there is empowerment of decision-making at lower levels, and there’s much less explicit regulation. There needs to be some kind of discretion, and we’ve lost that because I think of the primacy of law schools in the education of the administrative class.

0:42:51.2 SC: So I have no opinion about the diagnosis of blaming the law schools, but it’s very, very plausible in my mind. Good, so we’ve slid very, very naturally from the themes of the book that we started with, with the networks versus hierarchies in The Square and the Tower, to your new book Doom, which is a very good title, and the cover… Is the cover that I have seen the actual cover that is going to be of the guy golfing?

0:43:16.1 NF: The US edition has a beautiful photograph of a gentleman playing golf with wild fire.

0:43:21.5 SC: I think it’s not far away from where I live, so I’m very familiar…

0:43:23.1 NF: I think it was taken in Oregon in 2017…

0:43:25.3 SC: Oh, it was Oregon? Okay.

0:43:26.8 NF: It wasn’t one of last year’s Californian wild fires, but I remember seeing the image at the time and thinking that encapsulates the insouciant mentality of Americans today, golfing while the woods burn, and presumably also while the virus spreads. So yeah, that is indeed the jacket, the UK has a different, more historical jacket. But I’m excited about this book because it follows in a way from The Square and the Tower, it’s about what happens when network society is hit by contagion, simultaneously by a novel pathogen and by all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories about it.

0:44:06.9 NF: And it’s helped me think a little further along the lines we began by discussing. History has a problem as a discipline. We are as a profession attracted to disasters, a lot of books are about disasters, whether natural or man-made, but we don’t have a very good handle on the relationship between disasters and our species. So I wanted to write a general theory of disaster so that I could think simultaneously about pandemics and wars and financial crises and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, because they are so much of what we call history.

0:44:45.6 NF: And I came away with one very clear view, namely that we couldn’t possibly have a cyclical theory of history of any sort, no matter how appealing cyclical theories have been to people through the ages, because there are just too many completely randomly distributed or parallel distributed disasters for any kind of rhythm to be discernible, and we are as a species at the mercy of these extraordinarily unpredictable and very differently sized and differently formed disasters. That’s so much the story of human history. So that was exciting to do, because I’d been wanting to think about this for a while, and the pandemic gave me the opportunity to do it systematically.

0:45:37.9 SC: Well, I think probably a lot of people in their minds would have as the options that history is either cyclical or it’s progressive, and the point is, it’s neither one of those. It’s a lot noisier process than either one.

0:45:50.2 NF: Yeah, we’ve squeezed out some really significant progress, of course, particularly since the Industrial Revolution or, one might say, since the Scientific Revolution, and that’s hugely important, not least because it’s extended our lifespans and reduced the probability that our children die as children. But as I tried to show, the thing that humanity often has forgotten is that as we have made material progress, we’ve increased our vulnerability, and the networked world that existed at the end of 2019 with unprecedented volumes of passenger traffic through the air was of course a disaster waiting to happen, and indeed it may be that others of that form happen again, because after all, by historical standards, SARS-CoV-2 is not by any means the worst pathogen we’ve ever encountered; in fact, it’s let us off very likely by historical standards.

0:46:47.7 NF: So I think these two arguments kind of come together. If you recognize that our institutions have a tendency to become sclerotic and bureaucratic, and that networks morph into rigid hierarchies, to put it really crudely, and that this goes on in a world which is subject to pretty randomly distributed disasters of various forms, you can see why we get into difficulties, because we don’t really think about the world in a realistic way. For example, we will spend a lot of time in the coming weeks and months and years talking about climate change as if that is really the only disaster we need to worry about.

0:47:33.1 NF: And that mentality was striking to me over a year ago at the beginning of 2020, at the World Economic Forum, almost every panel seemed to be about climate change and the pandemic had obviously already begun. You couldn’t get anybody to talk about that, but it was a much more clear and present danger. So I worry that we are unwittingly making the same mistake of thinking a great deal about one scenario, which is the sort of worst case climate change scenario. It only needs volcanic eruptions to revert to their medieval level, so having really big volcanic eruptions, for global cooling to be our problem. And when I started to look at the geological record, the first thing that hit me was, wow, we really stopped having big volcanoes in 1815. We haven’t really had a big eruption, a real climate-changing eruption since then. I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that that’s just because the Earth got bored of big volcanoes.

0:48:31.4 SC: Sorry, what do you assume? What do you imagine? Why did it happen?

0:48:37.4 NF: I don’t think anybody has a clue, and I think it’s perfectly plausible given the ways in which over the very long run, the scale of volcanic eruptions has fluctuated, that at some point, who knows when, we see another really big Tambora-like eruption, and that would completely blindside us, because we just haven’t considered that as a risk, but it seems to be a perfectly real risk, especially as we really are now, in terms of the scale of population and its distribution, we have more people sitting next to more fault lines and volcanoes than ever.

0:49:19.0 NF: So I think that the need, and maybe this is the key point that the book makes, is to realize that disaster can come at you in multiple forums. There is no clear distinction between a man-made and natural disaster in truth, because ultimately it’s what we’ve done before and what we do after that determines how disastrous an event like a volcano or an earthquake or a pandemic is, hence the subtitle, The Politics of Catastrophe. All catastrophes are ultimately politically mediated, it’s our decisions that determine the scale of the disaster. If we’ve decided to build massive cities beside fault lines, we shouldn’t be too surprised when earthquakes cause very large casualties.

0:50:07.3 NF: And I think that that means that we need to be more I think broadly aware of our vulnerabilities and less preoccupied with just the ones that happen to take our fancy. You know, visions of the apocalypse have been a feature of human life since the earliest recorded times. We are drawn to the idea of ultimate doom, and I sense a lot of that kind of millennialism in some of what goes on in the conversation about climate change. And it’s very well worth worrying about, but it’s definitely not the only way that history can get us. There are lots of different ways it can get us. And it can get us a lot more quickly by some of these other ways. I mean, climate change is a slow-moving thing, a pathogen is a very fast-moving thing, a war is a fast-moving thing.

0:50:57.9 NF: If the US and China ended up having a war, something I talk about towards the end of the book, which is, history leads us to think it’s quite likely, that would be a disaster, particularly if it escalated into nuclear war, that would be far larger and more fast-acting than the scenarios of the IPCC.

0:51:22.4 SC: I almost think that climate change, I don’t think it’s necessarily sui generis, but it doesn’t fit into the same kind of worries. It’s a big worry. I think it’s a huge worry, but like you said, it’s gradual, we can sort of plot it, we’re in the middle of it, it’s going to take decades to progress to wherever it goes, whether we do something about it or not, whereas things like the pandemic, the financial crisis, you brought up asteroids before, solar flares are my favorite example of something you just don’t think about at all that could wreak havoc on our entire world.

0:51:54.5 SC: In all of those examples, to me, the big problem is, you know there’s a probability that it will happen, but it’s small, and therefore it might not happen for another hundred years or a thousand years, and we human beings just aren’t built to plan for those things. We could fix, firm up the electrical grid to save it from solar flares with a relatively tiny amount of money, but who’s going to do that for a 1 in 1000 per year chance of such a disaster?

0:52:22.8 NF: That’s right, and the points of the book is not that we should be taking out insurance policies against all of these eventualities, that would be, I think, a counsel of the impossible. My feeling is more that we need to keep our breadth of vision in recognizing that ultimately we don’t get the disaster we plan for. We almost never do. And if we spend too much time, which I think we risk doing, thinking about one particular set of scenarios, which are the bad scenarios in the IPCC, then I think we’ll be blindsided by something else.

0:53:08.6 NF: Ultimately, going back to the earlier point, the generally paranoid society has some kind of contingency for the temporary but perhaps prolonged failure of the electricity grid. And that could happen, not just because of solar flares, it could happen because of a successful Chinese, Russian cyber attack, conceivably. I worry that if we convince ourselves that the key thing for us to do between now and the next 20 years is radically to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and if we do that, we’ll be fine, then we are, I think, engaging in a kind of magical thinking.

0:53:55.8 NF: So I’m really trying, and I know I’m in good company, because people like Nick Bostrom have been doing this for some time, to point out, that if there’s one thing history tells you, it’s that you don’t get the disaster you prepare for, and the more you think about one disaster and fixate on one apocalypse, the less ready you’ll be for something completely different. And I think we were really unready, imaginatively unready, for a pandemic. Despite numerous warnings on the subject, we had allowed ourselves to drift into a state of mind, and that included people in the public health bureaucracies, that was actually disastrously unready for something that was far from a black swan. I mean, it wasn’t a black swan…

0:54:40.8 SC: We knew it was coming, yeah.

0:54:42.9 NF: Tens of people had predicted it. Martin Rees had a bet with Steve Pinker about it. I’m just constantly struck by the fact that when it strikes, it suddenly becomes a black swan; for years, it’s been a grey rhino that people have talked about and written about and predicted about and given TED talks about, but when it actually happens, we’re all stunned, shocked, shocked that there could be such a thing as an infectious respiratory disease. So it’s a little worrying to me that we might respond in exactly the same way to a full-scale war, because we’ve been accustomed to small wars, that we can largely ignore but grumble about.

0:55:17.4 NF: The thing about it is that most human beings have a theory of history based on their own experience. They really don’t tend to internalize the experience of all the dead people, and that’s a lot more people still, than all the living people. So what one has to do, I think, and this was the goal of the book, Doom, was to remind people of the experience of the dead and all the different ways that they got dead.

0:55:47.5 SC: And there is a hint of almost kind of a strategy in there, but I want to interrogate the extent to which we do this. In the sense that you point out that the more paranoid countries, the countries that sort of live in fear, paranoid is the wrong word because it’s justified, countries that worry about existential threats of a completely different form were seemingly much better at responding to this new kind of threat that they hadn’t necessarily planned for. So that seems to suggest, okay, we should worry a little bit more about various kinds of existential threats to give ourselves the nimble strategic ability to respond when they happen. There must be a downside of that as well, right? I mean, do we worry about clamping down on civil liberties and individual choice a bit too quickly, or being a bit too paranoid when new disasters are on the horizon?

0:56:38.9 NF: Well, the conclusion of the book is that our biggest danger might in fact be a totalitarianism that we construct out of risk aversion. After all, it’s very easy to say, and I’ve heard it said, look how well the Chinese handled this, and they were able to handle it so well because they have unprecedented levels of surveillance and social control. This is the totally wrong conclusion to draw from the events of the last 12 or 14 months. The conclusion to draw is that precisely China’s totalitarian system made this disaster happen, this was super-Chernobyl, and it came about because the system just can’t tell the truth in the early stages of a disaster.

0:57:20.9 NF: So we have to draw lessons from the right China, by which I mean Taiwan. The Taiwanese have understood, I think, partly with the leadership of Audrey Tang, their Technology Minister, that you must use technology in ways that empower citizens, not that empower the state. And when I was there, I by chance was there in January 2020 before the pandemic really became a recognized phenomenon, but that they were already worrying about it, they’d already heard enough to be worried. What struck me was how much thought they’d put into using smart phones in ways that did not give power to Big Brother, but would make possible, and it turned out to be very possible, a system of contact tracing and digital quarantining.

0:58:10.3 NF: So they had really addressed this, and I think the reason that they’ve been so good at this is that they have to be paranoid. They are right next door to the People’s Republic of China, which essentially claims to control and own them. Israel has the same, I think, feature of institutionalized or situational insecurity. Apart from a really nasty period last summer when they lost control of the pandemic, Israel performed well at the beginning and it’s absolutely hit the ball out of the park with vaccination. South Korea’s in the same category, good reasons to be paranoid when your neighbor is Kim Jong-un.

0:58:53.5 NF: So I think that’s what’s interesting to me that these societies have managed to combine a general level of wariness, let’s say, without sacrificing individual liberties, and crucially, and this is where I thought you might be going, without ceasing to be innovative. Because in the end, we’ve got to innovate our way out of all of these different threats, and I see it as being far from an accident that the cutting edge semiconductor manufacturer in the world today is TSMC, right there in the heart of Taiwan, that Israel has become such an innovative society, despite the fact that it can’t really scale within its own borders, and South Korea is also a technological leader.

0:59:43.6 NF: So I think you can definitely have vigilance without an authoritarian or totalitarian… Actually, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, a phrase I was brought up to revere, my grandfather loved to quote it at me, and it’s true. It’s true. That’s the way to think about this. I think we face a major risk from totalitarianism. I think we face it not only from China and other totalitarian states that are aligned with it, we face it from within, because our increasing preoccupation with mitigating all risks, including the risks to our children, this preoccupation is leading, I think, to a dangerous safety first mentality, which will encourage us, has already encouraged us, to give up a dangerous amount of our individual freedom, to accept a dangerous amount of surveillance.

1:00:51.4 NF: So yeah, I think there’s a good way of thinking about this. The first thing to stress is that totalitarian regimes caused the biggest disasters in history, not just the Holocaust, but the Holodomor in Ukraine, the terrible disasters that Mao inflicted in China, particularly the Great Leap Forward. So at all costs, if we want to avoid disaster, we should want to avoid totalitarianism.

1:01:17.6 SC: No, I think that’s a very good point. And it brings us back to this sort of complex systems network perspective, where I mean, is there… It’s hard to avoid making grandiose pronouncements here, so let’s do it, and we can put the caveats in later, but the more resilient systems are a bit more decentralized, right? I mean, you mentioned innovation also, the ability to experiment, try different things. I can absolutely imagine that being more like a network rather than a hierarchy lets societies respond better to unanticipated disasters of various sorts. Maybe you want to say something about that, but then maybe if I think about the flip side of that, some disasters are going to require cooperation, right? I mean, climate change maybe is that example, or peacekeeping or nuclear weapons treaties or something like that. Is there a trade-off there between resiliency from distribution versus safety from hierarchy?

1:02:19.3 NF: I think there’s clearly a trade-off. I think we know from successful experiments in international cooperation, the eradication of smallpox, the avoidance of a perpetual and endless nuclear arms race, the limitation of the use of chemical weapons, we know how do this, and we know that interstate agreements can prevent… We prevented nuclear proliferation to a far greater extent than was predictable back in the late 1960s when the Non-Proliferation Treaty was drawn up. So I think we actually have a pretty good track record. We’ve got better, in fact, at that kind of international agreement. It took a long time for there to be good international agreements on public health. The first sanitary conferences of the 19th century were pretty inconclusive.

1:03:10.3 NF: But by the mid-20th century, we’d come up with the World Health Organization, which was doing a pretty good job until… Well, let’s maybe not get into that, but until I think China became too powerful over its organization and leadership. So I think this isn’t one of the big headaches. I think decentralization is crucial for a great many problems, but not all, and a federal system with vibrant local governments ought to be able to act with national unity in the face of a dire emergency.

1:03:47.9 NF: The biggest emergencies have tended to be wars through history, and we’ve generally been able to overcome the coordination problems of decentralized and democratic states in time of war. I found it odd that people struggled so hard to think about an emergency last year, that in an emergency, you temporarily have to give up certain freedoms. That didn’t really puzzle our grandparents and great-grandparents in time of war, but we’ve definitely lost that, that notion that you have a temporary suspension of freedom in time of emergency. For the global challenges, I think one has to recognize that there is a fundamental mismatch between what states will commit to in things like the Paris Accord and how their commitments will be enforced.

1:04:50.3 NF: Ultimately, the problem that we face at the moment when we come back to the problem of climate change, which I like you take very seriously, there’s no question that we are heading to a more unstable planet if we carry on in our present trajectory and it’s going to involve mass migration and potentially starvation in those parts of the world that become less easy to live in, but what have we got? We’ve got a situation in which the Chinese say one thing and do another.

1:05:21.3 NF: More than, or roughly half of all the increase in CO2 emissions since Greta Thunberg was born are from China, and they haven’t stopped building coal-burning power stations. On the contrary, they ramped it up in the last year. And nobody has a good answer to the question, how do you enforce these commitments. Nobody has a good answer to that at all. And until we have a good answer to that, then I think there’s a risk of virtue signaling, where Europeans and Americans say, well, we’re going to do all these wonderful things to be carbon-neutral, it won’t make the blindest bit of difference if the Chinese carry on on their present path, it really won’t. We’ll essentially just impair our economic growth potentially, or maybe we’ll get it right and avoid that, but we won’t actually solve the problem if the Chinese carry on, and the Indians too, and there are some Middle Eastern countries that are increasing their CO2 emissions rather shockingly.

1:06:16.7 NF: So I don’t know what the answer to that is, but I do think that it ultimately becomes part of Cold War II. I think we’re in a cold war now with China, we don’t really want to face it, but we are, and the Chinese know it. And at the heart of that cold war is going to be finding ways of enforcing commitments that the Chinese have made, and I think it’ll take a while, but at some point, maybe it’ll dawn on Joe Biden and Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, but it didn’t dawn on their predecessors, they’ll realize that the climate issue is actually a geopolitical issue, it’s a fundamental problem that we should not be surprised by.

1:06:55.7 NF: Remember, the Soviet Union was in its way an absolute disastrous polluter, not on the Chinese scale, but it was still a characteristic feature of the totalitarian state that it doesn’t care at all about the externalities, it just doesn’t care, because there’s no accountability, there’s no property rights, no rule of law. Of course, the communist parties will always deal with pollution, it’s just that we’ve never seen it done this on this massive scale before.

1:07:22.1 SC: Well, let’s bring that back to the discussion about networks and revolutions and so forth. China is a place I have very mixed feelings about because I look back at the culture and history of it, and I want it to be one of the poles leading the world in some sense, but then of course, it’s an autocratic dictatorship with, like you said, very, very narrow self-interests. Is there any hope for thinking that in the modern networked world, a large-scale autocracy like that is less stable than it might have been? I mean, I know that China tries very hard to keep out information flows, but can they do that? Is there some hope for the people of China to shrug off the autocracy that is in charge of them?

1:08:09.1 NF: I try to be optimistic about this. I think that ultimately the idea that you can take the mid-20th century totalitarian model of the one-party state and the strong charismatic leader and replay it in the 2010s and 2020s is mad. The idea ultimately that you can build a surveillance state on the internet using a combination of human and AI censorship, that you could make that work, I can’t in my heart of hearts believe it. But when you go to China and watch it in action, you realize that they have come further than Orwell imagined in 1984, because the tele screen was on your wall, not in your pocket, and there was nothing remotely resembling facial recognition of the sort that the Chinese police can now use in urban China.

1:09:13.3 NF: So you’d have to say at this point that totalitarianism 2.0 is doing better than anybody foresaw in the 1990s when Clinton famously said that you can’t nail jello to a wall. They’ve kind of nailed jello to a wall. I think the key problem is that as the growth rate slows for demographic reasons and because of the excessive debt burden, the regime will more and more be inclined to rely on nationalism to maintain its legitimacy. That pattern is already well established since Xi took over, and it’s producing a kind of tone in their diplomacy, sometimes referred to as wolf warrior diplomacy, that is alarming to me because it’s so reminiscent of shrill, belligerent regimes of the past.

1:10:03.5 NF: So I think that the real key question is, at what point does this dynamic lead to actual war as opposed to wars of words. And that will be where the fate of the regime is decided, because if it loses it’s over. That’s kind of how I’m beginning to realize this will play out. I don’t think that you can combine One Belt One Road claims to Taiwan, crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea, I don’t think you can combine those things with a propaganda that is increasingly nationalistic and not at some point get into a conflict, unless the US just rolls over and says, okay, carry on, become the primacy, become the hegemon in the Indo-Pacific region.

1:11:00.9 NF: So I’m kind of with Graham Allison that the probability of conflict is quite high under these circumstances, and probably that’s how this regime ultimately comes apart, just as the totalitarian regimes in the past did, because they actually can start a war, but they can’t win a war, because… I think what’s clear from the 20th century is that when the United States, or for that matter, the British empire, when they were put to the test, they actually came through, and they came through because… And I remember writing about this in The War of the World, when you took American capitalism and said, go win a conventional war, and if you can’t win it, come up with atomic weapons.

1:11:48.5 NF: That worked. And the Soviet Union found it could not compete in the Cold War any more than the Imperial Japanese and Nazi German forces had been able to win World War II. So I think the Chinese ultimately, if they end up on a collision course, will not win, but it’s a messy prospect, and I hope we can find a way of avoiding this. I’d far rather see, I’d far rather see a gradual transformation of Chinese politics away from the one-party state. We all hoped that that would happen. Twenty years ago, that was the game plan, globalization would bring them into the fold. But it’s not happened; on the contrary, they’ve turned the clock back ideologically, universities are no longer places one can speak freely, and the party’s power has tightened in a way that is really quite quite frightening.

1:12:43.8 NF: So it’s hard to see the optimistic scenario playing out. The probability of that optimistic transition has gone way down in the last 20 years, particularly since Xi took over.

1:12:52.1 SC: Well, it goes back to where we started with the fact that history is neither uniformly progressive nor cyclic, there’s a bunch of different factors that come together in unique ways every time, so it’s hard to predict on the basis of past performance what’s going to happen next.

1:13:05.1 NF: So the sample size of cold wars is about point 1 or 2, and that makes it pretty hard to generalize about cold wars, but…

1:13:12.5 SC: Oh, we could do it. We can generalize, I’m sure we could do it somehow. But actually, let’s make that the last question, you’re a historian by label, growing up with physicists does not stop you from doing this, but you’re writing about extremely contemporary ideas. I don’t know when you had the idea to write a book on catastrophes in the middle of a pandemic, but that’s certainly something where every week things were changing, right. So let me just give you the last question to let you expound on the idea of the role of the historian commenting on contemporary events, whatever those events might be. Is it possible to learn from the successes and failures of past historians? Do historians have something extra to offer when we think about current events?

1:14:02.1 NF: I think I became an historian because I wanted to think about contemporary problems and plausible futures. I didn’t want to study the past just because it was kind of interesting for its own sake, though that was what we were told to do at Oxford. I remember being told explicitly by the Regius Professor, Michael Howard, that we couldn’t learn lessons from history, that that was the only lesson of history. And I’ve always resisted that counsel of despair.

1:14:30.3 NF: I think what historians have to offer is different from the models that social scientists or epidemiologists have to offer. We work in a way that can seem rather fuzzier, with analogies, and I think because if we’re doing our job well, as RG Collingwood put it, the great Oxford philosopher of history, we get a sense of the tigers in the grass. We get a pattern recognition skill over time; unlike mathematicians, historians should get better at being historians the older they get, because they should get better at the pattern recognition. And what we’re really there for is to say… I’ll give you one example. When you think about a pandemic, don’t think of one curve that you have to flatten, there will be multiple waves, that’s what to expect.

1:15:23.2 NF: I remember saying that back in March, when another Neil Ferguson was getting a good deal more airtime than we did, when the IL Ferguson at Imperial College. I thought he was making a mistake in thinking that we faced 1918-19, I.e., a pandemic as bad as that one. I never could see that even on the limited data we then had from China, it just didn’t look like being that deadly a virus. But you asked a good question, when did I think of doing this? Because it sort of mad, isn’t it, to write a history of disaster before the disaster in progress is over.

1:15:58.9 SC: Yeah, it’s still going on.

1:16:01.8 NF: I actually wanted to do this before. Before COVID-19 was even heard of, I had a lunch with my editor in New York and I said, but I really want to write about the various disastrous scenarios that we’ve envisioned in science fiction as well as in religious eschatology, and I think it’s a great subject to write a kind of history of our relationship with the end of the world or with disaster. And he was like, nah, nah.

1:16:37.9 SC: No-one wants to hear about that.

1:16:40.6 NF: I’d immersed myself in science fiction for much of the previous year. I’d had this sudden epiphany that history was great for pattern recognition about certain classic phenomena, like war, but it was bad at helping you anticipate technological change. And so I decided to resume reading science fiction, which I’d stopped doing at the age of about 17, to try to give myself a better sense of potential technological dislocations, became entirely obsessed with Liu Cixin’s three-body problem, and got very excited about how we could combine historical framework with science fiction. And then COVID-19 came along, and there I’d won the argument at that point, because a classically science fiction scenario, one that many different science fictions had been written about, a pandemic, was there, and I won my argument and got to write the book.

1:17:37.4 NF: But yeah, a lot of the book is not about COVID-19, because I couldn’t possibly write the history of something that wasn’t over. It’s just the last three chapters that touch on the unfolding event. The book goes all the way back to the prehistoric disasters, the great volcanic eruptions that nobody was there to write about, not to mention the asteroids that conveniently stopped hitting the Earth during our time. And I hope that it’s got some utility. I’ve used the phrase applied history a lot. I think that we made a mistake in the history of our discipline, we didn’t create a kind of department of applied history, we should have done, so that people like me could go off and try to do a kind of history that would be designed to deal with contemporary problems.

1:18:33.4 NF: I’m hoping to be able to build that, though it’s a huge challenge. I think we failed to create departments of economic history when we could have done. And the current departments of history are not doing this work at all, they’ve basically moved into a domain of cultural history and identity politics, they are disengaged from contemporary problems mostly, and as far as I can see, they’re mostly concerned about condemning the past for its racism and sexism and general lack of wokeness. And that just bores me, to me that’s utterly uninteresting, going back in the past and condemning slavery, I find that a sterile use of time. I’m much more interested in thinking about how we can learn from past experience to contend with future problems.

1:19:21.8 NF: And so applied history is really what Doom is supposed to illustrate, and I hope that policy makers can read it and think a-ha, yeah, what went wrong in 2020 in the domain of public health could go wrong in a lot of other domains, and that’s why we need to think more historically and less legalistically about the problems and challenges we’re likely to face.

1:19:44.9 SC: I should also give you a chance to mention, you did edit a whole collection on virtual history where people thought about counterfactuals, and maybe that’s something that historians could think about more.

1:19:54.4 NF: Well, I think it’s odd that most historians disapprove of counterfactual history. In fact, one in particular, Richard Evans, wrote a whole book condemning the exercise, but I actually think if you take a few seconds to reflect on the philosophy of history that you can’t make any meaningful causal statement without an implicit counterfactual. For example, COVID-19 would have been much less disastrous if Hillary Clinto had been president. I think one has to make those statements explicit and then interrogate them, because I don’t think it’s by any means obvious that a Democratic administration would have handled COVID-19 significantly better.

1:20:33.3 NF: How did they do with the opioid epidemic, which was slower-moving, not global, and it was worse every year of the Obama presidency in terms of the numbers who died. So I think, to me, counterfactual questions are indispensable and they need to be asked about the recent past. The more you think counterfactually, and this is the real key, I think, about the past, the more you recognize that the future is, it’s not determined, it’s uncertain, you and I stand before multiple plausible futures, and all we can really do at this point is attach some vague probabilities to them, but the more you try and do that systematically, the more you realize how hard it is.

1:21:22.4 NF: I spend a lot of my time trying to do that. If I’m getting 66% right, I’m doing really, really well. Just beating the coin toss is good, because this is so difficult to do, even if you’re just narrowly trying to predict where interest rates will be a month from now, it’s really hard. So, doing counterfactual history is a way of reminding yourself that what happened was not bound to happen, it’s just the scenario, it’s the sequence of events that we got, that ex ante it did not have necessarily even the highest probability, sometimes it’s the low probability scenarios that happen. So I think counterfactual thinking is extremely healthy and it should be… It should be kind of much more central to how we educate people, not only to think about big questions like the future of the United States, but also about how to think about their own lives.

1:22:15.3 SC: Yeah, I’m on your side here. I think that what human beings are good at and should try to become better at is imagining all the futures, assigning probabilities to them, vague or otherwise, and then taking them seriously rather than waiting for them to happen to go, oh, yes, I could have predicted that. So Niall Ferguson, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:22:34.7 NF: Thank you so much, Sean. Great questions.

[music][/accordion-item][/accordion]