Niall Ferguson: The Politics of Catastrophe

become a sustaining member of the commonwealth  club for just ten dollars a month join today hello and welcome to today's virtual commonwealth  club program my name is maya jasinov coolidge professor of history at harvard university  and your moderator for this evening the club would like to thank the ken and jackie broad  foundation family fund for generously supporting tonight's program as the club continues to  host virtual events they are also grateful for the continued support of their memb

ers and  donors visit commonwealthclub.org to learn more about membership or support the club  right now with a tax tax-deductible gift by clicking the blue donate button on your screen  it's my pleasure to welcome neil ferguson milbank family senior fellow at the hoover institution  and author of doom the politics of catastrophe neil is one of the world's most renowned  historians and an award-winning filmmaker in addition to writing a regular column for bloomberg  opinion he's the founder and

managing director of green mantle llc neil's book doom offers a deeper  understanding of why humans haven't gotten better at handling disasters and what we urgently need  to learn to avoid the next crisis and just a reminder that if you have a question for neil  please submit those in the chat and in the uh final 15 20 minutes of today's program we will be  taking audience questions neil welcome it's great to be with you it's great to be in conversation  with you and uh let me first say that thi

s book is a huge amount of fun uh especially for a book  entitled doom and fun is not really the first thing that one might associate with doom but what  makes it so fun is the incredible uh sort of range of events and modalities and methods that you  draw on to give us really a deep historical context for understanding the present  catastrophe that we are all living through and i wanted to start by asking you um sort of  beginning at the end as it were asking you to tell us a little bit about h

ow you went from living  in the early moments of this pandemic in 2020 to thinking about the much bigger picture this is  a book that actually started life as a powerpoint slide deck tell us a little more about that well  i do feel slightly self-conscious talking about doom on zoom in the gloom because as you can  probably see i'm in a fantastically badly lit room that there is a kind of levity perhaps  some people will consider it inappropriate about the book and i'm glad you you spotted  that

in many ways that the title is ironical didn't quite begin if i'm absolutely honest as  a powerpoint deck in the sense that i'd spent a lot of 2019 thinking about the history of of  disasters and in particular dystopias and that section at the end that thinks about the history  of the future which is a kind of digest of my favorite science fiction going all the way back  to mary shelley was really what i began with i was thinking a lot in 2019 about the history of the  future and ways in which w

e've imagined or bright people who write science fiction have imagined  the end the end time armageddon the apocalypse and so that was the beginning of the book and and  then january came along and i was traveling as i used to do a lot i was in east asia in  taipei singapore and hong kong and then it was there that i started to hear talk of  a mysterious new pneumonia in wuhan in china and i've been reading enough science fiction  as well as i'd read enough history about the beginnings of pandem

ics to be very alert to that  kind of snippet of news because a lot of pandemics real and fictional begin with that kind of story  so by the time i got to the world economic forum in davos and switzerland i was completely  convinced i knew enough to know there was going to be a pandemic it was slightly strange  because nobody at davos with the perhaps one or two exceptions seemed to see this they wanted to  talk about climate change and i was running around the conference hall saying i know clim

ate change  is important but there's actually a pandemic now you don't seem to realize there are three people  from wuhan on your list of delegates and it was an adept an attempt to persuade people the kind  of people that go to davos that i started pulling information together to try and show people this  really was very very serious and very fast-moving so this of course invites another question  why in 2019 were you thinking so much about histories of the future what was it in  that moment th

at was making you think apocalyptically i'm not sure maybe being scottish  i'm just always slightly inclined to think about you know the doomy side of life but i  i actually had come to an intellectual decision at some point that year which was that  reading history was not enough as you know we talked about this often when we were colleagues at  harvard i'm a great believer in applying history to contemporary problems i think we really  can learn things from history it's difficult it's easy to

get the wrong idea from trying  to learn from history if it's worth trying but i come to the conclusion after a few years  at stanford that this alone was not enough because what history is bad at telling you is  about the impact of technological discontinuities because those have become uh in many ways more  frequent in modern history and that makes most of history a poor guide in some ways to the future  so i thought i'll try to counterbalance my reading of history by going back to science fic

tion a  genre that i'd abandoned at about the age of 16 in the belief that one shouldn't be unserious  and that it was frivolous but i actually found going back and reading science fiction uh  again incredibly intellectually stimulating and i got interested in the fact that the famous  works of dystopia that not likes of 1984 by orwell or brave new world by huxley weren't panting that  prescient actually about what was coming whereas there were other writers of science fiction  perhaps less famo

us and less widely rare she'd in fact had a better handle on the way that things  were going to develop so the idea was to sort of temper my applied history approach with with an  infusion of of science fiction and that was really what led me to tell my new york editor i want  to write a history of the future i want to write about imagine dystopias because it seems like  somebody uh in all the writers of science fiction is is going to have this rise i mean in a sense  science fiction is this hug

e crowdsourcing experiment we've got lots and lots of people  some of them very brilliant margaret atwood in our time or neil stevenson you say think  about figure out the future and although of course nobody's going to get it right because it's  inherently impossible to know the future there are too many uncertainties in some ways it really  helped me to have read a lot of uh the recent work of i mean atwood's great trilogy oryx and  craig is all about a disastrous pandemic and it's a man-made

pandemic it starts with a disastrous  bit of genetic engineering uh and i think it was because i'd been reading that kind of thing that  my antennae were twitching madly in the first couple of weeks of january and so then it arrives  and you find yourself you know tracking this real-time uh disaster as against historical time  disasters that you're that you're investigating one of the premises of the book really the central  argument as i understood it is that there's no bright line between natu

ral and man-made disasters  can you tell us a little bit more about how you understand the human elements in the making of  what might be seen as sort of exogenous events well there's obviously a lot in the subtitle  the politics of catastrophe the argument of the book is that all disasters are in some  sense man more people made the idea of a purely natural disaster seems intuitively right after  all an earthquake or a massive volcanic eruption are surely natural disasters whereas a war is a a 

man-made usually as men who make wars a disaster but what i wanted to try and do was to show  that that's not quite right and here amartya sen our mutual friend the great nobel laureate and  uh economist uh gave me the clue because in very famous work uh years ago now sen argued  that famines shouldn't be thought of as natural disasters in fact famines may start with some crop  failure but the reason there's mass starvation has to do with the failure of market mechanisms and  often politics in

a famous essay argued that you couldn't have a feminine democracy you could not  have had what happened in maya was china happen uh in india and i it suddenly hit me that if that was  true of famines why not of other disasters uh and it seemed odd to me that nobody had really pursued  the argument to its obvious next stage which is to consider all disasters as at some level the  result of human mismanagement go back to volcanoes if you um build a city right next to a volcano  and rebuild it afte

r the volcano's erupted once then there's going to be disaster the next time  it erupts that that's the sense in which even a volcano has has a man-made uh a quality  to it a volcanic eruption has a man-made quality to it if you look at the map of the world  and just look at where the cities are located it's remarkable how many cities we we build  next to major fault lines uh or massive uh a volcanic caldera and i mean i now live quite  near one of those fault lines as you know and i'm hoping it

won't actually  suddenly move during this conversation but that's the the idea of the book there isn't  really a sort of purely natural disaster unless you count the asteroid hitting the earth  that hasn't happened for a long time and it's pretty unlikely to happen in the near-ish future  if if you look at most of the things that we think of as disasters in history and to an extent  history is one damn disaster after another they all have this human element and in a way  covered 19 is a beautif

ul illustration at this point about a year ago it was widely accepted that  this was a kind of natural mutation that produced the new sarsko v2 virus and now we find that  rising probability that in fact this originated not in a so-called web market but in a laboratory  in wuhan which makes it look as if possibly covert 19 was a a man-made disaster i mean certainly  even if it was a zoonotic naturally arising mutation the way it was mishandled at the  beginning by the chinese regime ensured that

it was a much worse disaster than it would have been  and i think if if one puts a martyr sends brain to work on our behalf he would say if it had happened  in a democracy if if it had been a lab leak in a democracy would there would not have been weeks  and weeks of covering up and hushing up of doctors weeks in which of course the virus was able to  transport itself to pretty much every continent i also found myself thinking of sam a  lot at the beginning of the pandemic because it seemed to

me exactly that what we  were seeing unfolding around us was essentially a kind of um you know real-time political science  experiment in what kinds of polities and uh you know what kinds of um societies were best handled  to deal with this i also was thinking of the line said of the irish famine at the time  that it began god indeed created the potato blight but the british created  the famine which anticipates sin um and in your book you know one of the things that i did  find so striking is a

map that you have of all of the um the the most active earthquake zones and of  course they are you know the coastline basically north america on the west and you know  everywhere that people have indeed set up set up shop um now all that said i mean i think  um it's an ingenious thread and it and it really works in a lot of ways to hold these sorts  of events together but i i wanted to press you a little bit more on how you define disaster  because we see a big range of things coming up in the

book everything from the fall of  the roman empire and the fall of empires to the sinking of the titanic which took on cultural  significance but of course as things go it was one of you know hundreds of shipwrecks it wasn't a  singular disaster except in as much as it got the headlines so how do you define disaster what is it  that that um holds these two very different scales of events together well there's one chapter where  i look at what might be called small disasters uh and the titanic i

s a small disaster compared  with curved 19 clearly most of the book is about excess mortality events that cause significant  excess mortality and if it didn't do that i didn't really spend much time on it i didn't cover  massive oil spillages for example they kill a lot of wildlife but relatively few people so that  was the organizing principle we were looking for periods of abnormal excess mortality and  if you look through history what you find is that a relatively small number of pandemics a

nd  wars caused a really huge amount of of death uh the world wars are kind of up there with they're  not quite at the top of the league table with the biggest pandemics and then you have a lot of  different more localized disasters that still kill really large numbers of people whether it's  extreme wildfires or floods uh major earthquakes those sorts of things it seemed to me that  there were certain common features of disaster whether they appeared natural or man-made and  there came a moment

in the book where i thought i need to kind of go down to the smaller scale  to see if there's to use a rather pretentious phrase a fractal geometry of disaster here the  idea was that like tolstoy's happy families all disasters have certain things in common and  although i'm mainly interested in the big ones uh ranging from the big pandemics to the big wars to  other big disasters that kill a lot of people i found the chapter that zoomed in on uh famous  disasters in which relatively small numb

ers of people died but but there was a great focus on the  significance of the disaster very helpful because although the titanic's really on a much smaller  scale than oh i don't know the battle of the song nevertheless there are certain common features and  here's why i did this i was early on in the book trying to think through how to to structure it  uh when a former student another harvard person manny rincon cruz uh said to me you really have  to read richard feynman's book about the space

shuttle challenger disaster in 1986 and i i took  his advice and it was revelatory some some people listening may be familiar with the book feynman  was called in from caltech he was a brilliant physicist to be a part of the panel to investigate  why the space shuttle challenger had blown up uh an event that killed only seven people but was  watched by certainly half or more of the american population one of these disasters that sort of  sears itself in the popular consciousness and here was th

e key to a really important part of the  book's argument about the politics of catastrophe initially the white house press corps the  washington journalists wanted to find a way to blame it on reagan because that's what you do  if you're a journalist there's an argument that the launch had been rushed in order that reagan  could mention it in a state of the union address well this was untrue it was in fact fake news  there never had been any serious intention to put it in the speech feinman esta

blished by  talking to engineers and just making himself a bit of a nuisance around nasa that the real point of  failure was much further down the chain of command the engineers knew that there was a one percent  chance the thing would blow up because of the famous o-rings which basically leaked fuel  from the launching rockets especially at low temperatures but the bureaucrats at nasa turned  one in a hundred into one and a hundred thousand because they didn't want to uh and stir up trouble  wi

th the principal source of funding for the space shuttle program namely congress and so this this  was the kind of critical epiphany for me that the disaster that attracted so much attention around  the world uh i remember it uh from my own uh youth uh was actually the fault of middle management  it wasn't the fault of of the the man at the top and this became a sort of organizing idea for the  book the politics of catastrophe are it's often misunderstood that there's a strong inclination  to bl

ame whoever's at the top and we certainly saw that all around the world last year but  in reality no matter how many mistakes one can count that donald trump or boris johnson  made the reasons why we had very high excess mortality in the united states really had more to  do with failures of the public health bureaucracy the failure of cdc to ramp up testing at the  beginning and these failures occurred in most western countries regardless of whether the  leader was a an incompetent populist or a

technocrat so i come to the conclusion that  the politics of catastrophe is often about enigmatic figures in in middle management making  fateful decisions that that historians aren't necessarily that good at spotting it's  the same as the great military disasters the battle of the somme is is easy to pin on ask  with or even more on hague but but in in reality the reason that the plan went horribly wrong had  a lot more to do with defects of the way that the british military operated in in 191

6 so that's a  really important idea and i got quite fascinated by one of feynman's characters uh because there's  this great um there's this mysterious figure that um that crops up in the storia uh who's  the man that nobody can quite get hold of when they're trying to work out why it is that uh  one percent becomes uh one in a hundred thousand and it's mr kingsbury mr kingsbury is the official  at nasa who will never get never takes a meeting with the engineers when the engineers are  saying t

his thing can blow up and i think there's a mr kingsbury in a lot of of disasters  and that's that's for me a really interesting and slightly contrarian insight into not just  this recent disaster but disaster generally i would venture simply to add that i think there's  a there's a culture of catastrophe as well and i think that i mean as i read it the titanic would  be an event that becomes culturally significant for reasons which uh have their own sorts of  logics and it would be interesting

as a kind of supplement to the work that you're doing  on the the role of middle management and so on to think about why certain events jump out  in the public mind at the times that they do i mean i i wonder how these relate to each other  and it is not about necessarily the body count that things become significant in ways  that are really not proportional to to the body count and that's why i introduced this  strange uh set of creatures uh the grey rhino uh the black swan and the dragon king

uh  the grey rhino you see coming towards you it's a disaster like climate change that you  spend decades talking about as it approaches and the blacks one is something that  completely takes you by surprise that you think you never considered even if you did but  you forget about it at the moment of crisis and then the dragon king is is the  disaster that has much greater consequences than the body count would suggest i mean the first  world war is a disaster not just because something like 10

million men get killed in conventional  warfare it's a disaster because it has this cascading quality that leads to the bolshevik  revolution that leads to the spanish influenza and that's part of the argument but you're right  there's also a kind of cascade that occurs when a disaster even if it doesn't kill that many people  seems symbolic and that that i think was true of of the space shuttle challenger it was certainly  true of of the titanic i mean there have been ships that have sunk with

many many more losses  and some disasters just don't make it there's this great plane disaster that i write about that  occurred in in uh major of all places in the 1970s enormous numbers of people killed when two 747s  collide but it sort of just didn't make the cart as i guess film-worthy if one thinks about  the way titanic became a renewed source of fascination around the movie but at any  event disasters seem to lodge in our minds when they have some symbolic uh significance  or they resona

te with some broader sense of unease we feel doom is fascinating and that's  the real point i make at the beginning of the book we're fascinated by the idea of catastrophe  especially the ultimate catastrophe the one that sweeps us all away into extinction so we are kind  of fascinated by disasters we want to think about them we want to watch them on on the screen but in  reality we don't think about them very clearly and that's part of what motivated me to write the book  a sense that we were c

onfronting this new disaster last year and some people were complacent and  some people were in a state of total panic and the reality is that you kind of need to be somewhere  in the middle to cope effectively with a disaster yeah i mean i think a lot of what comes out in  this is people's assessment of risk and and the incredible um lack of reason that most people  seem to immense in their decision-making um and so that's uh that's manifest in the  present uh crisis among other things i mean 9

11 stands out to me as a an episode which  of course exemplifies in certain ways the politics of catastrophe if you want to think  about you know lack of security and all the rest of it but really the culture as well  because of the incredible sort of symbolism that it came to have which is indeed what imbued  it with the cascading effects in part you know as somebody who is working in universities um i'm  quite happy right now to think about the um the malign effects of middle management um but

i um i  wanted to ask you a little bit about your uh your your very well-framed opposition to the great man  theory of history as you put out in in this book but i wondered if you could say a little bit about  how you uh approach the great man knocking him off the pedestal of greatness in this book while  at the same time being a biographer you've written a number of biographies of course  most recently and notably of henry kissinger where do you locate individuals in history  when you're writi

ng a biography as opposed to the way you see them in this book i was much  influenced by tolstoy as a schoolboy it's really why i became a historian it was reading war  and peace and the great essay at the end when tor stoy reflects on the events that he's he's  described and the argument of war and peace is essentially that napoleon's significance  is exaggerated not only by napoleon but by historians i quote and doom the key passage  which electrified me when i read it tolstoy says it's really

not possible to explain the huge  upheaval that sent frenchmen in huge numbers into russia and caused this great uh conflagration in  terms of napoleon's intentions now off i went to oxford thinking i must understand this problem  better tolstoy asks this question what is the power that moves nations but it doesn't really  answer it so i've spent i guess the last 40 years trying to find an answer to that question  and the answer seems to be roughly as follows that ultimately there are moments w

hen  individual leadership can matter enormously but they are sort of distinct moments that one  can identify pivotal moments uh most of what is going on in the process we call leadership has  to do with and this goes back to an earlier book uh the square in the tongue networks leaders don't  really sit on top of great hierarchical structures org charts where they just issue commands and the  law orders carry them out in reality leadership is about being a hub and a network being a  node has lot

s and lots of connections and with that connectivity you can motivate people  persuade them and lead them uh and that's why i now think about leadership it's about locating  leaders in networks and understanding how those how those networks function that the distorting  i think perspective which the modern media adore is the one that emphasizes always the personality  of the person at the top especially if that personality is uh dramatic or charismatic or just  clownish and amusing it's a great

mistake to argue as james fallows did last year in an essay for  the atlantic that the president of the united states is like the pilot of an aircraft and that  the plane crashes it's it's probably pilot error there's just no way being present in  the united states is like flying a plane not even close in truth people at the top of  complex bureaucracies have and this is something i i've learned partly from writing about kissinger  have surprisingly limited information flow often and are general

ly confronted with choices  after the options have been filtered down to a typically three by the bureaucracy so this is a  very important point of connection between my 35 000 feet work books like doom or the square on the  tower and the biography i mean i needed to write a book about networks to understand kissinger and  understand his role in american and world politics and then i think i needed to write a  book about disaster because ultimately in volume 2 of christmas i have to write about 

vietnam and make sense of of one of the great military disasters and political disasters of  modern american history now it does sound a little bit like i'm saying it's a bit of both it's  a bit of great or wicked men and it's a bit of the great uh forces of history but let's face it  that's the truth about what we do as historians we're trying to tease out those things over  which individual leaders don't have control and then we're trying to identify  what exactly the decision-making role was

a good illustration of  this from doom is churchill and the bengal famine which has always been the  stick with which churchill's critics have have beaten him and it's not been hard to  do because churchill said numerous callous things about about the indians and particularly  about the leaders of the nationalist movement but if one actually looks closely at what happens  and i discussed this with the marcher and got him to read the relevant parts it's clear that it  wasn't the british prime mi

nister who was the key uh culprit for what went wrong in bengal during  the war and ultimately although he didn't do it very gracefully churchill did the right thing  in making sure that supplies were diverted to the area that was affected so that that's  a good illustration of how i think we should proceed as historians churchill mattered a huge  amount i think he probably was as ajp taylor said the savior of his nation without churchill it's  hard to imagine actually how britain would have com

e through 1940 but 1943 in bengal doesn't seem  to me like something that has a huge amount to do with his decision-making had much more to do  with the people closer geographically to the to the disaster dare i say that something in what  you've just outlined reminds me of my own basic approach to the role of individuals in history  which uh i admit comes from marx men and women make their own histories but not in conditions  of their of their choosing um and there's a constant interplay betwee

n the possibilities for  individual action um and the choices that people make um you know you know that i've always been  a marxist but just on the side of the bourgeoisie another thing incidentally and i won't go down  this route but you are uh your other sort of historiographical acts uh to grind in the book  is uh is against cyclical histories and um and here um you know i i sort of wonder um i suppose  i found myself wondering how many people actually do still uh hold to cyclical histories

these  days and are taken seriously but uh but perhaps that's a different thing yes i mean one of the  best-selling books of history broadly defined is is this book the fourth turning which people  constantly quote back at me and then there's ray dalia who's whose latest foray into into writing  history is a resuscitation of a kind of financial cyclical theory this stuff has it's a little  bit like your work on ancestry i mean academic historians may disdain it but it's actually the  kind of his

tory that that a wider public consumes and people really do like the idea of cycles  of history because it gives them some sense of order and there's some predictability to this it's  going to be like the seasons or the seven ages of man and we kind of want that because to be told as  i'm afraid the readers of duma told sorry history is quite chaotic and there's no way of predicting  disasters and they're randomly distributed i mean that's not a very comforting thought and the quest  to find a c

ycle of history that will allow you at least to have some predictive power well i think  we'll always go on but i think in doom i finally figured out why it's doomed uh as an enterprise  as an intellectual project i mean you just can't have a cyclical theory of history if these random  disasters keep butting in uh you know no matter how elegant the theory and i mean peter turchen's  work is really impressive he's definitely the best uh of the practitioners of this kind of history  and he's done

a great job of gathering data and giving us demographic drivers and and i'm a  great fan of his work but i think in the end you can't get away from the fact that however  you you may how far you may get in constructing a cycle based model that the incidence of  disaster will just throw that model off at random times and in random places and that  seems to me what dooms the enterprise it strikes me so to speak um it strikes me that uh in your  in your uh talking just now about cycles that um uh y

our your your interest in counterfactual  history uh also comes into play here uh because that is essentially trying to run the experiment  with a different outcome um i wanted to ask you a little bit about um disasters that don't count and  by this what i mean you know you just were talking about churchill churchill is a man who spent much  of a professional career i mean he was he was rather old by the time he became prime minister  he had decades of experience before that and throughout the d

ecades uh of his career before  becoming prime minister he frequently mobilized exactly the same sort of rhetoric that he would  later apply to hitler to very very different kinds of situations you know he'll talk about the  suffragettes as being you know the the evil of of all time he'll talk about you know irish fema  you know irish uh rebels as being you know the greatest evil of all time he'll talk about gandhi  as being the greatest evil of all time and he'll talk about hitler as being the

greatest evil  of all time with hitler he actually got a lot of people to agree with him but my point in this  is to say that there are obviously lots of people who uh are wrong nine times out of ten and  then if they're right the tenth time um it's that's the time that really sticks and i'm  wondering in your account of disaster if some of the disasters that are standing out here  in a sense this goes back to my titanic question is is that some of them are the ones that  stick i mean that is cl

early you know the spanish flu killed an awful lot of  people but some of these other things such as uh again the titanic or the challenger these  are the ones that kind of rise above the transom so what about the ones that don't you allude  briefly to the opioid epidemic at the end of the book um one could point to the syrian civil  war and the migrant crisis that has followed do these count as disasters and if so how and if  not why not well certainly the opioid epidemic because it hasn't been

global it's been  national has been a disaster and it it killed uh over the course of barack obama's presidency  as many people as covert 19 killed in the final year of trump's presidency and  yet i don't remember ever reading a piece by jim fallows blaming uh obama for the opioid  epidemic it happened on his watch though and each year more people died uh the administration  totally failed to to deal with the problem and i do think it's it's a reflection of the way  our media work that there wa

s so little criticism of uh of the administration that presided over  that uh disaster a disaster that was beginning to uh urban has of course uh deteriorated again  last year with a big spike in in overdoses i i guess the the key here is is how disasters  get framed and you'll write that there's there's a phenomenon of uh the lucky cassandra that is to  say if you predict a financial crisis every year for 10 years there's not a bad chance that  you'll get one and and then if you get the right m

edia coverage you are dr doom and that  was neural robini's uh super k at the time of the 2008 financial crisis i had known nuriel  since going to new york university in 2002 he predicted a financial crisis every single  year from 2002 until it finally happened and then he's continued to predict them every year  since so this is a strategy that can work for you very well peter turchen predicted disaster in 2020  on the basis of a demographic theory of history he got it because of a pandemic but

that's okay he  still has been getting much better media coverage as a result so i think it's partly getting the  right coverage if you've been the stopped clock or if you've been the cassandra that just kept on  predicting disaster until you finally struck it it lucky but i think there's another issue here which  is slightly harder to grasp the spanish influenza is famous and unjustly so it's one of the world's  worst pandemics the asian flu of 1957-58 is almost forgotten and although covert ha

s now overtaken  that in terms of the proportion of the world's population that it's killed it's only just done so  and if you'd sort of been writing as i was in late uh 2020 you could have said it's basically the  same scale of disaster that was about 0.04 percent of the world's population it's now got got a bit  higher than that we may indeed end up revising still higher but the asian food 5758 is is closer  in its impact to covert than the spanish influenza and i read hardly anything about th

e asian flu  of 1957-58 because it's largely forgotten even by the people who lived through it and i since  i've started writing about it i've kind of jogged memories people have written to me saying yes  i do remember that in fact i was a child then i was i've never been more ill than i was with that  with that influenza but it's not a historically significant episode it's not one of those dragon  kings in fact it barely features in any history that you'll read of the 1950s and i i'm thinking 

a lot about why that is i think part of the answer has to do with the different attitudes of people  in the 1950s they had been through a lot they were grappling still with other infectious diseases  like polio the war had only recently stopped the korean war had only just happened i think the  tolerance of excess mortality in the 1950s was much higher and i found a good example  of this since finishing the book excess mortality in britain was as bad in 1951 as  in 2020 and who remembers that in

1951 there was a severe influenza outbreak especially around  liverpool with really really high mortality it's just gone i delved into the british papers  and at the time they were referring it to it as the worst winter in english history well that's  journalism isn't it i mean it's always the worst disaster the one that you're covering because  that's what's going to get you the coverage but only some disasters really turn out to have  that kind of lasting memorable impact that the the spanish

influenza did all for that matter the  black death so i think that's part of the reason that you can have a really big disaster with lots  of people dead but if it doesn't strike the moment politically if it doesn't really capture uh the  imaginations of contemporaries it's remarkable how quickly disasters get forgotten i mean let's  not forget this is not our first pandemic our generation um had the aids hiv aids pandemic  which killed 32 million people which is still about 10 times as many pe

ople as covered and yet  i keep being told that this is an unprecedented event that we're experiencing so i i this is  part of what motivated me to write the book we just we just find it very hard to get the  orders of magnitude right i think that's part of it well and it all again as i see it comes back to  the culture of catastrophe and why certain things resonate in the ways they do with the people with  whom they do obviously communications technologies are going to be very significant to ho

w things  play as you say the generational distance of most people alive now from the last kind of  really global cataclysm which was world war ii all of these things are going to play their role  as i think finally will expectations about health you know we're living in a world in which  unhealthiness as measured by for example obesity and diabetes is really terrible um and  yet uh in which expectations among people in affluent societies about the kind of life  they're going to live are you kno

w they're no comparison to that of people as you say in the  1950s so i think all of these are ingredients and in making sense of of the rush to the term  unprecedented yes right now you and i are allergic to because we know that when people use the  word unprecedented i mean really most historians most historians ought to be i think if historians  had one thing they could say to journalists it would be please remove the word unprecedented  from your from your column so let me you know we're we'

re just a few minutes away from questions  from the audience which are starting to come in and i'd like to shift to those but let me just ask  you um one one sort of final line from me which is so this book is of course an indictment of  middle management as we've already discussed how about pundits you know i remember i  mean you talk already about davos and people missing the points and i remember vividly going  to a lunch at uh at the belfor center in harvard's kennedy school which you know w

ell um the very day  that uh that harvard announced that all students would be sent home from campus and everyone going  around the room and saying one after another oh you know not a big deal you know in the end it'll  just be a flu nothing really going on um now obviously you are full of justifiable contempt for  such positions um at the end of the book though you do talk a lot about the um relationship  between the us and china and how that may or may not shift out of code but this is somethi

ng  about which many people are pontificating um and i wondered if you could just say a little bit about  where you think uh pundits are getting it wrong um and why and what you see uh coming coming out  of this for virgin america as you've called it well chimerica was uh that extraordinary  symbiotic relationship between the us and china from about 2001 to about 2007 which  was when i think i used that word first we seem to have gone from chimeric to cold war ii  extraordinarily quickly i was w

riting about cold war ii before the pandemic i think the pandemic  has really taken us from the foothills of cold war to some distinctly higher elevations in lots of  ways and it would be tedious to list them all but suffice to say i think we are in much more of a  cold war than most pundits want to acknowledge uh there's certainly a recognition that the u.s  china relationship has deteriorated that would be very difficult to deny but i was struck by  a conference that i attended organized by jo

hns hopkins last year by how few people wanted  to agree with me that it's a cold war even graham ellison a colleague at uh harvard and  uh illuminae of the belfast center who wrote destined for war can't quite bring himself to  acknowledge that this is cold war ii as surely as uh as world war ii was world war one writ large  i think this is going to be very light the first cold war and i think most pundits are in denial  about that because they're seduced by uh dubious concepts like co-repetiti

on that is to say we're  going to compete and also cooperate with china on climate and i'm constantly told by eminent uh  professors at stanford as well as at harvard oh this is not like the cold war because the great  economic interdependence of the us and china and my response to that is i can assure you that  that will just make the espionage much much easier for the other side than the first cold war  was so that's my take we were already in cold war and i think as in the first cold war amer

ican  intellectuals don't really want to admit it there was a real lag if you look back at the  1940s between orwell's first use of the term cold war which was i think in 1945 and a general  acceptance by the american intellectual elite that that was exactly what they were in so i think  that's what's happening and i end the book with the the geopolitical catastrophe that could happen  because i do think that that's much more imminent than people realize after all the thing about cold  war is th

at it turns hot periodically it turned very hot in korea in 1950 and my suspicion is  that we're much closer to a clash over taiwan or perhaps the south china sea than most people want  to admit because at some level they just they just can't quite imagine it and when you're sitting  around the belt a center table you've you've been to china many times you have chinese colleagues  you've had many chinese students it's just hard to get your head around the idea that in a really  short space of ti

me there might be a shooting war between the united states and china but our friend  jim stavridis read a nice novel recently imagining just such a conflict and i'm very struck by how  the the military rather than civilian professors are thinking a lot about this and you know not  every war that the military plans for happens but i find my historians antennae tingling about  taiwan just the way they were tingling about those strange cases of pneumonia in wuhan and i you  know i'm coming to trust

those antennae they're not they're not too bad well cockroaches survive  nuclear apocalypses so i've always thought of myself as an intellectual cockroach i was i was  just going to say that that you know one of the um one of the things that made teaching with you so  much fun and for the audience of the listeners uh i should say neil and i taught together at  harvard for a couple of years is that you know to your uh politics and economics take on things  i have my culture and society take on t

hings and i would say that actually if you look at u.s china  relations or shall we say white asian relations you would uh never delude yourself right now  into thinking that there was anything but a great deal of um animosity right now i mean  obviously the spike in anti-asian violence is palpable in the bay area and uh and here on  the east coast and and elsewhere and i think if you look in the cultural realm there's  plenty of reason to be um to support your your vision of the cold war even i

f that's why  i keep saying to people this is about issues we have with the chinese communist party and its  leadership not issues that we have with chinese people or people of of chinese descent it's an  extremely important distinction and we know from past examples in american history how dangerous  it is when those lines get blurred absolutely but we also know from american history that um that  the one leads the other and that the popular uh animosity on this much more everyday level can end

  up you know these these two realms are in constant dialogue with one another i think is what i would  say it's a very important issue for this club um i mean the the extent to which chi america is  the the kind of californian coast is something that i'm really acutely aware of since moving  to stanford and i have chinese american friends that's to say u.s citizens of chinese origin are  deeply deeply worried about the situation and i share their worry yeah yeah well let me  move to a few audie

nce questions um so here's one as we continue to deal with the  pandemic is there another disaster that you are concerned about you've hinted already a little  about the hot war but i wonder if there might be some some others on your mind yes one of the key  what points the book makes is that you have to be ready for quite a wide variety of disasters rather  than focusing on just one i think climate change is a huge issue don't get me wrong i think we're  actually closer to the worst case scenar

io than we were when the paris accord was signed and by  the way that is actually mainly because of china which is responsible for about half the increase  in co2 emissions since paris but that is that should not be our sole focus because there  are a bunch of other things that could happen that that we might prove to be just as badly  prepared for as as a pandemic i've mentioned one one aspect of of the u.s china relationship that  i think we need to think more about is that any major conflict

will be a will will feature massive  cyber attacks in the united states and the united states is extraordinarily vulnerable to attacks  on its critical infrastructure via the internet uh and if you follow the colonial pipeline story  you'll know that even a bunch of east european crews who might have had some backing from moscow  were able to disable a really large part of the uh the energy supply lines of the east coast  of the united states so with with malware so i think i think or ransomware

to be exact so  i think this is probably the kind of disaster that could happen much faster than the things  we worry about when we go to conferences about about climate change i do worry that when an  earthquake a big one strikes uh california and the west coast will will turn out to be just as  badly prepared for that as we were for a pandemic well one of the paradoxes which i want to  include in this discussion is that on paper we were very well prepared for a pandemic we had  lots and lots

of pandemic preparedness plans they just didn't work and i think that might  turn out to be true if there is a major earthquake on the west coast i won't go on  any further because i don't want to depress people but the key takeaway is disaster comes  in many shapes and sizes and you don't tend to get the disaster that you carefully prepare  for and that's one of history's cruel ironies there's a long list of presidents who kind  of get the wrong crisis the one they weren't really elected to dea

l with and in many ways  donald trump was only the latest in a succession on the issue of cyber threats and hacking  another audience member asks what can be done to better handle that looming disaster one of  the lessons of my earlier work on networks is that if you build a really really large complex network  which which we've done with the internet which we've done with the us economy which is highly  reliant on just-in-time delivery highly reliant on optimized connections it's extraordinaril

y fragile  and we need to think much more carefully about how to have circuit breakers when something like a  mile where a ransomware attack occurs because the easiest way to disable uh an electronically  interdependent system is just with something that spreads virally through it uh but that's i think  something that that we haven't fully digested what went right in those countries that dealt well  with the pandemic last year like taiwan and south korea was that they just when you you're able t

o  use circuit breaker techniques to stop the spread we failed utterly to do that so you have to think  about it all as as vulnerable networks that have not been well designed for the eventuality of  of a contagion the case of rsa back in 2011 has only recently been properly understood this  was a firm that was in fact providing secure id services to many government agencies and it was  hacked by the chinese in 2011 and the hackers were able to take just about all the crown  jewels from that com

pany's security system because there was just not no way of once they  got in uh there were no break walls there were no circuit breakers to prevent them taking uh more or  less full advantage of access i think that's the crux of it now we talk a lot about cyber security  i'm very skeptical to be honest that our cyber defenses are properly designed for that kind  of eventuality in which you need to cordon off a vulnerable or attacked part of the system but  you know what do i know i'm just you k

now i'm just a hoover fellow they're people who work on this  for a living and they're paid not to talk about it but it does strike me that we've had some  pretty good early warnings of what an attack on critical infrastructure could do and i don't  feel confident that we are ready for it so not surprisingly after hearing you um doom say for the  last 45 minutes or so a number of audience members are um curious to know how we can do better um so  um so um to sort of collapse together a couple of

questions here you know one wants to know if  there's a coherent approach to anticipating or mitigating future disasters and relatedly another  audience member asks the us has spent billions preparing for disasters preparing in quotes  with fear and threat-based messages and programs what can be done to get us to embrace other more  effective approaches i'm so glad that you asked those questions because it allows me to be upbeat  and not not a doom monger because i'm really not a doom monger th

ese are fixable problems uh you know  mr kingsbury the problem of bureaucracy is fixable uh the things that have become really deep  pathologies of federal and state government the tendency to produce a 36 page plan and  say the job is done because our assets are covered that tendency is very widespread and i  think it's relatively novel i don't think the federal government worked like that certainly  in the 50s and maybe it was beginning to work like that in the 60s but i know i know that  it d

oesn't need to be that way one solution to the problems that is uh one that didn't exist  before is to use technology more intelligently one of the heroes of my book is audrey tang the  transgender minister for technology in taiwan and uh and audrey tang was originally a kind  of cyberpunk rebel leading an occupy movement against the taiwanese government but got brought  inside with the mandate to use technology to make the government more accountable to the citizens  and that's one reason that

until this recent outbreak taiwan did so well that they have a new  culture in which they use technology to empower citizens to exchange information for example  they were able to solve the mask shortage problem at the beginning of the pandemic just by using  crowd sourcing techniques being transparent with the public saying here's the situation rather  than lying to the public which is what the american public health officials did to claim that  masks didn't actually weren't actually important

when they were in short supply a terrible  mistake that sowed the seeds of future diet about the importance of of masks so i think we  should be sending people from federal agencies to taipei to look at the way audrey tang's  various software platforms work it's the same uh story with contact racing something that  we did abysmally badly in the west but but in in the end actually worked when finally the national  health service did it in britain it turns out that really worked didn't happen unti

l september last  year and it still hasn't really happened in the us outside of maybe massachusetts but the taiwanese  and the south koreans have shown that you you can deal with the contagion there are ways of  doing it but you have to be quick on the draw and this is one of the big takeaways of  the book it is much better to be generally paranoid and jumpy quick to react than it is to  be meticulously prepared for the wrong disaster that i think is where where we currently are we  we have a cu

lture of us covering bureaucracy very complex regulation pages and pages and pages of  what look like uh contingency plans but when the rubber hits the road when there actually is a  crisis everything slows down to a snail's pace perfect illustration of this dominic cummings's  account of britain in 2020. anybody who was following his testimony last week got an  absolutely brilliant insight into the utter paralysis that sets in when a crisis strikes  and you have elected politicians uh career ci

vil servants and academic experts all  sitting around the table failing to decide on what to do and that that i think was happening  in most western countries in some shape or form uh last year so i think these problems are fixable  but it's it's time we stopped looking at china and saying oh gosh i've seen the future and it  works that is not the future china's system is so screwed up it really caused this disaster we need  to look at the republic of china look at taiwan and i think we can lear

n a lot from taiwan  and south korea and how they handled this can i just interject on this i i've wondered a lot  about and of course i'm not a political scientist so what do i know but i've wondered a lot about  the question of scale and diversity of societies because you're absolutely right about taiwan  and south korea there's no question about that but you look at the united states  you look at brazil you look at india and you see obviously three massively large and  multi-ethnic societies

they all happen to have various analogies and they're having had or  currently having populist leaders but really you know my question is what about the fact that  the societies are just massively diverse and have extremely complex histories of trust and lack of  trust and authorities and so on and you know is it really um feasible to imagine that what works  in south korea could work on the same scale and in vastly different demographic configurations i  think we've got to be careful of of a co

uple of of wrong conclusions one is um you know we're just  too you know too diverse to do these things well except that britain which is now a pretty diverse  society uh nailed vaccination uh procurement and distribution uh and it was also able to make as i  mentioned earlier contact tracing work eventually after you know failing to get things right for six  months so i think um it's not quite true that we can't do this stuff i mean the us actually has it  ended up making a huge success of a va

ccination drive that wasn't predictable when i wrote doom  i mean i signed off on doom back in october and at that point we didn't even have the face  phase three results in from fire and moderna turns out we produced the best vaccines in the west and  then we were able to roll them out even faster in the english-speaking west than in continental  europe so i think there are there are kind of paradoxes about the recent disaster the countries  that were terrible at containing it turned out to be

really good of vaccinating against it and  vice versa because right now the time these are struggling having failed to vaccinate their  people with the new and more trans transmissible uh strains of the virus that's why i'm very  leery of generalizations um and there's another that you could have made but you're too subtle  a historian to do it but i've heard it from many other people well we're too fond of individual  liberty and we don't have their collectivist confucian outlook and i'm really

really really  really dismissive of that argument because if we are so fond of liberty why did we submit to  house arrest or mass in multiple states i mean is it actually preferable to be locked up in  your home than to have a contact tracing app i mean i don't understand how that kind of  argument works we submitted to immense limits on our personal liberty compared to the taiwanese  and the south koreans so that argument which again is cultural in nature seems to me to fall by  the wayside th

ere are ways i think we that we can learn from uh the the experience of the last  year and a half and we can do much much better what we did badly last year without compromising  individual liberty and also without compromising the the diversity of of the country which is  ultimately it's it's it's source of strength i mean in the end i'm kind of an optimist  about cold war ii i think the us will in fact come out ahead mainly because i think china's  centralization and homogeneity its resistance

to diversity exemplified in the policies in xinjiang  these will prove to be as serious a set of weaknesses as the similar weaknesses of the soviet  union so so we have time for just one or two more quick questions and uh these ones are a little bit  lighter in spirit uh one person wants to know if there's a biography of someone that you're hoping  to tackle next and i should tell the audience that of course we all are on tenterhooks for kissinger  volume 2. so it would have to be after that no

all right i am i'm deeply deeply immersed  in volume 2 of kissinger i'm glad i wrote the square in the taran doom as sort of prep for  it but i can't actually imagine writing another biography after after this one i think i think at  that point my work will be done as a biographer um incidentally i i also have to note that your  early work in biography was of course about networks the rothschild so there's a lot of really  connected qualities across all of these genres that you work in and then

another audience member  wants to know who your favorite sci-fi author is or what your favorite book is i think uh it was  probably one of the sort of uh seminal moments uh of my science fiction reading that i  discovered this extraordinary book we uh it's it's a book that actually in many ways  uh anticipates uh orwell and and huxley uh and uh what uh uh we does it's a wonderful russian book  the author's name will come to me if only i can uh get my exhaustive brains to supply  uh genius that'

s it you have genius we which was suppressed uh under the bolsheviks  he himself was part of the russian revolution but we brilliantly imagines a world in  which there is no privacy whatsoever everybody is a cipher they're not  they're not citizens they're ciphers they they have eunifs everybody wears the same clothes  but best of all their apartments are made of glass and the state controls every aspect of of life  more completely than in 1984 and i as i read zamyatan's we i remember thinking o

h my god he he  foresaw the destruction of privacy which is one of the decisive and disastrous features of our time  not only in china but in unfortunately in the west too so yes if you haven't read zamyatin's we you  have a treat and so he was an astonishing writer largely forgotten because he was essentially  snuffed out by by lennon and his cronies his short stories are also absolutely extraordinary so  yes he's my i think he's one of the truly seminal figures in the history of science  ficti

on and not nearly widely enough red well thank you very much neil for the book for  the conversation uh for the reading suggestions um and uh with that i'll conclude the program uh  for today uh with thanks to neil ferguson milbank family senior fellow at the hoover institution  and author of doom the politics of catastrophe we encourage you to pick up your copy of neil's  book at your local bookstore and if you'd like to watch more virtual programs or support  the commonwealth club efforts plea

se visit www.commonwealthclub.org i'm maya  jasmine thank you and take care thanks you