How Will History Judge 2020?
Dan sits down with Niall Ferguson, a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, to discuss how history will remember 2020.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] I suspect that the fiscal and monetary consequences of 2020 will require us to take some remedial action way sooner than 2029. So yeah, enjoy, enjoy the party. I think it'll be a shorter one than it was a hundred years ago.
What's less obvious is how to put the pandemic of 2020 in historical context. What lessons can be learned about our response to past public crises? Can these lessons be applied to the one we're living through now? And what may lie ahead post corona? As we transition from this most unusual year, I thought it'd be good to check in with Neil Ferguson.
Neil is a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and he's the managing director of Greenmantle. A macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm as a professor, [00:01:00] Neil is taught at Oxford, Harvard and Stanford, a weekly columnist for Bloomberg News. He has published numerous books, 15 in total, including the square in the tower networks in power.
From the Freemasons to Facebook, which I highly recommend. It's about the history of social networks. And this book reminds us how vulnerable networks are to contagion. From the earliest days of the pandemic, Neil assembled a slide deck to chronicle everything he was learning about the crisis as it unfolded and provided historical context for his analysis.
Almost weekly, he'd update the deck and share it with friends and colleagues, which came to be known among us as the monster deck now close to a thousand slides. It also came to inform a lot of my thinking about COVID 19 and much of it can be found in a book he's been working on during the pandemic called doom, the politics of catastrophe.
It's a deeply researched history that raises serious questions about whether the West can anticipate and cope with future catastrophes. In today's [00:02:00] conversation, we'll look back at 2020. And we look ahead 2021. This is post Corona.
I'm pleased to invite historian Neil Ferguson to this conversation. Neil, who's a friend has sort of been like surround sound for me since March of this year, even before March, which we'll talk about constantly. Informing me and friends and colleagues about what was happening with the pandemic, where it was going and what the historical context was for this.
So, Neil, thanks for being here. My pleasure. Dan. Great to be with you. You know, during this past year, pre covid, you, you saw a lot because you were traveling this crazy schedule, including to some of the places. That should prominently in the start the spark the catalyst of the pandemic. And then you've obviously been in touch with people around the world since then.
Epidemiologists, government, public health officials, government leaders. So I [00:03:00] want to jump in 2020 and and you are the perfect person to help us put it into historical context. So there's that famous line by Vladimir Lenin that. You've heard a hundred times that people are quoting or misquoting, but, um, but it is apparently attributed to Lennon that he said there were decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.
So, let's look at these last 52 weeks where it seems like a lot of decades have happened and I want to go to the beginning, really the beginning of 2020, because in the beginning of 2020, I remember 2 places you travel to that I had, you had told me about 1 was to Taipei. And then you went to Davos, so. If the clock serves me, the calendar serves me correctly, you were in Taiwan just as the coronavirus was getting started.
What were you doing there? And at the time, did you have a sense that something big was happening? Well, it was [00:04:00] nearly a year ago. It was the second week of January when I took a trip to Asia. And it was a three stop Hong Kong, Singapore. And Taipei and in 2 of those stops, I was attending rather large conferences and speaking in multiple crowded locations.
Taipei was a kind of interlude for. Research purposes, because I'd never been to Taiwan and I was eager to learn more about it. And you may remember that an election was happening there back in January. So that meant that in the second week of January, I was hearing a lot from people I met along the way about this strange new virus or illness that had occurred in Wuhan, China.[00:05:00]
You will not be surprised to hear that people, uh, in those locations pay a lot of attention to what's going on in mainland China. And I was hearing enough alarming things to feel my historian's antennae tingle, if that's what antennae do. I began to think to myself, hmm, this sounds a lot like The early phase, the early stage of a pandemic, especially because what the Chinese authorities were saying and what the Wolf World Health Organization was saying sounded remarkably unconvincing, you'll remember that in early January, there was an admission that there were.
There was a, an illness, a new illness. I think it was referred to as pneumonia, but the WHO took the Beijing line that there was no evidence of human to human transmission. Now, Taipei is a great [00:06:00] place to think about what's going on in mainland China because they have a default setting, which is not to believe the Chinese Communist Party.
And so I was hearing A lot of, uh, anxious commentary along the lines of, Hmm, this is a lot like SARS. This is how things started with SARS. Same in Hong Kong, because of course, the SARS, uh, uh, one, which we could think of as the first of the, the SARS, uh, uh, epidemics started in mainland China, came to Hong Kong, killed a lot of people in Hong Kong.
So by the time I flew back to the West and. And it was indeed to Davos for the World Economic Forum. I was persuaded that we were quite possibly at the beginning of a major pandemic. I'd heard enough troubling things. And yet [00:07:00] when I got to Davos. So hold on, just, just Davos was what, late January? I think it was the third week.
Okay. Of January. And just to set the, the state for what Davos is for those of you who have not followed the World Economic Forum. It is where the quote unquote smart elites convene solve what they perceive is the world problems, government leaders, thought leaders, academics, journalists, heads of heads of NGOs.
Right? And so you show up there thinking, of course, this brewing. And, you know, at time, who knows, there's gonna be a pandemic, but this brewing public health crisis is gonna be top of mind, right? That's and what did you find? That was, that was my expectation. I at least expected to be having conversations about it, even if it wasn't in the main program, which clearly had been designed some months before, but.
What I found was a conference entirely devoted to the subject of climate change. The global risk report that the World [00:08:00] Economic Forum publishes each year before the World Economic Forum was, uh, to An amazing extent focused on climate change. I think the top four global risks were all climate related and I think the risk of a pandemic had sort of vanished into the, uh, lower reaches of the top 20 global risks and who was the star of that?
Meeting of the world economic forum. Well, as in all good pantomimes, there was a heroine and a villain. The heroine was Greta Thunberg. The villain was Donald Trump, right? But to me, the striking thing was that everybody there stuck to the agenda. Talking about climate change, and I found almost nobody interested in my hypothesis that long before we had anything to worry about from changing climate, which is really a kind of 50 year story, we had [00:09:00] incoming a pandemic on its way in multiple jet planes, not only to Europe, but To the United States to everywhere and almost nobody wanted to talk about this.
And I was getting some funny looks from people. Um, as I said, look, I actually think we're talking about the wrong risk. We should be talking about a pandemic. And it got better because then I discovered that there were, I think, four delegates to the World Economic Forum from Wuhan. And so I sent a rather anxious email to the organizers saying, are the delegates from Wuhan actually here?
And if so, should you not tell us because isn't there a risk that the World Economic Forum is a super spreader events? Well, it wasn't at least. I don't think it was. I think I found out later that the delegates from Wuhan didn't come, but it could have been because, in fact, at around about the same time, there was a.
A Brit who'd been in, in Asia, who'd come [00:10:00] skiing in Switzerland, who, who did bring, uh, the virus with them and, and did indeed spread it to a bunch of people in Switzerland before going home and spreading it to a bunch of people at his local pub in England. Wow. So it was an extraordinary time. And I wrote a column just after that, my first.
Really, um, COVID related column of 2020 was for the Sunday times in London saying, I have a bad feeling about this. And isn't it funny that whenever you go to, to Davos, uh, the, the chatter at Davos is almost always a counter indicator because if they're worried about X, that's the one thing that won't happen.
Uh, a little bit like if you'd been at the world economic forum. 2007, not many people were talking about an impending financial crisis in the same way. In January, 2020, we were talking about climate change as a pandemic was, was actually underway by that time. Of [00:11:00] course, we now know the virus had made it throughout Europe had made it to the United States was in the process of getting to every continent.
So I, I look back on that as a, as a strange episode. There's a, there's a footnote. Uh, which is that I may have actually been carrying the virus because I felt quite ill at around that time. And by the time I got back to California, I was coughing in a most hideous way, but I couldn't find out if I had the strange new virus because there was absolutely no testing capacity in the United States.
I would have been better off staying in Taiwan. And, uh, I couldn't, I kept going to the doctor at Stanford. I mean, Stanford is a place with pretty fancy medical. Facilities and I was told twice. I'm terribly sorry. We can't actually tell you if you have this. So I, I, I still don't know if I, in fact, was an early carrier of, uh, of SARS CoV 2 and it's too late to find out because, uh, [00:12:00] Probably if I had antibodies that they would have faded by the time I'd actually got to the position of being tested.
So I'll probably never know if I, if I had it and, uh, and therefore don't know if I have resistance and therefore don't know if I need to get the vaccine. Um, and that, that state of uncertainty has been characteristic of the entire year, uh, not only for, for me as an individual, but for the world as a whole.
And you at the time when, when I remember March, April, May, you were pointing those of us, you were in touch with, with whom you were circulating your, your monster, which is what we came to call your monster deck that you were saying 1918 is not really the comp for this moment. The more relevant comparison is 1957, 1958, the, the Asian flu.
So can you just. Briefly explain why, why you thought we were focusing on the wrong, the wrong pandemic. Well, back in January, the right posture was the one adopted by Yanir Bar Yam and Nassim Taleb, which was assume the worst [00:13:00] act as if this is the black death or as if it's the 1918 19 influenza, because, and this is a quote from the epidemiologist, Larry Brilliant, early detection and early action are the ways to cope.
With a novel pathogen, and that was how Taiwan responded with tremendous speed, they created an integrated system of testing and tracing and isolating the infected, which was why Taiwan had single digit fatalities from COVID 19, despite being right next door to the epicenter, the People's Republic of China, we did that around.
Uh, January, I already talked about even in February. There was still a complete failure to appreciate the scale of the risk in the United States. I was in Washington, uh, in February for a Hoover Institution board meeting, and I was slightly flabbergasted to find that the [00:14:00] various people I talked to in the administration really get.
The, the scale of the risk and you'll remember back then it was a common talking points, not just amongst conservative, uh, uh, writers and broadcasters, but amongst journalists on the left that this was no big deal. And in fact, seasonal influenza was much more serious and indeed it was racist of Trump to restrict travel from China.
All kinds of rubbish was being written and talked in February. Our, our mayor, bill de Blassio, said, encouraged people to go to the theater and go to go see, go see great, independent films. Get out. Yeah. Don't get spooked. Yeah. Th this, this was a failure and it's good that you mention Mayor de Blassio. This was a failure that, that was by no means confined to the president, though he certainly made all kinds of mistakes.
In truth, the, the, the failure was a generalized one throughout the American. Bureaucracy, including the public health [00:15:00] bureaucracy, which I think did terribly badly at that time. By the time we got to March when it was sinking in that, that there was a problem, not only in Europe, not only in Italy, but also in North America, we went from complacency to panic.
And one reason that happened was that in mid March, another person called Neil Ferguson, not me, spelt. I'm very grateful to my parents for their decision to go with the obscure, uh, Gaelic spelling N I A double L. It's cost me a lot of inconvenience through my life, but it meant that I was at least to people who were literate, not the man at Imperial College, London who published a paper saying that if we didn't do lockdowns, uh, if we didn't take drastic measures.
Then 2. 2 million Americans would die and half a million people in Britain would die. And so there was this great flip from it's no big deal to [00:16:00] shut down the economy, because this is in fact, as bad as 1918, 19. If you think about those numbers, 2 million or so American dead and adjust for population, essentially the other Neil Ferguson was saying, this is 1918, 19.
It's. Potentially as bad as that catastrophic pandemic, which was one of the world's worst in all of history in terms of the proportion of the world's population killed by March. I think we had enough data from China and elsewhere to know that it wasn't going to be that bad. For example, it was already obvious by March that the disease disproportionately killed the elderly that that was.
Easily identifiable from Chinese data, uh, in February, in fact, and you could start backing out a plausible infection fatality rate, the proportion of people who died who got the infection, and it didn't look to me then as if it was as high as 0. 9 or [00:17:00] or higher. In fact, 0. 9 percent was the infection fatality rate.
Neil Ferguson at Imperial College went for in his model, people. The Spanish influenza was probably a bit higher than that. I was of the view that it would be more like 0. 5 insofar as an average infection fatality rate made sense. But the really key point was that unlike in 1918 19 when the influenza killed people who were very young as well as people who were very old and.
Killed people in the prime of life, this was what made it such a terrifying pandemic that it was people in their twenties who were dying covered. 19 was not going to be like that. We already could see that in March. And so I started to say to people, look, if you want a historical analogy, and I'm. I'm in the analogy business.
I don't build models because I don't think the world is that easy to model if you're looking for an analogy that makes sense. Look at 1957 58 the [00:18:00] Asian flu as it was then called because it too originated in China. And what you see there is a global pandemic. Uh, certainly not a trivial phenomenon.
Killed a significant number of people, didn't just kill the elderly, although it certainly did kill them, but it, it also actually quite badly affected the very young and teenagers. And let's look at that analogy because it, it seems to me, and it still seems to me today, uh, speaking in late December of 2020, that that's more like what we faced.
At the beginning of, of this year in terms of its, its risk in terms of the threat that it posed to populations. And yet, and this is the key reason for exploring this analogy, the response of governments in 1957 was very, very different in particular in the United States. The Eisenhower administration essentially followed the advice of the public health bureaucracy not to [00:19:00] do.
Any drastic measures not to close schools, not to close colleges and certainly not to lock down the economy, which meant that all the public health effort in 1957 was focused on getting a vaccine, which they did. You've probably heard multiple times this year that there's never been a vaccine developed so rapidly as the vaccines against COVID 19.
It's completely untrue because in 1957 Morris Hillman working in the United States went from identifying that there was a new, uh, variant of influenza to having a vaccine within a matter of months, rather spectacular. Achievement and that vaccine was being distributed more quickly than the vaccines are being distributed in 2020.
So I look back on 1957, 58, and I'm struck by a couple of things. Number one, there was almost no [00:20:00] economic impact because there were no lockdowns. There was a bunch of, uh, of, uh, absence from work for illness. But the economy, although it had a mild recession, that year was was not impacted significantly by the pandemic.
The recession was really a consequence of of monetary and other factors. Secondly, the attitudes of people in 1957 58 were very different from our attitudes today. Namely, there was a greater acceptance of the risk of infectious disease as part of life. This was also a time when Americans were deeply preoccupied with polio and finding a vaccine for polio had been a major issue in the 1950s.
So I think the whole attitude of society was Was different in 57, 58. So there was excess mortality comparable in, I think, scale to what we are seeing today in some ways worse because more young [00:21:00] people were affected than in 2020, but the disruption to society was much, much less that that seemed to me a much more helpful way to think about what we were confronting than to tell people that unless they shut everything down, there was going to be.
Mass death 2. 2 million, uh, in the United States that I think was, was, uh, a misleading, a misleading inference from, from the imperial college model. And it led to, it led to the overreaction that basically shut the economy down in the spring and caused a very large financial crisis in the process. And you are among the experts who've argued that there's no real correlation between lockdowns and meaningful.
Uh, outcome in terms of beating the pandemic. Can you, can you speak to that here? One has to speak very carefully. The correct line of, [00:22:00] of response was that of Taiwan and South Korea. That is to say. To take very early steps to ramp up testing to establish a system of contact tracing, and then to make sure that when you isolated people, they stayed isolated.
And that that was the right way to go. We ended up doing the worst of both worlds because we did it around what we should have been acting, making sure that. The virus got to pretty much every state by by the spring, and then we did this very blunt instrument, uh, thing of of lockdowns, as I said earlier, models that assume a homogenous population in which everybody's at risk and everybody's spreading will lead to erroneous.
Policy measures, whereas if you identified early on the super spread [00:23:00] problem and also recognize that vulnerability was not evenly distributed through the population, you could do things that were much less economically disruptive than what we did. Remember, we basically shut down the most economically important states in the United States for a significant period of time.
And I'm pretty sure that the evidence does not vindicate that decision. For example, at Oxford, at the Blavatnik school, they did a. Really quite useful exercise. They tried to kind of measure government stringency. In fact, they, they did a really good job of assessing the different measures that different countries and indeed different states, uh, imposed and there's no correlation between stringency and containment.
Of COVID 19 the most stringent country, according to the Blavatnik index was [00:24:00] Argentina. The least stringent was Taiwan. Taiwan has had single digit mortality from COVID 19. All Argentina did was crater the economy in absolute numbers. Like yeah. Yeah. A dozen people died of COVID 19. Right. Uh, last I checked in Argentina, all that the lockdown did was postpone the.
Uh, the pandemic and this was a common mistake that many governments and commentators made, which was to think that you just had to flatten this 1 curve. Pandemics aren't just 1 curve. And this was something I kept saying. Back in the spring, they always come in waves. And if all you do is, is postpone wave one, which was essentially what happened in Argentina, uh, at a significant economic cost, it's not clear that you're achieving very much the best argument for [00:25:00] lockdowns in the first wave, and then again, in the third wave in the United States was we need to avoid the, the hospitals from being overwhelmed, that, that was a good argument and a legitimate argument.
But as I said, it would have been much smarter. If we had simply looked at Taiwan and said, Hmm, that's, that's smart. We should do that. Let's ramp up testing really, really fast and have a system of contact tracing. And then let's make sure that we enforce, uh, isolation or quarantines. If they could do that in Taiwan, if they could do that in South Korea and avoid lockdowns, I think it's a legitimate question to ask why we could not.
It's not as if we're technologically backward in the United States. It's not as if we lack the ability. Uh, to create multiple tests and to create systems of contact tracing, we just chose not to. We have, we have Silicon Valley. So we have, we have Apple, we have, everyone's got a phone on them, a smartphone, we have Google, we have companies [00:26:00] like SafeGraph.
It seems to me if any country was at least technologically equipped to pull off what you're describing, to build a Taiwan model, it was America. Correct. It, in many ways, one of the great questions of 2020 is why, given that we could have graphed the social network of every American very easily with data from Google and Facebook and Apple, why we didn't.
And I'm not sure exactly what the answer is, but I think from what I can gather that the big tech companies consciously chose not to pursue this because that they, they felt there was a. downside risk to being involved in, in such an endeavor. And so they punted it to the States and essentially said, Oh, you guys should do contact tracing apps at the state level.
And anybody who knows anything about American state governance knows that that was an absurd idea. And I mean, obviously it was absurd to think that you would [00:27:00] just do contact tracing at the state level. Americans are very mobile. They were crossing state borders throughout the The pandemic, you needed a nationwide system and yet we didn't get one and we still don't have one.
Uh, we're still in an incredibly backward situation compared with, uh, the, uh, the successful Asian economies. I think part of what went wrong was the mistake that the WHO encouraged, namely to focus on what the Chinese did and not what the Taiwanese did. When you looked at what the Chinese did after they'd Failed to cover up the initial outbreak when they finally did decide to contain the new Virus, they used draconian measures not only in Hubei province where Wuhan is but but in every province using all the extraordinary power that the Communist Party wields Literally to weld people into their apartments.
In some cases, there were extraordinary controls imposed in China. [00:28:00] This succeeded in containing the pandemic so that it didn't spread exponentially in any other province. But the mistake that many people made in the West was to say, Oh, that's how you do it rather than looking at Taiwan. But the WHO was pretending Taiwan didn't exist in order to curry favor.
Uh in beijing, so we kind of learned from the wrong china and and concluded that lockdowns were the way to go And I think that imposed a much bigger economic shock than was than was necessary Although clearly having made all the early errors and got into the mess. We were in by mid march We had to do some pretty drastic things or we would have ended up in In North Italian situations in New York and probably some other states with the hospitals overwhelmed.
So I don't think there was any real argument by mid March that we could just kind of do nothing. And I think those people, and there were quite a few of them, who argued on, like, A kind of [00:29:00] libertarian basis that we should just kind of let it rip. I think that was delusional because if you'd let it rip by mid March, in other words, if you had just pursued a, a so called herd immunity strategy without any significant economic and social restrictions, then the numbers of dead would have been much higher.
You'd have committed a kind of against the elderly. I discovered the word Uh, this, this year, I, I'd never, never come across it before that. That's the idea of, of killing the elderly, which turns out to have quite an interesting history, but we kind of would have been committing set aside if we'd, if we'd let it rip.
And in some ways we came close to, because remember a really high proportion of the early victims of COVID 19 were, were. Were people in old folks' homes, in elderly care facilities. That's what we were dealing with in New York State. When, when Governor Cuomo sent back all these elderly people into, into senior citizens' homes, it was, yeah, shocking.
I mean, that was a, that was a disastrous bl and it was made in multiple [00:30:00] places, including many European countries, the uk among them. So I think if we'd just been completely blase, then a very large proportion of elderly Americans would've died. This rate, it's still going to be quite a big percentage of the elderly, could be 0.
8 percent of people older than 65, ultimately, if we end up with a death toll of more than half a million. But I think if you'd done nothing, it would have been a lot more than that. And nobody really was able to do full. Full so called herd immunity, the Swedes who didn't do lockdowns, nevertheless, placed all kinds of restrictions on gatherings and, uh, and had, as a result, a worse experience than their, their Scandinavian neighbors, but, but not.
The kind of experience they would have had if they'd done nothing. So there were lots of kind of bogus debates going on in the spring about what the options were for the United States. The truth was that by mid March, it [00:31:00] was, it was too late. We'd already made the really major blunders in January and February.
Let me ask you about the medical science and public health communities. Um, I, up until this summer, I, I saw the hard sciences is the one area of academia and public life, largely walled off from politics. And the beginning this past summer, we saw troubling signs that I think culminated during the, during the, the protests, the black lives matter protests, where for the longest time, the public health community had been.
Telling people not to congregate in large numbers and then suddenly they blessed it saying it was a public health issue and it was important for people to go out in the summer and protest in the streets. And I have other examples of where it seems that politics started to muck around. It's I hear it from friends of mine who are medical schools now about the social justice agenda at some of those schools.
You you saw it in some of the. The evolution of the, some of the CDC recommendations on [00:32:00] vaccines and who should be getting vaccines. So can you put this in perspective? Is this something, is this a dangerous trend that something we should be worried about? Yes, but it's not surprising really the idea that workers, um, if you want to call it that, that ideas of critical race theory and.
The various, uh, equivalent ideologies in the realms of, of, of gender and sexuality would be confined to humanities departments and would not spill over into first social sciences and then hard sciences was never a plausible one. To me, universities are, uh, in many ways. Institutions designed to promote the transmission of of ideas between fields, we're always talking about the importance of interdisciplinarity.
So it wasn't likely in my mind that it would just [00:33:00] be in in literature and, uh, and history departments that. The new ideologies of the reconstituted left would, uh, would find, would find supporters. I was depressed to notice in, in the medical science literature, articles saying that it would be quite wrong to explore any genetic explanations for the higher.
Vulnerability of African American and other non white populations to COVID 19, these articles said, essentially, we should not explore genetic explanations of variance in susceptibility because that is not the case. In some way associated with racism when scientists start closing off [00:34:00] avenues of inquiry, ex ante, then science is in trouble.
So that seemed to me, that seemed to me a quite, quite worrying sign. And so I think there is a problem and it was very foolish of people in the natural sciences to, to start. Making political statements that was so obviously inconsistent with with the scientific, our scientific understanding at that point.
Mind you, the interesting thing about the black lives matter protests of the of the summer of 2020. Was that they, they didn't apparently increased transmission of covered 19. And the reason for that is a rather clever paper showed was that when protests happened, especially when there were reports of violence, the average person was more likely to stay at home [00:35:00] to avoid the trouble.
And so actually, mobility for populations as a whole went down during the peak, uh. Protests in the meeting, someone who's not necessarily going to participate in the protest who otherwise would have gone out just in their daily lives actually stays in because of fear of the protest. Right? So so the predicted correlation between protests and increased spread didn't materialize because non protesters were more likely to stay at home during the.
Protests and so social mobility and aggregate went down in those cities where there were protests, especially where there were reports of of violence. But, yeah, I think this is a key concern. I do. I do think the rotten academia dates back many, many years. And, uh, some of us have been talking about it for years, but it's a little bit like this that originally it was just, you know, conservative, uh, social scientists or historians, uh, who, who got canceled, uh, you know, it was Charles [00:36:00] Murray.
And when it was Charles Murray getting canceled, then liberals somehow felt, uh, unaffected and were noted notably absent in. protesting at the violations of free speech. It was in 2020 that the, the canceled culture came for liberals too. And, uh, similarly, it was in 2020 that, uh, critical race theory came for medical science.
Uh, and so finally, and belatedly people in the. The center ground of academia are realizing, uh, that what began as an attack on conservative academics, in fact, is a fundamental threat to free expression and free inquiry and universities without those things might as well just shut down. You talk in your, the main in the manuscript I've read for your upcoming book, which will be out in the spring doom.
You talk about there is historical precedent for. Public protest and in some cases, violence [00:37:00] during draconian lockdowns in a pandemic context, and you said actually one several centuries ago in Wisconsin of all places, which is what we were experiencing in the summer. So is there a real connection, at least in the West between between these lockdowns and people storming the streets?
I don't think it's just lockdowns. I think any. Pandemic because it's disruptive and alarming and increases anxieties and restricts behavior and in a variety of different ways will likely be associated with social and political unrest in the new book that you just alluded to do the politics of. Of catastrophe, which isn't just about pandemics.
It's about all kinds of disaster and how we deal with disaster. I look at other examples when a crisis, a pandemic, for example, was associated with an upsurge, upsurge of, [00:38:00] of social and political protest. In many ways, my favorite example is what happened in Europe in the 1340s at the time of the black death, the great wave of.
mnemonic and bubonic plague that killed roughly a third of Europeans. So a disaster much worse than the one that we've been through. Then, uh, there was great disruption needless to say, as a result of mass death and all kinds of measures that were taken to try to limit the spread of the The disease, the flagellant orders came into existence.
Now, the flagellants were groups of men who went from town to town whipping themselves, uh, as an attempt to ward off further divine wrath. And this active expiation was something that I kept thinking about. Uh, in 2020, because many of [00:39:00] the protests that followed the death of George Floyd had a quasi religious or sometimes explicitly religious character as multiple white protesters, so at least metaphorically to scourge themselves for the past sins of, of, of racism.
So this sort of thing isn't. Unsurprising to a historian, pandemics are very disruptive in all kinds of ways, including, including the psychological and the protests that we saw, uh, in the summer of 2020 were, were somewhat similar in that sense to the, the flagellant orders of the 1340s. There's this lovely moment, which I.
Describe in the, in the, in the book in doom, uh, in which a young female protester harangues a black policeman about, uh, uh, about systemic racism. And he, he responds, [00:40:00] uh, with, uh, an authentically Christian counter argument and encounters like that, these kinds of surreal encounters where young white people are telling.
Black policemen, how they should feel about racism. I mean, that, that seemed to me straight out of the medieval era, magical thinking at its best. Okay. Just wrapping up to two final questions. One lot of experts and a lot of folks in the media hold up China and China's future as a model that the, while they had a rough early.
You know, patch in the pandemic, they ultimately recovered and we could learn from China. I know you're a skeptic of that view. So am I. But how would you compare looking forward as a historian, China's strengths and America's strengths in dealing with crises like this? The temptation has been very widespread to, to say that China won 2020 because it's economy achieved [00:41:00] growth because it got the pandemic under control.
I think this is a complete misreading for a couple of reasons. First, let's not forget the COVID 19 is Chernobyl. But on a massive scale, if you happen to watch the television dramatization of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, I think you'll have been struck by some resemblances, in particular, the way communist party regimes deny lie in the face of of disaster.
That is their default response. Now, relatively few people outside the Soviet Union suffered. Uh, adverse consequences of Chernobyl. Luckily by com contrast, the, the Chinese Chernobyl Wuhan COVID 19 has killed, where are we now? 1. 7, 1. 8 million people and counting. So this was a catastrophe far [00:42:00] larger than Chernobyl, but with similar origins, with similar roots in the fundamental mendacity.
That characterizes communist regimes. Secondly, I think this year was the year Europeans and others around the world saw the true nature of the Chinese regime. Those of us who had been making arguments about the way Xi Jinping had turned the clock back ideologically. I think we finally made some headway this year because opinion on China drastically shifted in Europe and India and many countries.
The Pew organization did some great survey data. Some survey research on this. So in terms of including among some of the developing countries that were. Beneficiaries of China through one belt, one road, right? Even among some of those governments opinions change. Yes, it has also turned out that if you receive Chinese lending, you're not [00:43:00] necessarily entirely a beneficiary, right?
Because one belt, one road is, is a project designed to benefit you. Imposed Chinese power as much as to build infrastructure in poor countries, so I think that there's been a significant backlash. It kind of began in countries like Australia and then the United States, but it's no global backlash against the power of the Chinese Communist Party.
So that's that's why I don't think China won 2020. I also think that, although. The regime has the power to bring a disaster under control through mass coercion, a power that doesn't exist in the United States or indeed in any democracy. That doesn't mean that it is going to go from strength to strength.
There are still people who expect that the Chinese economy will overtake that of the United States. And indeed it came. A step closer this year when the U. S. [00:44:00] economy actually contracted. But I'm of the view that one of the big lessons of history, and it's a central theme of doom is the totalitarian regimes with the excessive centralization of power that they imply are fundamentally doomed to fail, especially.
In a world like the one we inhabit today, which has been characterized by extraordinary decentralization of power through technology, I just don't believe that you can keep the one party state going, uh, in the 21st century in the way that Xi Jinping is attempting to do demographically in terms of its debt levels.
China's doomed to slow down. And it can't really win the innovation race, I think, against the United States because it doesn't import talent. And that's the biggest difference. Nobody wants to go and become a citizen of the people's Republic of China. Whereas all over the world, the [00:45:00] most coveted citizenship is still that of the United States.
And even today, even after all the, uh, the, uh, the kind of disruption of the last few years. So I'll take the. The other side of the bet that this is going to be the Chinese century. I actually think the regime is in, in much worse shape than people realize. I'm old enough to remember all the debates in the 1980s when the intelligence establishment and most commentators greatly exaggerated the strength and durability of the Soviet union.
So no, I actually think what happened this year has dealt China. Two severe blows one domestically to its own economic system, the legitimacy of the party and the other and the other internationally. I think it's done irreparable harm to the Chinese, the Chinese brand and let's face it. This is not a system that can change.
It's not going to [00:46:00] rethink its strategy, uh, as part of a, a detente initiative under the Biden administration. I don't think they'll make any significant concessions. Look, this is coming back full circle to climate change. The thing everybody was worried about back in January of 2020. Think about this.
Since the birth of Greta Thunberg, China's responsible for about half the increase in carbon dioxide emissions in the world. And this year, it has actually stepped up. It's Uh, creation of coal burning power stations. And so while Xi Jinping says China will be carbon neutral in 2060, you know, I have a bridge to sell you to, and anybody who buys that story, who judges China by its words rather than by its actions has learned nothing from 2020.
Last question for you, Neil, many [00:47:00] historians point out that the 1918, 1919, 1920 pandemic was followed by the roaring twenties, lots of pent up demand and then the economy got rocking a. Do you agree with that? Analysis and be, do you believe we should we expect that we'll have a roaring twenties twenty twenties in the decade following this pandemic?
I certainly think we'll have a roaring 2021 because over the past year, various restrictions have forced Americans to save. Plus, they've been given a ton of money to save by the federal government. And so there's at least a trillion, probably more than a trillion dollars sitting around waiting to be spent when the pandemic's over.
I think that by the time we get to April, May, [00:48:00] once vaccination has been rolled out to a significant extent. Once it starts to feel like it's over, there's going to be a surge of, of spending on all the services that people haven't been able to enjoy, uh, for most of 2020, it'll feel like one heck of a party.
And there will certainly be a roaring twenties vibe by the second half of this year, something to look forward to, I think, but will it be sustainable? That is, I think the tricky question. Because the unintended consequence of the lockdowns was that we dusted down the global financial crisis playbook and did massive fiscal and monetary expansion to offset the supply side shock.
The fed has essentially changed its tune on inflation saying that it now won't mind if inflation goes above the 2 percent target for a bit, because it [00:49:00] just wants it to average out and it's been below target for a long time. I can foresee trouble ahead if this party gets out of hand, as parties often do.
If you think about where we'll be a year from now, it's conceivable to me that we'll be having an argument about whether the Fed should be acting. Before inflation gets too far above targets or acting maybe more likely because of financial stability concerns. Because if you think about what the stock market did this year in the midst of a global pandemic, just imagine what it will do next year as the pandemic ends and the fed and other central banks are still on a low rates forever.
So I think, I think the party might actually have to be drawn to a conclusion rather sooner than it was in the 1920s when, as you, as you know, Dan, it raged on until 1929, when it all ended in tears. I suspect that the fiscal and monetary [00:50:00] consequences of 2020 will require us to take some remedial action way sooner than 2029.
So yeah, enjoy, enjoy the party. I think it'll be a shorter one. But it was 100 years ago, Neil, I, uh, as I said in the introduction, I've been grateful over these last few months, not only for your friendship, but for having your voice and access to your monster deck that helped kind of keep me sane and informed and have a little.
Perspective, rather than getting sucked in the sort of mob mindset on all these issues. And I think our listeners got a taste of this today and they will when your book comes out, when doom comes out, uh, it'll come out in the spring. Highly recommended. I've, I've read the manuscript, uh, and some of the issues that Neil got in today just scratches the surface.
It's a deeply, deeply researched and highly important book. So Neil, thank you. Grateful for your time and your, and your insights. Thank you very much indeed. Dan. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Neil [00:51:00] Ferguson's work, look out for his weekly column at Bloomberg Opinion, and follow him on Twitter at nfergus.
You can also pre order his new book, Doom, at barnesandnoble. com. And you can also get it at that other online bookseller. I think they call it Amazon. If you have questions or ideas for future episodes, tweet at me, at nfergus. Dan Senor.
Today's episode is produced by Ilan Benatar, a researcher at Sophie Pollack. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.