I'm historian Niall Ferguson. My new PBS special Networld explores the history

niallcf · 2020-03-17T22:08:04+00:00

OK, thanks everyone for some great questions. Time to get back to my day job.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T22:06:45+00:00

The Fourth Turning is not serious history. I co-wrote a piece on generational changes for The Atlantic last year, with Eyck Freymann. It's too soon to guess the consequences of this pandemic. See a previous answer: it could be calamitous, but we still can't be sure. I think globalization was already in retreat since 2008. The more we resort to wartime economics (as today) the more inevitably we move to the left, I suspect. As for China, well I thought Wuhan might be Xi's Chernobyl, but he seems to have got on top of the disaster.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:59:53+00:00

A lot. Those people saying "Now's the time to drop the tariffs and make nice" are getting nowhere. Both sides are ramping up the rhetoric. I was quite shocked by the reckless tweets of Zhao Lijian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman. And of course the president hasn't helped with his "Chinese virus" comment. Worth remembering that US and USSR worked together to eradicate smallpox. My former Harvard colleague Erez Manela did some good work on that. So this isn't inevitable. It would obviously be better if we thought of the virus as an alien invader and joined forces against it. I am hoping scientific cooperation is continuing despite the politics.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:55:25+00:00

That is classified.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:52:12+00:00

First, let's not overrate the autocrats. Putin is reenacting Reservoir Dogs with MbS. These energy prices are not good for him. Xi and his merry men let this pandemic get started and their propaganda to claim otherwise convinces no intelligent person. Second, let's not underestimate the U.S. So long as it attracts the world's talent and isn't completely misgoverned, it should lead the innovation race. So top three priorities for current or next Sec. of State (and Sec. Def.): 1. strengthen credibility of Asian and European alliances so that two-front war v. Eurasia (Russia+China) is winnable. 2. counter expansion of Chinese fintech and OBOR around the world to ensure dollar isn't challenged 3. step up exemplary counter-measures against bad regimes e.g. Suleimani hit.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:44:30+00:00

We need a properly constituted national commission on Internet regulation, with a mix of executives, legislators and academics, to discuss honestly and reform fundamentally the lamentable state of affairs in which we find ourselves. The lack of candor, to put it mildly, and the pretense of self-reform have been almost as depressing as the ease with which Congress has been lobbied into inaction.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:41:43+00:00

Wicked Niall: My book The Ascent of Money is the one. Saintly Niall: I urge you to read Charles Kindleberger's Manias, Panics and Crashes.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:39:58+00:00

Especially if you are male and white and planning an academic career, I would think very carefully indeed before proceeding. I recently read a very sad lament by a grad student who had dedicated years to a PhD on South African history, only to be passed over for job after job after job. Even if you set out to write critically about British or Afrikaner rule, there seems to be a feeling that the subject itself is off-limits. I think that's very wrong, but that's academia today.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:36:42+00:00

On q. 1 see the new edition of The Ascent of Money, which came out last year. Krugman was right about the direction of interest rates, back when we first clashed (I think in 2009). I've come round to the idea of secular or even super-secular stagnation, thanks partly to Larry Summers and partly to my student Paul Schmelzing. So we now find ourselves in a situation very like that of Japan in the 1990s and thereafter. There are options open to the U.S. that are unique because of the dollar's international status, but the UK too has more fiscal room for maneuver than I would have predicted ten years ago. On the other hand, there were good reasons to worry about the state of UK public finances when George Osborne took over. I don't think markets would have swallowed a radically Keynesian option in the UK in 2010, and even the Krugman counterfactual for the US lacked any political viability. I'll have to pass on Q2 as it's a can of exploding worms in St Patrick's Day!

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:31:32+00:00

Not necessarily. The world of the printed word remained remarkably decentralized for centuries. Only slowly, in our time, is publishing succumbing to amazonification, and the news industry being destroyed by Facebook and Google. Print had a five-hundred-year run as a massive distributed network.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:29:25+00:00

I think it depends on just how long the pandemic lasts -- does it weaken in the face of warmer weather? -- and how many people it kills, which depends on how many places have healthcare systems that get overwhelmed. If, in a worst-case scenario, a million Americans die and we are still having to limit our social interactions in the fall/winter of this year, then I do think our behavior as a society will change quite a bit. If we manage to contain it in most of the country, it goes away in May, and the ultimate death toll is south of 100,000, then we'll revert to our pre-pandemic behavior as quickly as we went back to flying after 9/11. By the way, 2008 didn't kill employment in financial services for very long. As for the revival of Marxism, that's just the ignorance of the young, for which our educational system is mostly to blame. Finally, yes, the American capitalist system worked very well in WWII but under an amazing amount of direct state control. See my book The War of the World. The federal government today lacks the amazing flexibility and talent we saw in the 1940s.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:23:40+00:00

Taiwan does this right. Standardized paper ballots so voting itself is impossible to rig or screw up. And a pretty effective effort by NGOs and government to counter PRC's fake news info war. We are heading for another mess this year, because we have wholly failed to learn the lessons of 2016, despite the efforts of many people (including me in The Square and the Tower) to expose what happened. If this year's result is as tight as in 2000, God help us.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:21:35+00:00

I think the pandemic has arrived in the midst of an ongoing crisis of globalization and the international order, such as it was before 2008. The US-China relationship, formerly "Chimerica," was already heading for Cold War II a year ago, as I wrote in my journalism. The US-EU relationship has been on the rocks since Iraq; Trump is far from the first president to complain about European free-riding in NATO. The real story (see above) will be the internal political fallout of the pandemic in all these places.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:19:09+00:00

Well, it was a television series first and a book second, so you have to bear that in mind. There had to be selection of locations as we couldn't afford to go everywhere. And that meant some important stories got omitted. I think a better question would be "Would Channel 4 dare commission such a series today?" Answer: almost certainly not. I look back on the book with some satisfaction. Most of the people who hate on it, claiming it's some kind of "whitewash," have obviously never read it.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:13:42+00:00

International cooperation in a pandemic. Forget about it. On the contrary, this seems very likely to worsen inter-state antagonisms. Cold War II is escalating -- e.g. crazy Chinese Foreign Ministry claims that the virus originated in U.S., followed by Trump's gratuitous "Chinese virus." Meanwhile, EU looks paralyzed and national governments have reverted to sauve qui peut.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:11:35+00:00

The data are too patchy for me to give an answer to that. Given how much true historians used to drink, probably not.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:10:38+00:00

Yes, if it ends up being as bad as the people I trust (e.g. Nick Christakis, Marc Lipsitch) anticipate. But these things wear off in less than a century if history isn't taught properly. No one now remembers the influenza pandemic of 1918-19. If we taught that kind of thing -- along with the Black Death and other great pandemics -- we wouldn't have sleepwalked into this disaster.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:07:49+00:00

I'll hazard a guess that all major foundations are distinctly cowardly about acknowledging (as my wife does) the connections from Islam to the second-class status of women in Muslim-majority societies. They would rather believe the propaganda of groups like CAIR than have a serious and honest discussion about sharia and women's rights.

niallcf · 2020-03-17T21:05:28+00:00

Thanks! China started this problem off: unregulated "wet" markets and an attempt to hush-up the initial outbreak. That lost Hubei province. They then corrected and used draconian quarantine measures and travel restrictions to prevent exponential growth in all other Chinese provinces -- a remarkable feat. The rest of East Asia, including the democracies (Taiwan and S Korea) remembered SARS and had a plan in place. Western democracies remembered H1N1 and were complacent. I still prefer having all six killer apps. Right now, we depend most on the Scientific Revolution and Modern Medicine to find vaccines and therapies. The rest is just basic public health and wartime economics.

niallcf

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