Niall Ferguson On Catastrophe Through History | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘It hit me as I was writing the book, that the distinction between a manmade and natural disaster’s actually a false dichotomy because, and this is a point interesting that the economist Amartya Sen made about famines a long time ago, they’re actually kind of manmade, it really is human agency that determines how far a crop failure leads to mass starvation. But this applies more generally. I think, for example, a massive volcano erupting on a deserted island is a different kind of thing from one that erupts in, next to a crowded metropolis. And so it's it's human decisions about the location of cities that explain a lot of the big disasters in history. There are a lot of cities, especially in Asia, in pretty dangerous places, where there is pretty significant risk of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, and things like that. And that's why the subtitle of the book is the politics of catastrophe. Because whether we think of it as natural or manmade, all disasters are ultimately politically mediated, it's really political decisions that that determine how high the body count will be, even if the points of origin is something like a novel pathogen or a geological convulsion'...
‘You also write about the sort of social extreme behavior that was caused by the Black Death? Do you think disasters tend to provoke extreme behaviors of the people around them?’
‘Yes, they do. And that seems to be one of the obvious lessons of 2020 as well. If you put society under great strain with the sudden surge of, of excess mortality and the fear that goes with that, and then the measures, the abnormal measures that have to be taken to try to limit the spread of the disease, you create a very tense, febrile cultural atmosphere. And so when you look back at what happened in Europe after the onset of the Black Death, a couple of very striking phenomena occurred, there are these extraordinary flagellant orders that that roam around Europe, these are men who flog themselves publicly, engaging in acts of, often very masochistic penance, to try to ward off for further divine retribution. So, so that's one and the other is, is that there are these outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence, pogroms against Jewish communities who are blamed for for the plague. I was, reminded of, of those two phenomena when I was watching the very extraordinary activities of the summer of 2020 in the United States that the follows the the murders, as it has now been confirmed, of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin in, in Minneapolis. To most people this just looked like political protest. To my eyes, it seemed like just the kind of eruption that you'd anticipate in a time of plague, and it was expiation. So I felt as if I'd kind of stumbled into a reenactment of, of Norman Cones, the pursuit of the millennium, a wonderful book about the flagellant movement that I remember reading years and years ago when I was an undergraduate...
Let's rewind the tape to 1957. Now the 57-58 influenza pandemic was globally about as bad. In the US, not as bad. And I think this is important to bear in mind. So it's not a perfect like for like comparison… But it's still, I think, instructive to compare how the Eisenhower administration responded, because at the beginning, they knew no more about how bad it would be than we knew in January 2020, how bad COVID would be. That health experts said to Eisenhower, we can't stop this spreading, it's just gonna spread. There's no point shutting down schools or declaring an emergency, we're just gonna have to accept that there's going to be excess mortality. And let's get a vaccine as fast as we possibly can. That's what we have to focus on. And that's what they did. It's, it's not true that there's something unprecedented about how quickly we found vaccines for COVID, they found the vaccine for the so called Asian flu in 57 even faster, and they rolled it out incredibly rapidly. And that was it.
They didn't lock down anything. They spent a fraction of the, a tiny fraction of the money that the federal government has spent in the last year. And the economy basically kept going without missing a beat. There was a recession that had nothing to do with the pandemic, it was very mild. And you can't see the pandemic in the economic data at all. So what does this tell us? I think, firstly, it wasn't as if we could just have done that last year. And it would be naive to make that argument though some people did. If we had basically taken that approach, there would have been a much higher death toll, maybe, maybe a million people in the United States as opposed to half a million. And that's not really the the moral of the story…
It's clear that the society of 1957 was not only younger, probably fitter, certainly slimmer, but also in other ways more resilient. There was excess mortality. It affected young people as well as old people. And that's a really important difference. In fact, teenagers were really quite hard hit in 57. And, and yet, life went on. And that I think, was because, there was an expectation and acceptance of, of risk that was quite different in that time than in our own time. This was a population that had been through World War Two, been through the depression before that, been through the Korean War, had still battles with polio to fight. And I think there was a kind of greater social cohesion in the mid 1950s... Even if you'd wanted to in 1957, you could not have locked down because most people couldn't have worked from home. Whereas these days, about a third of people can do what we're doing. No, we do our jobs if we want to at home. That wasn't an option in 1957. A very large number of people still didn't have phone lines. Nevermind the internet, which of course didn't exist...
I think there's a mistaken idea which is very popular with journalists that you can blame all the excess mortality in the US in the past year on on Donald Trump and all the excess mortality in the UK on Boris Johnson. And I call this the Tolstoy fallacy. In War and Piece, my favorite book, Tolstoy has great fun at Napoleon's expense, showing that Napoleon had this delusion that it was all about him. And that's why 1812 happened. And Tolstoy keeps telling us no no, what's going on, in this extraordinary upheaval, where hundreds of 1000s of Frenchmen sort of invade Russia and and engage in violent acts. This is not simply because one man ordered it. I think that's a really important insight. And it comes back to the point we were discussing earlier about networks. The truth about government is that it's not one individual sitting at the top of the pyramid, handing out edicts. That's certainly not how the government of the United States works, because by design, the powers of the president are circumscribed. By design, it's a federal system, a lot of the decisions actually had to be taken at the state level.
And more importantly, perhaps, with a problem like a pandemic, any president or prime minister doesn't sit reading the science journals trying to assess the infection fatality rate. The President's job is not to do that. The President has experts, and a bureaucracy whose one job it is to deal with the public health emergency of the sort. There even was an Undersecretary, a deputy secretary rather of pandemic preparedness, and the failure I think that we want to attribute to Trump or to Johnson… in truth, the failure was further down the chain of command, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention really screwed up. And that was why the response to the pandemic in the US was, was so very unsatisfactory, dithering around until mid March then lurching into lockdowns with all kinds of unintended consequences. It was a very disastrous performance. And it's not unreasonable to criticize it when you could see it being done right in countries like Taiwan and South Korea that were much closer geographically to the epicenter of the pandemic...
I think the general takeaway is that it is better to be generally paranoid, than very specifically prepared, because you can be very specifically prepared for the wrong disaster. And you generally don't get the disaster that you're preparing for that. That's one of the themes of a later chapter, when I look at how each president beginning with George Herbert Walker Bush, kind of got a different disaster from the one that he was prepared for. And this gives us a history, it's ironical, quality, I think we are preparing, or at least talking about preparing for climate change, to the exclusion of other disaster scenarios. And we've already been given one slap in the face, namely COVID-19, which, by the standards of past pandemics is still a medium sized disaster.
You know, what next? I don't think that we're going to get from here to the end of my life, with only climate change to worry about. There are a whole bunch of different forms that disaster can take much faster than the disaster of climate change. To give one example, war. A war between the United States and China… So I think that the takeaway the the lesson is, and this is, I think, exemplified by Taiwan. It's better to be generally paranoid and ready for disaster in all its forms. And to be ready to act quickly, to react quickly than to have a 36 page pandemic preparedness plan with accompanying PowerPoint deck, that doesn't actually work when the points of contact with the enemy occurs.
And I, by chance, was in Taiwan right at the beginning of all this, I was there for the first time in January 2020... The best thing is to be anti fragile. Best of all, you actually are strengthened by a crisis. Next best is to be resilient, so at least you don't fall apart. It is no accident that three countries that handled this crisis really well, Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel, if you leave aside that they had a really bad outbreak or a couple of bad outbreaks, but otherwise they handled brilliantly vaccination. If you look at those countries, what do they have in common? And the answer is that they have reasons to be paranoid, they are menaced by their neighbors, and they don't know what form the menace is gonna take. And that's I think, why by and large, they were very quick on the draw, and we were sitting around, you know, looking at 36 page pandemic preparedness plans, instead of getting testing to be ramped up.
I mean, the best illustration of what went wrong in the United States was not all the idiotic things that Trump said, it was the fact that it was harder to get tests for COVID, got steadily harder over time, because of the way CDC mismanaged that process... And much as one would love to blame it on Donald Trump, it's hard to see that he was responsible for that…
I think the the naive reading, as it was unfolding was, China's winning this because China very quickly got the spread of the disease under control. And we completely failed to. But actually, I think, I think it may be the other way around. I think China did itself great harm, not only because of the way it tried to cover up the origins of the pandemic, but also because of the way they then tried to sort of bend the narrative with this very aggressive wolf warrior diplomacy.
If you, if you look at attitudes towards the Chinese government around the world, not only in the US, everywhere, they've got a lot more negative. And despite doing its usual, initial mess, the United States got its act together when it came to vaccination. And the western vaccines turned out to be much, much more efficacious than the Chinese or for that matter the Russian. So I think, in truth, on net, this has done China's significant harm. And we probably underestimate the, the costs and consequences of the pandemic for China's economy, which has not only got a demographic headwind and a debt headwind, but it now has the headwind that people are still nervous...
All disasters are the same. A bit like Tolstoy’s happy families, regardless of scale. And that, at the heart of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was the same recurrent feature of disasters through the ages that, that the problem wasn't really at the top, it was with middle management at NASA, the the engineers knew that was a 1% probability the damn thing would blow up because of leaking fuel. But the bureaucrats turned that into one in 100,000 because they didn't want to slow down the program. And I think lurking in all disasters, there is the obscure figure on you know, the third floor in the, in that office, whose name nobody can quite remember, who's sort of getting it wrong...
Even the Gallipoli disaster, when you look closely at it wasn't straightforwardly Churchill's fault… the point of failure is quite often somewhere in the middle. And that the failure of middle management of bureaucracy is a recurrent leitmotiv through the ages, we need to learn about that dysfunctional quality of quite hierarchical bureaucracies because until we have something much more nimble, which I think they've successfully built in Taiwan, much more responsive to, to changing circumstances and much more, also much more open to input from people, these disasters are going to keep happening, and we can't stop disasters from happening, but we can manage them a whole lot better than we managed COVID-19.’"
Given that lockdowns don't save lives and the costs of the covid
response will be with us for decades, it's clear that treating covid
like the 1957 flu would've been the much smarter choice
