The Munk Debates Podcast - Niall Ferguson on history's lessons for the world after COVID-19

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, best-selling author and historian Niall Ferguson joins us for a conversation on how history can help us understand what our world will look like after the pandemic.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode, we normally provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. But our world as we know it has changed. And so has our format for the next few weeks. We're bringing you a special series called The Monk Dialogues. We invite the sharpest minds and brightest thinkers for one-on-one conversations live on Facebook to reflect on what our world will look like after the COVID-19. 19 pandemic. These dialogues aim to provide you, the listener, with original insights into the pandemic's impact on everything from our shared values to the economy to international affairs. This week, we bring you globally recognized historian and former monk debater, Neil Ferguson, in conversation with Redyard Griffiths. This is an edited version of the live event recorded Wednesday, May 6th. Hello and welcome to the Monk Dialogues. My name is Rudyard Griffith. I'm your host and moderator for these

conversations. This is our fifth week where we've been gathering for you on one evening each week, some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers to reflect on the world after COVID-19. This we know. It may take months. It may not be till next year. It may be later. But the world will move from this period that we're in now, this crisis, this pandemic, to the world after. COVID-19. That new world will have changed. It will be fundamentally different from the normal that we knew before December, January, February of the last few months. It'll be a world where our relationships are how we work, how we play, how our geopolitics operates, how we think about our economy and our collective values will be refashioned by this crisis. The purpose of these

dialogues from the outset has been to step back from the news cycle, step back from the day-to-day info points that are informing our knowledge of this crisis, and really think big and think long. And tonight we're extremely fortunate to have with us a person that I consider one of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. He is a frequent appearances on the monk debate stage. I've had the pleasure of moderating him at a number of debates over the years. He's currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the best-selling author of over 15 books, many of which we have all read. He's a columnist for the Sunday Times of London and the Boston Globe. And he's here with us this evening from the United States, from Montana, where he's spending time with his family, writing busily and thankfully giving us the next hour of conversation and reflection.

Let's bring up Neil Ferguson and welcome him to the program. Neil, great to see you again. Good evening, Rudyard. It's good to be with you virtually. Yeah, well, we had the pleasure of seeing you here in Toronto on a number of occasions for the monk debates, and we'll make sure that happens again in the future. But tonight, again, a real privilege to have this opportunity to have a long-form conversation with you about your thoughts on this crisis and how it is changing the world as we know it.

And I guess, Neil, there's so much to dig in with you because the breadth of your research, the breadth of your intellectual endeavor covers a whole range of issues that I know we want to touch on in this next hour from China-U-S. relations to the future of the global economy to information technology and the kind of rise of Silicon Valley yet again during this crisis. But I want to begin with you as a historian, someone who's developed the muscle memory through a lot of hard work to think about how history informs the present and can help us think creatively about the future. So what do you see if you had to choose one facet, one lesson from history that we should

embrace right now to understand the world after COVID-19? What would that lesson be? Well, one obvious lesson, Rudd, is that the word after is actually the wrong word in the title of this series. It should be with the world with COVID-19, because it's perfectly possible that. that despite the endeavours of scientists, there won't be a vaccine. They never found one for HIV. And in the past, a disease of this sort would come along, wreak havoc, and then become something that we lived with. And we live with a great many diseases, influenza being the most obvious one,

that we can manage, but we can't eradicate. Some diseases we've really managed to drive back with the combination of public health and medical science. Smallpox is a good example of that. But I don't think there's any guarantee that the world will have an after COVID-19. COVID-19 might become a permanent feature of our lives the way that influenza has. Neil, what is your feeling, though, about how modern society, 21st century society, has approached this disease, has approached this pandemic? Because as you have written about recently and as you well know,

pandemics are nothing new to human history. They have had in the past big consequences, big consequences for politics, big consequences for how people organize societies and the purposes to which they dedicate themselves. So what do you see is the difference between our response now versus maybe what's come out of some of the big pandemics in the past in terms of large-scale sweeping social changes? So I'm a historian and historians have been largely left out of the public policy discussion, unfortunately, because I think in fact history has quite a lot to teachers and maybe more than epidemiological models that turn out to have been really profoundly flawed. The most obvious insight that history can give us is that the pandemics belong to that class of

disaster like earthquakes and also wars, man-made disasters, that come in dramatically different sizes. And they come in such, at such irregular intervals that they're extremely. extremely hard to predict. They're in fact, technically in the domain of power laws. They're not normally distributed. There isn't an average pandemic. There have been two pandemics in history that actually killed, we estimate, roughly a third of humanity. One was the Antenine plague during the Roman Empire, and the other was, of course, the Black Death in the mid-14th century. But there have been some other really, really big pandemic. It's not quite as catastrophic as that, but still pretty huge, of which the most recent was just over a century ago in 1918, 1919 influenza, which

which may have killed 3% of the world's population, not in the same league as the Black Death, but a pretty massive catastrophe. And I think if anybody had asked historians who work on this kind of thing to give an assessment of the threat posed by COVID-19 back in, say, January, when we knew very little about it,

they would have heard from me, indeed I wrote this at the time in my column. I said, look, we don't know enough about this to rule out the utter disaster scenario. If we have that possibility, no matter how low the probability, if there is a risk of something utterly catastrophic, then we have to behave with maximum urgency because we really don't want to rerun 1918-19 or, for that matter, the 1340s. That would have been the historian's advice. Now that we're into May, we know a bit more about the virus and the disease it causes, it's clear, I think, to me at least, that this isn't 1918, it's certainly not the 1340s, that COVID-19 as a pandemic as a disease is not in the same league.

It's actually probably more like the influenza pandemic of 1957-58 in terms of its likely death toll as well as its contagiousness. And that's a very important point of comparison, very different from the terrifying ones I began by talking to you about. Because if we look back to 57-58, it's really striking how differently the world reacts. to that pandemic. There were no economic lockdowns. There were minimal closures, even of schools in the United States. There were significant excess deaths. As usual, as nearly always is the case in pandemics, there were waves. But the economic and indeed the political impact of the 57-58 pandemic was very, very minor, certainly by comparison with what we're seeing today. And if anybody is listening who's of the generation that can remember that, they're probably scratching their

heads and wondering why our reaction in 2020 has been so much more extreme and indeed disruptive economically than the reaction of the generation of 57-58, which frankly just regarded pandemics as something that you dealt with, you coped with, and you just hoped you survived. We've really radically changed our attitude to this kind of public health emergency in ways that would certainly baffle the generation of President Eisenhower, who would, I think if you could bring somebody from 57-58 back to the year 2020. They'd conclude actually looking at our behavior that COVID-19 was in fact a mental disease and we'd all gone completely mad. So, Neil, why is that? Why is our reaction now so significantly different? Is it a different

attitude around risk in our society? Is it maybe in a positive way, a different attitude about the value we place on human life and how we think about the cost of this pandemic in terms of its threat to people's mortality, the extent to which it is killing tens of thousands of weak and vulnerable people in our society. Are these positive things or negative things that have caused this very different reaction than half a century ago? Well, I think that's the right question. It's tempting to think somewhat casually that attitudes towards death were somewhat more hard-nosed for the generation that had lived through the Depression World War II and indeed at that point had just come out of the Korean War.

And I think there's some truth in that. I certainly think that our relationship to death has grown ever more distanced. It struck Evelyn War as pretty distant the American attitude to death when he wrote the loved one. but we are actually in a very, very strange relationship to death, to the point almost of denying it. And I heard some people talking early in the pandemic as if somehow zero deaths were an attainable objective. It's clear that very few people have any idea

of how many people die in a typical week in the country where they live. And most people are not exposed to death unless they're in the medical profession until somebody very close to them dies. So I think it's partly that our relationship to death has changed and that the generation of the 1950s, which still was grappling with a whole bunch of diseases, polio, for example, was a generation that regarded excess mortality some years as something that life dealt you. And you just had to hope it wouldn't be as bad as the pandemic that granddad

remembered in 1918, 1919. But I think there's something else going on here, Richard, which is maybe more profound. What depresses me about what's happened in the the United Kingdom and the United States to some extent in Canada, is that we dithered around at the beginning of this, acting as if it was no biggie. And I really want to remind people watching that this was a sort of bipartisan in Sussians, because in fact, many people in the liberal media were very dismissive of the idea that COVID-19 posed a threat to North America. And it was shocking. I was writing about the subject. from about, if I remember rightly, January the 22nd, saying to people, look, you have to consider

the possibility that this could be really disastrous. And the world has never been more interconnected. Influenza traveled very fast in the 20th century, but it was traveling by boat in 1918. It traveled by air in 2020, and it traveled with astonishing speed. And we knew that it would do that. There was ample research. It wasn't just Bill Gates. There were a whole bunch of people, Larry Brilliant, for example, who repeatedly had warned of the danger that a pandemic would happen much faster than it had ever happened before because we were just so much more interconnected. But despite that knowledge, and despite the fact that on paper, our governments had elaborate plans for a so-called biodefense, what actually happened in some of the key English-speaking

countries, not all of them, didn't happen in Australia and New Zealand, but it did happen in the UK and the US, was that leaders and also professional. that the bureaucrats and the government scientists messed around for weeks. And then in mid-March, on the basis really of a single epidemiological model, freaked out and went from insoucians to the other extreme, which was to close down our economies and inflict a really massive hit. Actually, I think the economic hit may turn out to be more significant historically than the pandemic itself.

So it's not just that our attitude to death has changed. I think that's not really the critical point. The critical point is that something went terribly wrong because we didn't react nearly quickly enough. And then we learned sort of the wrong lessons from the wrong China. We know how this has been handled well because there are countries that have handled it really well. But the one that handled it best of all

was not the People's Republic of China, which actually caused this disaster. It was the Republic of China, Taiwan, a country that reacted extremely quickly, didn't believe the lies that were emanating from its larger neighbor, and managed to contain the pandemic so that they've suffered barely any fatalities. And we've paid almost no attention to that. So I'm more dispirited, frankly, by the complete malfunction of what was supposed to be well-prepared contingency plans for a pandemic.

That's what I think if President Eisenhower came back, that would be really baffling to him. He'd say the federal government's so much larger than it was in my day. You spend so much money. You've got all of these people in the case of the United States, in the Department of Health and Human Services with grand sounding titles, and they appear to have completely screwed up. And nobody's talking about that. That's the really odd thing.

You'll read almost nothing about what really went wrong in the very heart of the administrative state when it was supposed to have a plan for this. Right. We'll have to look to historians to write that story for us. Neil, I'm going to go to audience questions in a second, but I want to just pick up on one more thing that you said. You indicated that you thought the economic consequences of our response to the pandemic may be the biggest chapter, or one of the most important chapters in the history that will be written about this outbreak. Give us a sense of why you think that could be. What do you see

as some of the big trends that are going to emerge out of this extraordinary economic response to this crisis? Well, I think it's already clear that the shock to the economies of the developed world is significantly greater than the shock of the financial crisis of 2008, 2009. The impacts in terms of the destruction of jobs are much greater than anything that there has been since the 1930s. And indeed, it may turn out that we actually have unemployment rising faster in the United States than it did in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash. We'll find out the numbers later this week. But this is already shaping up to be the biggest economic disaster

since the Great Depression. And oddly enough, policymakers seem to think that this is just a rerun of 2008-2009, and all they have to do is dust down the playbook of monetary and fiscal stimulus, and all will be well. And so what we've seen is this spectacular expansion of central bank balance sheets led by the Federal Reserve in the United States and enormous widening of public sector deficits, just to offset lockdowns that we decided to impose to try to contain the virus.

It's really an extraordinary thing. Let me offer this reflection. Sometimes it's the consequences of historical, disasters that are bigger than the disasters themselves. And I think that the pandemic is a big disaster, but as I said, it's not a colossal one like 1918, it's more like 1957-58. The economic disaster that we've created as a consequence of our mishandling of the pandemic is much bigger and is going to be much harder to overcome. The temporary measures are not stimulus. It's just an offsetting relief effort to try to compensate for the fact that we've suffered the biggest supply shock that

there probably has been in modern industrial history. And it won't be durable for much longer. You actually can't stop an economy for very long and expect it to come back to life when you decide it's time to end the lockdown. So we've run, I think, a much bigger and costlier risk with our economic response than people yet realize. And people are always, wandering around Wall Street talking about V-shaped recoveries. I think this is just extraordinary, because it's the same people who talked about V-shaped recover in 2009-10. How long is it going to take for us to recover from this? Much longer than people are assuming, because this is not just some temporary interruption to normal service to come back to the main theme of this series. There will

be long-lasting consequences. The big takeaway from history is that pandemics are not four- or five-month events. They are two-year events at least, and it may indeed, as I said earlier, take longer to deal with because we can't have any certainty about whether or not vaccines will be found or therapies will be found. So I do think that for the future historians writing about this will say, gee, that was, yeah, it was a pretty bad pandemic. It was certainly worse than anything that they'd seen since the 50s. But oh dear, what were they thinking when they basically crashed the global economy to contain the virus. You're listening to The Monk Dialogues, a special edition of the Monk Debates podcast,

where we invite big thinkers to reflect on what our world will look like after COVID-19. This week, bestselling author and historian Neil Ferguson on what the past can tell us about our post-COVID-19 future. We've had a whole bunch of audience questions for you over the last number of days. I'm going to ask for your usual succinct to the point analysis, and that will help us respond to as many people as we can. So here's the first question from Pete. He said, based on previous pandemics, how would COVID-19 affect the concept and practice of democracy in various parts of the world? So, Neil, this is an ongoing theme in these dialogues.

I think there is an anxiety out there, a worry on the part of the public about how maybe the government response, how the geopolitical balance of power. something that you've written a lot on, China versus the world, how that's going to play out in the months and years to come as a result of this crisis. But it's clear, Pete, to an historian, the great pandemics of political as well as social, economic, and even cultural consequences. It's a little hard to kind of get a fix on quite how this one will play out. But there's no reason to think that a pandemic is necessarily bad for democracy, if anything, the period immediately after 1918, saw quite a flourishing of democracy around the world, widening of franchises, countries being created on democratic bases. It didn't last, of course, terribly long in the

case of Central Europe. But I don't think it would be easy to argue that there is some kind of connection from a pandemic to a crisis of democracy. But I think this idea is abroad and being discussed because there is a perception which the Chinese government's doing its best to reinforce, that somehow its authoritarian one-party system handled the pandemic better than our messy democracies. And if that narrative takes hold, then I think we have a major problem. So let me succinctly remind viewers, number one, this pandemic is a direct consequence of China's authoritarian one-party state, which lied and covered up the extent of the public health emergency in Wuhan for fatal weeks, allowing travel to continue from Wuhan, indeed from all of China, to the rest of the world,

into the lunar New Year holidays. So I don't think the pandemic is a great advertisement for authoritarianism, quite the opposite. I think it's revealed that at its heart, China's system has many of the pathologies that we came to know in the Soviet Union, and which gave rise, of course, to another great disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It's kind of similar, similar kind of sequence of events, bungling, blundering, covering up, and then eventually the acknowledgment. of the disaster when you can no longer conceal it. I'd say that if you ask the question, what does this tell us about democracy? It tells us that some democracies know what they're doing, that the top performers in terms of response to the pandemic are Taiwan, South Korea has done well.

Israel came near the top of a recent ranking of responsiveness. Small democracies that are used to having serious security threats handled this well. But the democracies that were complacent or thought that they had a plan but didn't have a plan are the ones that have come up short. The hope is that there'll be a chance to sort of have an inquiry into what went wrong. And that will only be possible with the kind of free press that we have in democracies. They'll never be an inquiry into what went wrong in Wuhan because the Chinese Communist Party is incapable of having a transparent inquiry into its own failings. So no, I think if anything, the pandemic underlines the benefits of a democracy. It's just that some democracies knew what

they were doing. I'm afraid ours didn't. Okay, let's go to our next question. So Nobina is asking, as a professor and educator, can you discuss or speculate about the scarring effects of the crisis on university undergraduates? Neil, you've, taught a variety of universities around the world, you know, a sense as to how these institutions are going to function. What are you hearing out there? And I don't know, is there some reason to be hopeful that universities can remain a kind of beacon of light here in a dark time? I think as somebody who spent most of his adult life in universities, beginning as an undergraduate and now as a professor and senior fellow, I'd be quick to recognize that it's hard luck, very, very hard luck indeed

on those people, particularly those people who were going to graduate this year, because there'll be no graduation, celebration, there'll be no commencement, and there'll be a sense of inconclusiveness about the end of their time at university. So compared with my eight-year-old son, who's really quite enjoying having dad at home. And although distance learning is not that great, he's really not having that bad a time. It's hard on my 20-year-old son, who's in the midst of his studies in England. I think that's worth saying right away. But, of course, that age group, the 20-somethings are in the happy position of being much

less vulnerable to the disease COVID-19 than I am. And it's even more true of people older than that. So while we should feel some sympathy with those people who are missing out on graduation or missing out on the joys of university life, in the great scheme of things, this is a significantly smaller hardship than those people who are suddenly falling gravely ill, and in many cases dying very unpleasant deaths, because this is a nasty disease, it is not a nice way to die. I think the question that I'm grappling with here is twofold. Firstly, how are universities going to? to revert to normality, if it turns out the distance learning works. And if it turns out that it doesn't work, then they have a real problem if they can't get back to normal in the fall. Now, I'm not sure on what basis one could return to normal service at a university or a school in the fall, because we're not going to have a vaccine then. And every pandemic in history that I can think of,

indicates that there's rapid transmission of contagious pathogens through educational institutions. So there's a sense in which universities have to kind of keep this distance learning thing going for longer than just a few more months. If they fail, they have a problem, but if they succeed, they also have a problem, because if they succeed, we're going to ask ourselves, Hmm, why exactly are we spending three or four years at these very expensive residential institutions doing stuff that we actually can do via Zoom? Second question, and then I'll shut up. Universities are supposed to be the places that really do the hard thinking about problems like pandemics. And I see evidence of extraordinary scientific responsiveness. some fields have been just blown away by the speed with which medical research has advanced

from sequencing the genome of the virus all the way to trying to identify viable therapies. I've not been so impressed by the response of other disciplines to this particular crisis. And in that sense, there's been a sort of revelation, at least to me, that maybe our academic institutions aren't quite as good at this kind of thing as they were in the 1950s. The professors and researchers who responded to the influenza pandemic then were kind of swashbuckling aggressive types who got to a vaccine with amazing speed, brooking no resistance from bureaucracy or indeed soft-minded colleagues. I'm really struck as I read the history of that time by the difference in culture in the academy then compared with the academy now.

So I think there's a question to be asked here about whether our elite educational institutions are really as good at dealing with this kind of thing, preparing for it, thinking about it, as they used to be. Some disciplines clearly are. Others, I'm not so sure. And in some cases, I think, certainly when I look at the kind of issues being discussed in academic circles at this time,

I mean, there are some parts of academic life it just seem at this point to be completely redundant. Neil, I'm going to go to the next audience question a sec, but I want to ask you for your views on this sense emerging in the last number of weeks of an intensification of this rivalry between China and the United States. And going into this crisis, there was a lot of talk about an increasing kind of Cold War feel

to the China-America relationship. That now seems much more acute. Where do you see this conflict between China in America heading as a result of this crisis, what do you see as the impacts, the effects in the months and years to come? And how much weight or significance do you give to that binary relationship that you've written about so thoughtfully and insightfully in the past? Well, I wrote more than a year ago now, a column saying Cold War II has begun. We just haven't noticed in the West, but the Chinese note it. And I stand by that analysis. Indeed, I think the pandemic,

has had a kind of revelatory quality. It's certainly revealed to many people in Europe that that is, in fact, the reality. And anybody who thought that the United States and China might make common cause against COVID-19 has been very wrong. If anything, the relationship has deteriorated dramatically in the course of the pandemic with a kind of extraordinary disinformation campaign that the Chinese government launched to try to claim that the virus hadn't in fact originated in China but had somehow been brought to Wuhan by an American military team competing in an October event. This was such a wild and fantastical tale that you might have expected to find it in the National Enquirer or its Chinese equivalent. It actually was endorsed by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry.

And this has unleashed a war of words and more than just words. I think there will be significant and economic consequences. My sense is that a great many countries, not only the United States, are looking at supply chains that are dependent on China and asking, is it really rational for us to depend on China for, say, our antibiotics. So I think that the pandemic's accelerated the descent into Cold War II. But I want to just add that I don't think Cold War II is necessarily the worst thing that could happen to the world.

As long as we can avoid nuclear brinkmanship and conventional warfare in peripheral geographies. Cold War II could be just a technological competition, a race between the United States and China in a whole bunch of domains, including, it should be said, virology, because the Chinese would love to get to a vaccine and the therapy before we do. And that's great. I mean, competing to come up with quantum computers, vaccines for COVID-19, competing to see whose artificial intelligence is best. All of this is going to have all kinds of benefits, actually. Cold War II is probably going to be better on the whole than Cold War I was. But there were benefits from Cold War I that we often forget. Economic benefits were particularly obvious in North America in that golden age of

the 1950s and 1960s. So Cold War II, I think, is a reality. I think it's been a reality for over a year. And the pandemic's helping people, especially Europeans, to realize that. And it's not the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing that would, of course, could happen would be hot war. And World War III seems like a great deal worse as an alternative than Cold War II. Thanks, Neil. Let's take another audience question now for you. It's Kevin asking, what are the signs that the world will be prepared for the next pandemic, or is history doomed to repeat itself? So, in short, Neil, do we learn the lessons the past teaches us, history teaches us, or at best does history rhyme, not repeat? What's your verdict?

Well, we know we can learn because we have done, at least some countries learned. I think what is interesting is that countries that had at least some sense of the dangerousness of SARS and mirrors were the countries that did best in 2020. And countries that had only really being paying attention to H1N1 to swine flu in 2009 did badly. I think it's probable that one of the things that went wrong in the UK and the US was that the experts and the bureaucrats were expecting an influenza pandemic, not a coronavirus. And they hadn't really understood the lessons of SARS and mirrors. And the obvious lesson was that something like this, if it's deadly and contagious, requires incredibly rapid action. You can't count on a quick path to herd immunity.

You might kill a great many people doing that. So I think it's very clear that we have been trying for centuries to learn the lessons of pandemics. Remember, back in the 14th century, people had no clue what was actually responsible for bubonic and pneumonic plague. It took a long time for scientists to work out what was really transmitting the disease. And in some ways, you can tell the story of the history of pandemics as a kind of heroic story of scientists, figuring out what's doing the damage, whether it's yellow fever or cholera. And I think that there's no question that we have got significantly better with respect to science at dealing with this kind of thing.

The failure is not on the part of science. The failure is in the public policy area where we seem to have bureaucracies with, let me give you an example, a 36-page biodefense plan that goes back to 2018 in the United States, 36 pages, which turned out to be worthless waffle when the rubber hit the road. So I think the lessons we need to learn aren't just about viruses or matter any pathogen. We have to learn that there is something amiss with what is probably best called the administrative state, the bloated bureaucracy that is supposed to have a biodefense strategy and turns out not to have one. That's what we really need to dig into. Great insight. Let's go to our next audience question for you. It's from Gene. He's

asking, how does this change our society going forward in terms the trust of authority, the willingness to accept ever-accreasing abridgments of our privacy and other, in quotes, personal rights? Neil, do you see this as a, I don't know, just as an interesting kind of litmus test, a watershed moment where, I don't know, people get used to living with less privacy and we somehow culturally back away from those rights? Or do you think it's going to make us even more protective of them? Well, there's a couple of things. I think in emergencies, whether it's war or plague or some other disaster, citizens expect to assume that there will be emergency measures that will temporarily circumscribe their freedoms, including freedom of movement.

That's not new, and it doesn't, it seems to me, pose some fundamental threat to democracy, as long as we understand, that emergencies are temporary. It's a little bit more worrying when, as in the United States, emergency powers become just a permanent, feature. They never actually expire. That, I think, is something that Americans need to give a lot of thought to. There's a second issue, though, and that is the issue of technology in this crisis, because this is a pandemic happening to a networked world digitally as well as in terms of transportation. And a very important way in which you can contain this kind of contagion is using digital data to map social networks and trace contacts of infected people. In fact, the correct policy mix to cope with COVID-19

is testing, large-scale testing, followed by contact tracing. You actually have to do both. This is what Taiwan and South Korea got very right and what at least two English-speaking countries got very wrong. So can you have that kind of policy without substantial loss of privacy? many people, I think, worry in the United States that if you have an app of the sort that they have in countries like Taiwan and Singapore, you really are just inches away from being under the kind of surveillance regime that they have in the People's Republic of China. And I think that's a misconception, but it's a misconception that's understandable because of the ways in which the big tech companies, I'm talking about you, Facebook, even though you're carrying this conversation, also Google and I think, to a degree, Apple, the way in which those big tech companies have harvested data from us as individuals and not looked after it and not treated it as our data, but as their data. This is why I think people recoil of it when they hear the news that Apple and Google are working together on a contact tracing app. In Taiwan, they've really thought deeply about this to make sure

that when data are being used for a public health purpose, privacy is still protected. And I I think the trend there is towards the notion that the data belong to individuals and should actually be kept in as far as possible private, except when some emergency of this sort arises. And I think having just visited Taiwan back in early January, I think that's the right model, because we don't want to throw away the advantages of technology. Having no contact tracing, which is basically what the US is doing and trying to go back to work, is essentially going to be playing whack-a-mole with the blindfold on. So we can't just throw away the technology.

It ought to have been an advantage that the United States are the biggest tech companies in the world. And it turned out to have no public advantage at all because they didn't really make the data available for public health purposes, and the government didn't know what to do with it anyway. I do think there's a solution to this problem that doesn't compromise our privacy

that makes the most of technology, but it requires a root-and-branch reform of big tech, which, unless we fundamentally change it, is going to pose as bigger threat to individual liberty as the Chinese Communist Party because it will essentially have far too much access to our private data and no real constraint on what it can do with it. That's where we are now.

You're listening to the Monk Dialogues, a special series of the Monk Debates podcast. Each week, for the next few weeks, we'll bring you one-on-one conversations with the sharpest minds and the brightest thinkers, reflecting on how COVID-19 will change the world as we know it. If you're enjoying this podcast, write a review on iTunes. Check us out on Twitter or Facebook for the date of our next live Monk Dialogs.

And send us your questions for our guests in advance at Dialogues at Monk Debates.com. Now, back to the episode. Let's go to our next question coming to us from Eric. He's asking, Russia has received barely a mention in the previous four monk dialogues. Well, Eric, we'll try to correct that now for you. If I can just pull back on that question a bit, the focus is important, one we should reflect on. Is Russia irrelevant to global affairs post-COVID-19 or as this conflict spirals out in the years to come? What is the Russia? piece here. I mean, they're battling a very bad outbreak right now. That's right. And Russia is one of the quite big countries in the world that doesn't have anything resembling a flattening of the curve. In fact, cases, as far as I can see on the latest data are growing close to exponentially. They're certainly growing. And more importantly, COVID-19 is spreading right across Russia, right across the population. And so the crisis is a real one for a problem.

President Putin, who thought he could somehow hush up the problem in the way that he's hushed so much else up when doctors spoke out. They were disappear. That's the Putin approach. But the great thing about a pandemic is that it is a moment of truth. It's a moment of truth for all authoritarian regimes that think that they can lie their way out of a crisis because the virus doesn't hear their lies. So I'm going to be very interested to see which authoritarian regime in the world is undermined the most by this crisis. There will certainly be some political casualties, even if President Putin can seem unassailable. No dictator is unassailable if they really screw up. The other thing to bear in mind is that in terms of Cold War II, Russia is very much the junior partner of China.

But it's a junior partner with a great deal of expertise, not least when it comes to information warfare and cyber warfare. And I think one of the striking features of this crisis is that we're seeing the Chinese now adopting Russian tactics. There are Chinese bots all over social media, just like they're a Russian bots. And if you get drawn into these arguments, as I have been, I wrote a column asking Xi Jinping six direct questions about the way in which the pandemic had originated and been mishandled in China. China, and I've been getting, as a result, all kinds of nastiness online from what are obviously Chinese bots and trolls. Well, they learnt that in Moscow, and it's quite striking how much they've copied the Russian approach. So, yeah, Russia's a player all right. It's not the big player that it once was in the days of the Soviet Union, but it's still very much a player,

assuming, of course, that Putin can weather the social, public health and economic storm that he's currently dealing with. Yeah, I think that's a really important point to underline here, that it's not just democracies that are going to be pressure tested here in some ways, autocracies as maybe more fragile, brittle hierarchies, something you've written a lot about, could be under a great deal of stress. Let's go to our next question, and it's from Rudolph. He's saying, is there a divide between leaders and societies? We've seen citizens and companies taking actions before state guidelines, as it was the case of Brazil. Can Professor Ferguson elaborate on this?

Thanks. Thanks, Rudolph. Great question. I think we'll probably find when we delve into the data that the most important thing that contained the spread of COVID-19 and prevented it, just sweeping through the world's population, is social distancing. that actually the behavior of individuals as they adapted to the threat was more important in slowing down, lowering the reproduction number, slowing down the spread than lockdowns.

Many of the coercive measures that governments introduced came too late really to be effective and it inflicted considerably more harm than the good that they did. to give you an illustration of this, the Blavatnik School at Oxford has a very good study of government measures measuring them by stringency. And if you look at the website, the latest study shows that there's quite considerable variation in the stringency of government rules. It doesn't correlate at all to the extent of infection in countries. It looks as if a great many government measures were in fact completely ineffective. And what really matters mattered with social distancing, changes of behavior, mask wearing, that kind of thing. But broadly speaking,

I think the changes of behavior that people adopted, not necessarily government orders, but because they learned quickly about the threat that they faced, those seem to have been really the crucial things. And of course, the government can say, okay, that's it, it's all over. You can go back to work now. But people will probably continue practicing social distancing and be very wary of a premature you'll return to normalcy. So that's, I think, what's emerging from research as we speak. But I should add the caveat that this is early days in a pandemic and we have a lot more to learn about the disease and its consequences. Great. Let's go to our next question. Tanya is asking, is this situation going to set back the environmental movement? Are there regulations that have been

canceled? You know, what happens? In a sense, I think she's asking. asking, Neil, and so it is an interesting question. To what extent will growth be everything coming out of this crisis and the extent to which economies are going to make decisions not necessarily based on environmental considerations, but on returning to growth, dealing with record unemployment to trying to put the economy back together again? I was at the World Economic Forum back in January, and the real dominant theme of that conference was the environment climate change. The four top global risks in the annual risk report of the World Economic Forum were all climate-related. And I wandered around that little Swiss ski resort saying,

you know what, I know climate change is serious, but there's actually a pandemic going to happen this month, and you probably should be talking about that. I do think that climate change was in danger. of taking the oxygen away from all other threats that we should be discussing, it's not the only threat we face. This pandemic has nothing to do with climate change, really nothing. And yet we wandered into it.

At least the world's economic elite wandered into it, having an argument about long-range average temperatures, which turn out not to matter terribly much when you're battling for breath in a crowded hospital in Italy or for that matter, New York. The good news is that if you want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, there's nothing quite like shutting down the economy of the world to achieve that. And I'm sure some of those watching have heard of the wonderful blue skies that have resulted in some of the big industrial centres of the world. Yep, it's clear if you want to stop climate change, the way to do it is undoubtedly to shut down economic activity. But Greta Duneberg, of course, has argued for that.

But now that we see what happens when we shut down economic activity, it's actually not ideal, is it? So I think that the environmental movement needs to learn from this, that monomaniacal focus on one issue is not necessarily the correct way to proceed. There are trade-offs. Bjorn Lomborg is a good book coming out about this that I just read in manuscript, making the argument that, yeah, we definitely have a problem here. we do need to have mitigation strategies, but we can't have mitigation strategies that crater the economy and cause mass unemployment and zero growth, because there will be costs to that in terms of human life and welfare that we can't ignore. So we have to get away from the kind of absolutist arguments that the likes of Greta Tundberg make, stop the economy now. I mean, she said that at

Davos. Well, we've just done it. And guess what? Mass unemployment is not particularly pretty either. These are trade-offs. There are trade-offs in all the major public policy issues we confront, all the threats that we face. Let's not just talk endlessly about one threat and ignore all the others, especially when, as in the case of this public health disaster, it was a much more proximate threat than climate change. Just to build on that, Neil, because it's an important point. Do you think we come out of this somehow with a, I don't know, a richer, more nuanced conversation about these big global challenges? Is there reason to be hopeful that as you say, in a great disruption like this, you can respond to that by resetting and by resetting

the global conversation around maybe a new awareness or appreciation of what's really important. Well, Rod Jad here's hoping. Wouldn't that be great? But I must admit, I don't have tremendously high hopes because I think back to some of the early arguments that were triggered by the the pandemic in the media and academic circles. There was the story on CNN complaining that the US task force and the coronavirus was all male and all white. Like that was really the key thing. We must have diversity.

That was the priority. And you know, you get these stories that, in my view, garble the issue of why there are disproportionate fatalities in the African American and other minority population. it's frustrating really if one wants to talk seriously about the science or the economics of a pandemic to have the virtue signalling brigade show up with their endless litany of grievances and priorities that just frankly seem wrongheaded in an emergency it doesn't seem like the top priority to worry about the diversity of the committee surely the only thing that matters is having the best qualified experts to deal with a problem.

So, yeah, I'd love to think that we would emerge from this with a new clarity of vision. Prepared, for example, to talk about the role of genetics in explaining differential impacts of the virus. But of course, nobody wants to go there because if you even talk about those questions, you get kicked out of universities like the University of Cambridge to name just one.

So, no, I would love to think that there would be some kind of clearing of the air and a return in academic life and journalistic life to a meaningful freedom of speech. But that trend, I think, will take more than a pandemic to achieve. So political correctness will not be a casualty of COVID-19. Okay, Neil, I want to try to just squeeze in a couple more questions. This is Steve asking, if the world is going to return to a better state than the previous normal, what do we dramatically need to change or improve? So I guess he's a little skeptical about the value of what went before COVID-19. But do you see Neil some opportunity here? I'll be very brief so that we can

squeeze in another question, Roger. I mean, number one, I've talked about it before. We have to have a root and branch reform of bureaucracies that have failed. And we need to Taiwanese our government. A big government failed in this pandemic. Anybody who thinks, thinks the pandemic's an advert for big government isn't paying attention. This has been an epic fail for a very bloated bureaucracy in the United States. So that's part one. Part two, you know, normal. Normal is something that will be very difficult to get back to. And I don't think it's so much that we'll be thinking of wonderful ways to improve the normal of the future. It's more that we will find ourselves maybe stuck with a bunch of new practices related to social distancing that will

make life really quite different and not necessarily pleasantly different. Parties, crowded bars, crowded restaurants, crowded lecture halls, Rudyard, I'm afraid. I mean, all of those things may suddenly seem like things of the past belonging to a vanished normal that predated 2020. And I suspect over the next couple of years we're going to be very focused on just coming up with a new way of living, as I said at the beginning, living with COVID-19, because it will turn it to be much harder to get rid of than many people are currently assuming. Of course, it will be great if people like me can do a great deal more of discussion and lecturing via the internet, instead of getting on planes and flying around the world, contributing significantly to the

problem of climate change. If I can be a more sedentary public intellectual, then that will definitely be a positive, not just for the environment, but for me and my family. Yeah, this is practically zero emissions, you know, compared to a normal monk debate. Okay, let's take our last question of the evening and then we're going to let you go. It's from Joel. If small states are the best respondents to the crisis, should the U.S. explore a radical decentralization strategy? Is it time to rethink the traditional nation state in light of this crisis? And as you say, a checkered response.

Well, I wrote an essay for the Spectator magazine about a month. ago saying that no superpower was coming out of this well, but the little city states, or quasi city states like Taiwan and Israel and the smaller states were doing better. There are dis-economies of scale in a pandemic. That was true way back in the time of the Romans. If you're a big integrated empire, you are very, very vulnerable to a new pathogen. But I think the key to answering this question is, is indeed that decentralization is a good thing. And that the more you you can localize and decentralize, the better. It's kind of happened willy-nilly in the United States.

The states, the state governors, ended up, and indeed, in some cases, the cities, ended up making their own decisions about the extent of lockdowns and restrictions. That was exactly what happened in past pandemics. And a good thing, too, because if you think about the radical difference between a state like Montana, where I am and California, where I usually live, would have been crazy to have adopted Californian policies here. So I think one of the key lessons, not just of this pandemic, but of modernity is that excessive centralization is dysfunctional. And that is why in the final analysis, China won't be a winner because it will become clear that China's central pathology is excessive

centralization of power. And that is one reason that they ended up making this disaster happen in the first place, whereas more decentralized big states are just going to do better over the long run. I think that the classic takeaway here, which I think is of relevance to places other than the United States, is that decentralized democratic states tend to do badly in the first inning of a crisis. They tend to be in disarray when the war begins. But over time, confronted with a new threat, decentralized free society, will get to better solutions much faster than a highly centralized autocratic society. So I think the lesson of the networked world is you want distributed networks, not highly centralized

ones. And that's a lesson that isn't just specific to this pandemic. It was one of the central themes of my book, The Square and the Tower. It's why I think we need to weaken the power of big tech platforms and make the internet as it was supposed to be a distributed decentralized network, not one dominated by a few near monopolies. Well, I just want to thank you. It's always such a pleasure to talk, the breadth, the perspective. It really comes through speaking to you that you've done the hard work. You've put in the hours, as I say, developing the muscle memory over 15 remarkable books, many of which are on my bookshelf. And I know so many of our listeners and viewers right now just have really appreciated the opportunity to spend this hour with you.

So thank you so much. Thanks, Roger. Same to you. Well, that concludes our Monk Dialogue for this week. As I mentioned, these events are entirely the product of the Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation and its sister foundation, the Oriya Foundation. Both these entities are funding these dialogues in their entirety through their charitable donations. This is an extension of both Foundation's longstanding commitment for over a decade now to promote more and better discussion of the big public policy issues.

and challenges that face us as a society. So thank you. Be safe. And let's keep the dialogue going. Thank you. Good night. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths, Ricky Gerwitz, and Debbie Pacheco are the producers.

The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Philip Wilson. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.