We're All Doomed!! (ok, not really). Niall Ferguson Talks to A&G

Published May 12, 2021, 9:15 PM

Author & historian (and and A&G favorite) Niall Ferguson joins Armstrong & Getty to discuss his latest book, "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe".

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We're all doomed. It's Armstrong and Getty extra large, because four hours simply isn't enough. This is Armstrong and Getty extra Large. Doom is actually the title of the new book from Neil Ferguson, Doomed, The Politics of Catastrophe. In the opening of his book references a sitcom that I don't know as an American, in which one of the characters, apparently, no matter what happened, would we say we're all doomed, which is alert. I was laughing quietly as you alluded to Dad's army. We're doomed. It's a very Scottish thing to say, which is part of the reason that I gave the book the title doom. But but actually we're doomed as a Star Wars line. I hadn't realized this until I started researching. We're doomed in popular culture, and I think it's a common response when anything goes wrong there. There there are those people who think when disaster strikes that it's the end of the world, and then there are those people who win disaster strikes are like the guy on the jacket of the book who's carrying on sinking his part as the wildfire rages behind him, And I think part part of our problem with with disasters is that that we kind of divide into the people who who freak out and the people who go into denial. Well, we're always pleased when people we admire agree with us. It makes us feel better about ourselves. And you seem to share our belief that the fixation on the chief executive president of the United States, for instance, as as some sort of godhead who can ensued fix all problems is pretty misplaced, right. Paul Stoy in Warren Peace makes fun of the idea that Napoleon was in command of the destinies of all Europeans, And as in a Storian, I've tended to be skeptical of the idea that it's all about one or two great or wicked men. That's not because I'm a Marxist his Storian. On the contrary, I just think that in truth, the history's complex process, and very rarely is the man at the top, and it's usually a man in sole charge, especially when disaster strikes. So what happened last year was that all those people who've had it in for Trump already were given the perfect opportunity to say that it was all his fault. Jim Fallows wrote a piece in the Atlantic that said, when I fly my light aircraft, I'm in charge, so if something goes wrong, it's my fault, and the president is in the analogous situation. Now, being the president United States is not like flying a light aircraft. It really is not, because you're in charge of a vast number of different agencies and you can't possibly keep an eye on every threat the nation faces. In practice, in every country when there's a pandemic, there is a bunch of people whose job that is. In the US, there's the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there's the Department of Health and Human Services. They even have a Deputy Secretary for preparedness. And the idea that it's the president's job to sit there and make calls about making tests available for a new coronavirus is is a cartoon version of how government works. And I think if we draw the conclusion, and I'm afraid that many, many, many people have, we draw the conclusion that this was all Sump's fault, that we wouldn't have had half a million plus dead if it had been Joe Biden, who somehow magically got elected a year early. Then we are not going to learn anything from this experience, and the next disaster will be just as big as the battle. So but I believe we talked to you right at the beginning of the pandemic and um, and we're talking about how it looks like this is going to shape up to be, you know, the sort of thing that makes history books for centuries to come. Like it's that big of a deal. What do you give the world for a grade on reacting to this, this this horrible thing that that struck us a year ago. Yeah, I'd have to say that the f it comes to mind at this point. And uh, you know you don't need to take it from me, because there's a new report that's just come out the Independent Panel, which has I think arrived at somewhat similar conclusions to my own, namely that this was an avoidable disaster if we had acted the way say the Taiwanese and the South Koreans did early, quickly ramping up testing and creating contact tracing, isolating people who were infected, we did not need to have a global pandemic. And indeed Taiwan did not have significant excess mortality at all. I think twelve people have died of COVID in Taiwan, and they're right next to China. So we know that this did not have to be this way. We know that we did not have to have more than half a million Americans die premature ly. But the problem, I think is that that we are seeking simplistic narratives about the story which are going to lead us to miss what is really amiss, what is really wrong. After all, this is not the only disaster that we have handled badly in recent times. I don't think you could claim that we handle nine eleven brilliantly. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, Invading Iraq doesn't seem like the best possible reaction to that crisis. Financial crisis, well, on paper, we were prepared. We had all kinds of regulations in place, but that was a pretty big debacle. And then on paper we were prepared for a pandemic. It was just that maybe we've got the wrong sort of pandemic. I don't know what the excuse would be, but I think there's a pattern here of failure, and I don't think it's always been this way, because we have great scientific knowledge. We we understand a lot about the disasters that we are likely to encounter, but it feels to me as if our response has become less competent compared, let's say, with the nineteen fifties, when in the face of the so called Asian Flu of nineteen fifty seven, the Eisenhower administration was able to cope with the challenge and deal with the disruption of excess mortality without shutting the economy me down, without letting the deficit explode, without creating all the kinds of I think avoidable and costly mistakes that were made in I know one of the themes of the book is that you you believe we have a what you call a middle management problem, a bloated complex bureaucracy problem. Tell us more about that. Well, it's, as we were saying earlier, very easy just to say this was all down to Trump, and I think we've got to avoid drawing that conclusion. Not that he didn't make many, many mistakes, But in truth, it wasn't because of Trump that CDC completely failed to make testing available early in the in the pandemic. The c d C folks, first they stopped anybody else from developing tests, and then they produced a test of their own that didn't work. And I'd love to believe the President United States is is busily monitoring the activities of laboratories at c d C. But let's face it, that's not how this job works. I learned a very important lesson from studying another disaster. It was actually a smaller disaster in terms of death, but a pretty spectacular one in terms of its impact on American imaginations. And that was the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger shortly after its launch, and a brilliant manner physicist named Richard Feynman wrote a book about that. He was involved in the inquiry, and in the book he observes that the initial impulse of the media was to try and pin it on Roll Reagan, to to try to claim that, oh, that the Shuffle launch had been rushed because Reagan wanted to reference it in a speech, And this was all completely made up. The reality was that at NASA, the engineers knew that this thing had a one percent, one and a hundred chance of blowing up. They knew there was a problem, especially at low temperatures. But the bureaucrats at NASA decided to change that one and a hundred chance to one in a hundred thousand in order not to reveal to the people who were backing the Space Shuttle program, namely Congress, that there was a significant risk of a disaster. Now, I think throughout history we find that guy in middle management again and again, inserting the point of failure into the chain of command. But we always want to blame the person at the top. So the Titanic sinks, and it's the owner of the shipping line who gets the maximum blame and opprobrium heaped upon him, But that is not really the key to the losses on the Titanic. And I think in the same way, you kind of go through the disasters and you start to realize that it's it's rarely the person who's really at fault who gets the blame and a disaster, we we tend to want to pin the blame on whoever's at the top of the chain of command, But disasters generally don't really unfold because of major errors at the top. I mean, it wasn't just to give another random exact ample, it wasn't Winston Churchill's fault that the defense of Singapore was completely bungled in World War Two. We can certainly say, with Harry Trueman, the buck stops here. Responsibility ultimately lies with the president of the prime minister. Sure, but let's not tell ourselves a fairy story that if only we'd had a different president last year, that had all have been fine, because that that seems to me like a complete fairy story. Yeah, the example you gave fits with the story of the day yesterday when the New York Times let us know that the c d C saying less than ten percent of transmissions were outdoors when the real number was point zero one percent or whatever. It's the same sort of thing, crazy crazy, And you know, that's a very good example of what was going wrong and is still going wrong. It was obvious a year ago if you were paying attention to the research that was coming out of China and then North ficially where the disease first really struck, that it wasn't being transmitted outdoors. I mean there were literally no cases out of Wuhan of outdoor transmission. And I remember reading this and thinking, oh, that's interesting, And so we ignored that for a year and introduced a whole range of totally stupid restrictions, of which my personal bugbear were the closures of parks and beaches. California shut down its public spaces, so not only locked people in their homes, but they then prevented them from going outdoors. And then, of course you have the mask wearing outdoors, which is actually entirely pointless. And this was not It's not like we just figured this out. This was obvious. It was obviously in March of last year, because nobody was getting this virus in outdoor settings. You could see already in the spring the super spreader effect that basically twent of infected people did, of the spreading, you could see already over a year ago that this thing disproportionately killed people over the age of sixty five. And you could see the places that it's spread. They were indoor settings where large numbers of people were fairly close together yelling or singing, and so the places that you should shut down in a situation like that of the restaurants and the bars, and you should certainly not be having people go to church. But that stuff was that was not difficult to see. I'm not a virologist or an epidemiologist. I'm a historian, but I was reading the literature as it was coming out because it was pretty fascinated by by the fact that we were in the midst of an obviously historic disaster. And it is mystifying to me that so many public officials whose job this was got things as basic as that wrong and imposed a set of restrictions in the population that were ultimately harmful. It must have been harmful to stop people getting outdoors and to confine them indoors when the virus is something that spreads indoors. Well, what makes us insane, and perhaps you can help us tease out what's going on here, is that so many of the the protective methods to policies that have been disproved months and months ago remain like the masks outdoors. Is that just? Is that a fixation on COVID? Is that bureaucracy is not at work? Is that bias in favor of the status quo? What's going on with that? I think there are two things. One, we have a bureaucratic mentality which regards all risk can, no matter what the probability is, as unacceptable. And the fun of that, if you're a bureaucrat is that you can generate endless regulations and then let people get off on that to an extent that I think some of us find hard to comprehend. But I see this not only at the state level, but at the local level, the county level, at the campus level, just the kind of desire to create regulations for their own sake. I'll give you a great example. The swimming pool where I take my kids has all kinds of precautions in place, and my favorite is the buffer lane. There is a lane that is left empty between where kids can swim and adults can do lap swimming because of course the stars Coby too virus loves to swim in chlorinated water. But it really can't swim across. It can only swim it. Come on, guys, and my credit to my nine year old. He's like, he's nine, he knows as his bullshit, and it's like, so he swims into the buffer lane to provoke what he calls the COVID police, and the COVID police, the poor people who have to enforce these regulations. We really come over and tell him to go back into into his lane, and they must know it's it's it's crap too. So We have a curious phenomenon, which is that there are some people who just love regulation and they love to control people's lives and it gets them out of bed in the morning. And this was their permission to regulate our every activity, no matter what the sign said. I don't think they paid the slightest attention to the signs. It was just like, oh, great, now we can create a lane where nobody can swim. The other thing that's going on, which I mean, this makes me crazy, um, but the other thing that's going on is that that we've developed a habit which was not always there in the United States and making everything a partisan issue and so which wasn't true. Like in the vaccines were like, great, we have the vaccine. We we were very proud of the facts in the fifties that the US was better at developing vaccines and faster at making them than anybody else, and was like everybody was like into that, and there was no partisan division on this issue. We we've allowed public health to become a partisan domain, and therefore mask wearing has become a symbol of political affiliation. And the masks here in California are going to be worn long after we have huge percentages of vaccine, and we're going to have a huge percentage of people vaccinated around where I live. We probably already do. I was told the other day it's actually over in my neighborhood and we're going to carry on wearing masks point leslie. Not really because we think we have to stay protected from a virus that is no longer really around, but but because it's a badge. And somebody says to me the other day, Oh, I'm wearing the mask because I don't want people to think I'm a conservative. Wow. Right, A strange times. I know that when I'm not. When I go out of the campus without the mask, I know that I'm getting the dirty looks. It's like I'm wearing a mega exactly. That that makes me depressed because it means that we've totally decoupled what we do in public health from science. And often it's the people who say the science, follow the science who are least interested in actual science. Neil Ferguson, it's always a great pleasure. We appreciate the time very much, and we hope we can talk again soon. I love that, Thanks so much, guys, Thank you, he reminded me um uh, we we did know going way back that it doesn't transmit outdoors. Remember that footage of the beaches around Los Angeles where the COVID cops were waiting on the beach for the kayakers to come in. Oh, that's right, people alone out at sea. We're being arrested, waiting on the beach to arrest him when they got there, because you couldn't. Just absolutely ridiculous. I like the fact that Neil Ferguson, who's a smart guy, gives the world an f in its response to this. Yeah. Absolutely, And and the fact that he attributes it. I've been reading some of the summaries of the book and the chapter headings and that sort of thing. He attributes it to essentially bureaucrat ease, the disease of of bureaucratitis, where there are just too many small people in small minds and egos and protecting the bureaucrat for all policy to pass through, and it just it can't. It's like a filter that the openings are too small for the particles that need to get through, and you just can't have good, effective, tie only policy in the system we have. So the book we're talking about is doomed the politics of catastrophe. You can grab any book the Neil Ferguson's ever written, and you'll be better for having picked it up and read it. So yeah, here, we're here.

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