124 | Niall Ferguson: The Politics and History of Catastrophe

The Realignment

Technology, News Commentary, National Security, Marshall Kosloff, International Relations, News, Public Policy, Economics, Politics, Saager Enjeti, U.s. Politics, Policy

4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2021

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Niall Ferguson, author of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, joins the show to discuss why some societies fall apart while others rise in the face of doom, how a Cold War between the U.S. and China could lead to catastrophe, and analyze the pathologies facing modern America through the lenses of imperial decline, finance, institutional decline, and social fragmentation. Special Niall Ferguson Bookshop Link: https://bookshop.org/lists/niall-ferguson-bookshop Subscribe to The Realignment’s Substack, now released on Thursdays: https://therealignment.substack.com/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Saga and Marshall here welcome back to the realignment.
0:09.2	In fact, it's hard to state, I think convincingly, that we would have had a much better experience in 2020 to 2021,
0:17.8	if someone else had been president, sure Trump made enormous numbers of mistakes.
0:23.2	But I don't think the counter-factual that if Obama had still been president or Hillary Clinton had been president,
0:28.8	that we'd have had far lower casualties. I don't think that's plausible,
0:34.0	because the points of failure was really further down the chain of command
0:38.0	in the public health bureaucracy, in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
0:42.6	because they completely screwed up and they were supposed to be prepared.
0:46.2	So something went wrong at the level of the bureaucracy that we need to understand.
1:01.4	Today we are very excited to be joined by Dr. Neil Ferguson.
1:05.0	He's one of my favorite historians for a long time.
1:07.4	He's out with a brand new book, Doom, The Politics of catastrophe.
1:11.0	And this book is really amazing.
1:12.6	He actually started writing it before COVID even happened.
1:15.6	And why it's important is he makes the point, which is that natural disasters,
1:20.2	pandemics, catastrophes, all these things, they only matter in so far as what they tell us
1:25.2	about the underlying social and political order of the globe and of a society.
1:30.2	So what did COVID actually reveal about America?
1:33.4	Is America screwed relative to Asia?
1:36.0	Why did they do better than we did in some ways and we did better than they did?
1:41.0	And are all the myths about arising China and all of that true?
1:45.0	Are they really destined to take over the world?
	...

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