#675 - Niall Ferguson - The Shocking Lessons Of History Everyone Has Forgotten

0:00Just how accurate do you think the quote is? History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes It's doubly inaccurate Because first of all it wasn't what Mark Twain said people usually attribute it to Mark Twain of Huckleberry thin fame, but actually Twain didn't say that He said something much more complex about history being like a a kaleidoscope. Remember those kaleidoscopes who used to have as kids and the pattern shifts, but there's a kind of regularity to it. That's what Twain actually said, not that it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And it's inaccurate also because history doesn't repeat itself in the way that we would like it to be very nice if it had that kind of predictable pattern.

0:51But in truth, it doesn't and you can try to look for patterns but you'll frequently be disappointed. And that I think is one of the most important lessons that I've learned. History is not regular and cyclical and predictable. It's actually pretty noisy and volatile and unpredictable. And that's what makes my life interesting. I can't tell you with any certainty what's going to happen in the next seven days, never mind the next 10 years. Does that limit the lessons that we can learn from history then? Given that as you've said, it's not as cyclical, it's not got this sort of recurrent theme. I think it means that we've got to learn rather different lessons from the ones we want to learn.

1:42We want cookie cutter lessons as in And if a dictator is elected, there will be World War II. That kind of, we love those simple lessons. And we hate being told actually there were dictators who didn't start wars. They're not all Hitler. So we have to look for a different approach to learning lessons. Instead of wanting Kukikata lessons, we should realize that the most important lesson of history is that it is as unpredictable and non -linear as sport. It's not a story. The kind that you reach your kids with a beginning and middle and a happy ending. It's as unpredictable as a game, but it's more open -ended.

2:31It's like a game of football that never stops, or a game of chess that never ends where the board is so large that there never can be a conclusive winner. And if one recognizes that that's the lesson, that there's lots of contingency and chaos, and that even small decisions can have massive consequences and big decisions can have no consequences, learning that about the historical process will lead us, I think, to make better decisions in the present, because it will get us away from what I would call bad lesson learning. So bad lesson learning takes the form of just to give you one example. The United States deciding to invade Iraq and believing that it would be quite easy to establish democracy there because American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad like the liberators of Paris towards the end of World War II.

3:32That was a terrible bad lesson of history. The right lesson was it's extremely difficult if you topple a dictator to establish a stable government in the ruins of the dictator's regime. It can be done, but it's really expensive and it takes ages. So I think there are lessons to be learned from history, but we tend to try to learn simple ones and that's where we go wrong. Is part of this due to the fact that you identified the neatness of a story, the beginning, the middle, the end, this nice closure, it's something that's sufficiently familiar, that it feels like an old pair of leather shoes, but it is the job of historians, a lot of popular modern historians, to make stories compelling.

4:18They need to be able to captivate the reader. So is this problem in some part laid at the feet of you and your colleagues for making history so compelling and familiar to us in a narrative sense somehow. Well, if you're writing a history book, there is certainly an expectation that it should be ideally as readable as a novel. I'll give you an example. Orlando Fiejie's wrote an excellent history of the Russian Revolution called a People's Tragedy. When you frame an historical episode as a tragedy, the reader kind of knows what to expect. It's not going to end well. There probably be bodies all over the stage at some point towards the end.

5:04So that's fair enough, and it's a good history of the Russian Revolution, one of the best in English. But it slightly lulls the reader into thinking that there could only really be one outcome, one sequence of events, that it was sort of bound to produce this dysfunctional totalitarian regime that was bound to last until about the late 1980s and then fall apart. Oh, the inevitabilities baked into the framing. We know the story and so we can't have read it with this sense that it's all destined to fail, but to fail over a prolonged 70 year period. And I think that's not right. I think there were times When the Russian Revolution could have been aborted, the Bolsheviks could have lost.

5:52There were times when the Russian Revolution could have led all the way to World War 3, think of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then lots of different ways this story could have ended. And I really love history that keeps that sense of the possible alternatives alive. I think it's better to read history as a series of forking paths with a keen awareness of other futures that might have happened rather than to think the minute you pick up the book, oh there's going to be a revolution in Russia, the Romanards are going to be overthrown, liberalism will fail, the Bolsheviks will cease power, things will go to bad to worst understand, to know the story and then to read it as if it's a novel I think is actually a big pitfall, much better to be aware that they are constant turning points, moments when it could have gone differently.

6:48Stalin could have been arrested. He thought he was going to be arrested at one point when Hitler invaded. This is an astonishing moment because Stalin had been completely certain he wouldn't and ignored all the intelligence that he got saying the Germans are going to invade the Soviet Union. He nodded all, said it was all propaganda. We would say fake news. And so when the term has actually did invade, and the Red Army was in total disarray, not least because he purged or killed all its most competent officers, Stalin retreated to his dacha in a kind of state of panic and wondered when his colleagues on the Politburo would turn up and arrest him as he'd arrested many of his colleagues in the past.

7:36they did turn up and he kind of expected them to put on the handcuffs and instead they kind of said, please come back to Moscow, we can't actually function without being terrorised by you. So that was just one of the many moments in the history of the Soviet Union that might have produced a completely different outcome because I think if Stalin had been arrested, then it's hard to imagine that the Soviet Union wouldn't have lost World War II, that would have been a kind of political vacuum. That's a different 20th century right there. And in my work, and I've been doing this now for more decades than I like to count, I constantly try to keep the reader aware that are these other paths that we could have gone down.

8:22Just as right now today, our lives, your life, my life, everybody who's listening's lives, that they could go in a completely different direction because of some disaster that strikes, I get hit by a car crossing park avenue, and everything's different from that moment on, just because I wasn't paying attention when I cross the road. That's the historical reality that we have to keep reminding ourselves of. Why is it the case given that human nature has been relatively stable for all of recorded history? it's been stable, it's been stable for 120 ,000 years. And group dynamics seem sometimes to reliably be similar as well.

9:07Why is it the case then that we don't have this cyclical nature to history? Is it the disproportionate effect of chance? Is it the fact that, as you mentioned, a lot of very large things can occur due to very small inputs? What is it that's causing this fractured, fragmented kaleidoscope rather than a nice smooth wheel. What you've said something very important, which is that there are certain constant features of human nature, and that is right, which is why we can understand Thucydides. It's why we can understand Shakespeare. The human condition, particularly when it comes to love and death and power, that hasn't really changed much.

9:49Even although our lifespans are much longer than the people of Thucydides' time, and But the nature of life has radically altered, not least because of technology. So there's something very important about that, which is why it's worth studying history. Because if, if the acidities were just unintelligible to us and Shakespeare made no sense, well, we couldn't possibly learn a thing from the experience of the past, we like reading about aliens, but they're not aliens, they're people. That's a really important thing, which when you come to ponder, it's remarkable. How amazing is that? That people who were born thousands of years ago when life expectancy was in the 20s can express themselves in ways that we can understand in our radically altered world.

10:39I never cease to be amazed by the fact that we have any connection at all with the people of the past. Now, there's a critical difference that I've just hinted at, which is that there is this technological innovation that really starts to accelerate from the late 18th century and makes the world different, decade after decade. And in ways that are quite unpredictable, there's the exponential growth in living standards that comes from the Industrial Revolution, but there's other things also happening, the kind of unintended consequences of labor -saving technology. So that's part of the reason that history doesn't repeat itself, because for example, once you have nuclear weapons, war can never be quite the same again.

11:33And so you can't really perfectly learn from 1914 what to do in 2024 because in 1914, although they could risk a massive conventional war, there wasn't the possibility of utter planetary destruction. But there's an even more important point than that that I want to make. And that is disasters. We may be kind of the same homo sapiens as the ancient Athenians, but we inhabit a planet where all kinds of random stuff happens and we can't control it. The disasters that constantly punctuate history, massive volcanic eruptions, enormous earthquakes, cataclysmic floods, up plagues, all that kind of natural stuff, and then the man -made calamities, as we like to call them like wars.

12:31These things happen in a totally non -cyclical way. There's just no pattern to the incidence of large -scale organized violence. There's no pattern to the incidence of massive volcanic activity. And that's why there's no cycle of history because while we may be trying in our unchanging human way to achieve power and love and all the rest of it, we're do it in a chaotic environment and we just don't know what's going to happen next, but I'm absolutely sure that when you plot all the different shocks that nature and we ourselves inflict on the planet, there's no cycle there. There can't be. It just statistically isn't, isn't observable.

13:16I think one of the reasons that people like and are comforted by the idea that history repeat itself or echoes is it gives us a sense of control. It makes us believe that we have a prediction engine that we can if we read enough of the past we can accurately work out what's going to go on in the future. That's right and political scientists and social scientists especially economists feel that if they can only model the historical process then they will be able to project the future with some degree of certainty. And this is a constantly disappointing exercise, but it doesn't stop them trying.

14:04And to see just how hard it is, let's look back on the predictions of just of the economy over the last 20 years or so. Nobel Prize winning economists have been wrong again and again about major economic shocks from the financial crisis that began in 2008 through to the pandemic. There's still an ongoing debate about what caused the big inflation surge of 2021 -2022. There were eminent economists laden down with honors who were sure that there would be a transitory inflation episode in the wake of the pandemic and the only way they've been able to stay true to that hypothesis is by changing the meaning of the word transitory over and over and over again.

15:05So you look back and you realize even now the best paid economists in the world here in New York and Wall Street, the people with the most QDOS at the International Monetary Fund, they do a terribly bad job, even of predicting what growth and inflation will be 12 months from now. The Federal Reserve employs some really smart people. They have PhDs, and it's really hard to get a job there. It doesn't pay that well, but once you've been at the Fed, you get hired by the hedge funds and you make tons of money. So this is very competitive. And they were so crazily wrong about where interest rates would be right now, two years ago, they were like 500 basis points off.

15:51They were wildly, wildly wrong. And that was just over a two year time horizon. So we would love history to be predictable so that we just apply our model and say, oh, here's the fiscal policy, here's the monetary policy. This will be the inflation rate and this will be interest rate. We keep trying to do that. But then you go back and this is what we historians do. You go like, hey, let's see how those projections actually did. Let's take a look. And I'll give you a good example. The Congressional Budget Office, Congressional Budget Office constantly tries to project what the federal debt will be in relation to US gross domestic product.

16:28And it does this exercise on a highly regular basis. And it's always wrong. And not just a bit wrong. It's going wildly wrong. It's been underestimated the direction of the debt consistently for 20 plus years now. And they'll keep publishing those projections and they'll keep being discussed and people will write op -eds about them and go on TV to talk about them. But the truth is they'll continue to be wrong because there's something fundamentally flawed in the model. The model is a simplification, but it is such a big simplification of reality of the historical process that it's basically always wrong.

17:07There's a concept called the bullshit asymmetry principle, which is it takes far less energy to produce bullshit than it does to refute it. Therefore, the world is filled with unrefuted bullshit. And it's actually TV, especially on TV. And it must be said, probably on podcasts to the right. We are contributed. We are contributing to that asymmetry of bullshit right now. I'm trying my best to be anti -bullshit. It's like kind of anti -matter. And the key to anti -bullshit is that it is much, it doesn't go viral. It just doesn't go, I mean, anti -bullshit, it's just doomed not to go viral on Twitter.

17:45And so you carry on doing your best, but you will always be swamped by the bullshit. Yeah. So, have you got two examples of a scenario which if we were using this sort of typical cyclical, very nice and neat approach with history, you would have said, well, this happened in the past and this happened after the past, and they were broadly similar in terms of inputs, but that the outcomes were unbelievably far apart. Is there an illustrative example that you can think of there? Well, a good source for examples is the history of empire because people always want to use the history of empire to think about American power.

18:37And so every decade there will be at least one book and usually more than one saying, we are Rome. We are in the predicament of the Roman Empire and our decline and fall is inevitable because we are decadent and we like bread and we like circuses except we have burgers and American football but it's that that's the thesis and it's always kind of reliable if you're a publisher you'll sell books with the VR Rome hypothesis. And of course history is basically the history of Empires. It is mostly about Empires. Even although we like to tell ourselves it's really about nation states. Nation states are basically quite a recent invention.

19:26Most of history, if you just mean all in recorded histories about Empires. Because the Empires do stuff and they have pretty good record keeping and that's that's most of what we study. So we have a pretty good sample size of imperial rise and zenith and decline and fall because empires do that. That's why most of the empires that ever existed don't exist today including the British Empire and the French Empire and all the other empires that existed when our grandparents were around. So it ought to be possible you to thought to have some kind of general theory of imperial rise and fall. And that ought to be a cycle of history that we can work with.

20:16And then we could say, oh, okay, so the United States has reached its past the zenith and it's now in the kind of late phase. So we should expect to climb and fall to begin in 2028. The problem is that when you sit down with all the empires that ever existed, the first thing you realize is there's this massive discrepancy in duration that the Nazi empire barely made it past a decade. And in fact, if you only start counting from the reoccupation of the Rhineland, it's not even that. And the Roman Empire's like a thousand years. So Gibbon is great to climb and follow the Roman Empire, covers a millennium.

21:00So you don't know. I mean, sure, the empires rise and they have a good, good kind of period of dominance and then they decline and fall. But is it going to happen in a few years or is it going to take a few centuries? There's no way of knowing. And that's why the temptation to draw analogies with past empires is quite hazardous. It's always possible to find a case and say, you see here we are, we're just about where Britain was in pick a decade. I've done this myself. I did this for the economist just before the US abandoned Afghanistan. I wrote a piece for the economist saying, the US has beginning to look a bit like Britain between the wars, kind of too much debt, kind of overextended.

21:46And I use that analogy to make the argument that the US is getting to be where Britain was in the mid -20th century. Overstretched. It's not a new argument. And as part of my anti -Busher mission, I would say, it's only one of a dozen analogies I could have used, and I could equally well have said that the United States as where the British Empire was in the 1820s. And in the 1820s, Britain was going through a rough patch, had beaten Napoleon, had a ton of debt, all kinds of social problems, lots of deep division, polarization. I could have written a piece saying that's where the US is today. And the good news is that after Britain came out of the 1820s, it expanded its empire are over the next 100 years almost uninterruptedly and rule the world.

22:42There's no way of knowing which is the right analogy. You just pick the one that suits your journalistic purpose and off you go. But if I'm being absolutely brutally honest, there's no real way to be sure which analogy is the right one. That's the terrible truth. We don't know. Given that, what are the lessons that people should take from history? It sounds like a very damning indictment of reading history as a tool for understanding really anything except the stuff that's already happened. Are there, is there anything that you can take from this that is actually instructive for where you live now?

23:27Oh, yes, absolutely. And that's what motivates me. That's why I get out of bed in the morning. because history is so much better at helping you think about the future than those models that I told you about earlier which predictably get it wrong. What does history enable you to do? It enables you to do what I just did to realize that the sample size of analogies is quite large. You know, what's the right analogy for the situation of Britain today? Don't just take the first most convenient one that occurs to you, bear in mind that there actually are quite a lot of countries that had empires at one time and then couldn't afford them anymore and had to get rid of them and then had to readjust to that experience of decolonization and then remake themselves as nation states.

24:21And, you know, the range goes from the Netherlands to Russia. And you've got to sort of sit down and think, well, let's look at all the different countries that went through this. Which one is the better fit? Is it likely that Britain's is going to end up kind of like the Netherlands? I think it is. I think Britain in many ways is already quite like the Netherlands. It's just that we haven't fully come to terms with that loss of status. It's not so likely that Britain would end up like Russia desperately trying to get its imperial groove back even after it's really long gone and all that's left is this kind of stockpile of rusting weapons.

25:05So I think the lesson that I would take, the reason that I call it applied history, is that you've got to be kind of systematic. You're really looking for analogies and you've got to make sure that you kind of comprehensive, that you try to find them all before jumping to the conclusion that you're tempted by. And your mindset should be not, oh, please confirm me in my original prejudice. My mindset is always, please get rid of my original prejudice and teach me something new and interesting. I'll give you another example. People have been running around with their hair on fire since 2015, 2016, when Donald Trump suddenly burst onto the scene as a credible presidential candidate as opposed to a joke figure.

25:53And it's been enormously difficult for liberal intellectuals, academics, and journalists to make sense of the fact that this man got to be president and could be president again. So what's the right analogy? A lot of people lazily out of prejudice said, oh, he's a fascist, he's Mussolini, or he's Hitler. And these were really bad analogies because you don't need to go to into war Europe to find good analogies to understand all Trump. There's a populist tradition in the United States that goes back to the 19th century. There have been quite a few characters in American history like him with his ideas and his style.

26:33Who like it? Well, people you've never heard of. There was a guy named Dennis Kearney who led something called the California Workers Party in the late 19th century and Kearney's position was that we had to close the border and keep out building up the immigrants. He actually had build the wall as a slogan. There's a cartoon showing a wall being built across San Francisco Harbor. He was anti -Chinese. That was a big part of Curen's appeal. He was anti -elitist. He was really somebody who kind of relished being a common man without any pretensions. And all the policies that Curen he stood for, including restriction of immigration and China bashing.

27:15I mean, that has all been in American politics before. But it's been forgotten. Of course, Curen never got to be president. No populist until Trump has succeeded in getting to be president, but we've had populists before offering that combination of immigration restriction and elite bashing. And you didn't need to, you didn't need to look for analogies in interwar Europe. The United States is nothing like interwar Europe. I mean, I've studied interwar Europe. If I had a time machine and you and I got into it, and we went off to Italy in the 1920s or Germany in the 1930s about a day there, we'll be like, this is totally different.

27:52This is crazy. Every other person is in a uniform. I mean, the thing about Donald Trump's America is that you hardly saw anybody in a uniform, except occasionally there'd be somebody coming back from Afghanistan and in airport. But this is the thing that I'm constantly struck by. If you study history rigorously, you're constantly struck by how unlike the mid -20th century our time is. And yet people seem only to know about the mid -20th century. It's sometimes as if the only history that anybody knows is the history of reading my mind. I've got in front of me Godwin's law. As an online discussion grows, the probability of a comparison to Nazis are Hitler approaches 100%.

28:38Many people are quick to compare things to Nazi Germany because it's the only history they think they know. Yeah. The history channel has a lot to answer. And so just so does GCSE and A level history. And but it's not only in the UK. I mean, there is this extraordinary overemphasis on the mid 20th century as if that's the only history we should really bother knowing about. I mean, I studied part of my career. I spent studying that period. But that actually think that the 17th century is much more illuminating if we want to understand our time. because in the 16th and 17th century they had to contend with a new communication technology, the printing press.

29:18And it completely changed everything. It suddenly drastically lured the barrier to entry. You could get your thoughts out on paper much more easily than on an illuminated manuscript. We're living through a comparable period in which the public sphere is completely transformed by technology. And yet nobody bothers studying the 17th century outside a few Oxford and Cambridge colleges. The 17th century was a time when mercenaries were enormously powerful. There was a guy named Valensstein who was the pregoge of the Holy Roman Empire. We can learn a lot from that period. And it's much more interesting and illuminating than trying to fit everything into Germany in 1933.

30:06which is I'm afraid what we now do, as you say, almost in every online discussion. What was the response like when the print and press became widely available? What did it change? What do people not realize about what it changed? And how did governments and people that wanted to restrict access and stuff respond? Well, as the printing and press spread through Europe from the late 15th century into the 16th century. It was a highly decentralized technology. You really had no central control, printing presses were springing up all over Germany and especially Northern Europe. And initially, religious reformers like Martin Luther said, oh great, now we can get the truth about the church and about Christian doctrine out, and more effectively explain what's wrong with today's Roman Catholic church.

31:07And that was certainly true, that message spread like wildfire in Northern Europe and very quickly, Luther was able to convince a great many people not only in Germany, but all the way across the channel in England that something had to change. and so that part was right. But what Luther didn't anticipate was that once you can print the Bible and print criticism to the Roman Catholic Church, you can print anything and pretty quickly people were printing anything. There's one moment when remember where it was now. There's a tone inside Germany where they say, can we print a translation of the Quran?