Latest / Thinking Class / #038 - Dr. John Rapley and Dr. Peter Heather - Why Barbarian Invasion Is Not The Only Reason For The Fall Of An Empire

Transcript

#038 - Dr. John Rapley and Dr. Peter Heather - Why Barbarian Invasion Is Not The Only Reason For The Fall Of An Empire · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Dr.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: John Rapley and Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Heather.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: John Rapley is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and a senior fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: His books include Understanding Development, Globalisation and Inequality, and most recently Twilight of the Money God's Economics as a Religion and How It All Went Wrong.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Heather is a British historian of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Peter is chair of the Medieval History Department and Professor of Medieval History at King's College London.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: His many books include The Fall of the Roman Empire, Empires and Barbarians, Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe, The Restoration of Rome, Rome Resurgent, and most recently Christendom.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: John and Peter are co-authors of Why Empires Fall, Rome, America and the Future of the West.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, John and Peter tell us what a close reading of history has taught them about how empires end and why they are victims of their own success, the impact of poor financial health on maintaining empire and civilization, why Western nations should worry about spending more on national debt interest than on military, and why it is just as important to look at rising levels of personal and corporate debt.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: We also talk about international students in the United Kingdom and student visa issuance, and whether anything can be done to slow down and reverse civilizational decline, whether it's about birthing the new.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: We also talk about why China is so strong and whether Chinese dominance is inevitable, and also why we do not need to see rising world powers as a zero-sum battle.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: We also speak about Peter's changing mind on the importance of demographics, and John's about turn on the prospect of technological advances and AI being all they're cracked up to be.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: John and Peter were gentlemanly and fun to talk to, and I enjoyed our conversation very much.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: However, there were points in the conversation where I could have offered some strident dissent, particularly when immigration into the United Kingdom came into the conversation.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: However, I felt that I didn't want to derail the conversation.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is because I wanted to make sure that each of you had the opportunity to hear their analyses of how empires fall, rather than beginning to engage in a tit for tat on immigration and immigration policy.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: However, it's important that I put my own view across because I suspect most of you will have views on that part of the conversation.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: John and Peter are passionate about the strength of the university sector in the United Kingdom and believe that criticism of the number of international students and their dependents studying and being granted visas here is misguided.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: However, the numbers do present a problem.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Out of a total of approximately 1.2 million immigrants arriving in the last year, 700,000 net total once you subtracted the half a million Britons we lose to other countries.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And when the number of dependents arriving attached to student visas amounts to approximately 115,000 per year, this is equivalent to 10 times the population of the Northumbrian market town I grew up in.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the reality is we don't have the housing for them.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: A report by the Center for Policy Studies shows that migration accounts for around 89% of the 1.34 million increase in England's housing deficit.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's the amount of homes we have underbuilt by in the last 10 years.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: 67% of privately rented homes are headed by a foreign-born resident.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's 33% of social housing.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this rises to 47% in London.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: So we might wish for a strong university sector.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: However, the reality is that this is pushing British people and residents already here out of the housing market.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: John and Peter also made the economic argument for immigration due to Britain's declining demographics, which goes thus.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: If we want to maintain our lifestyle, then we need immigration to plug a birth gap.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm not sold on the notion that European nations, indeed any nation with a declining birth rate, should rely upon immigration to plug the gap.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: And this is for three reasons.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Firstly, what if this prevents the birth rate from ever increasing again?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: If people are struggling to move out of their parents' home because they can't afford to, because there's an increasing demand on a diminishing supply, and thus they're unable to couple up to start families, then why would we keep bringing people in to raise GDP or to keep a strong university sector?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Secondly, as the same report by the Center for Policy Studies shows, large-scale migration has not delivered significant growth in GDP per capita and has increased the strain on our capital stock, from roads and GP surgeries to housing.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: This does not maintain our lifestyle, but it puts pressure on it.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thirdly, immigrants differ widely in their contributions to the state and how much they take out of it.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: The report highlights that migrants from the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, aged 25 to 64, are almost twice as likely to be economically inactive as someone born in the UK.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: We have an unselective immigration policy.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Furthermore, earnings and therefore tax contributions also vary enormously.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: For example, Spanish migrants typically earn around 40% more than migrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh, but roughly 35% less than migrants from France or America.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Migrants from countries such as Canada, Singapore, and Australia pay between four and nine times as much income tax as migrants from Somalia or Pakistan.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: The strain on our public finances is large, and it will be in the future when immigrants reach pensionable age.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: A final question here.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: What is a country for?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is it to be paved over and built upon to service the needs of international workers and students?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a sound economic policy, not to mention a cultural one?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: As thinking class guest Garrett Jones shows in his book The Culture Transplant, migrants make the country more like the ones they left, economically and culturally.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Britain had more migration in the 25-year period from 1997 than it did since the Norman conquest in 1066.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Six million more people came to Britain in the 14 years of Conservative government that began in 2010, just under two and a half million in the last two years alone.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is unprecedented.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Culture matters and it sticks for a long time.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't seem sensible to me, or increasingly to those in Gen Z across Europe, and increasingly in the United Kingdom, that we should carry on down this route culturally or economically, nor in a bid to maintain a strong university sector, many of which universities are being propped up by high fees but are in financial turmoil otherwise.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: That was important for me to be able to lay that out.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to or watching the show on, because the more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: John Rapley and Peter Heather.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Thinking Class.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining me.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Pleasure to be here.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for inviting us.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's really kind of you.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I appreciated your book, a very short book, uh, Why Empires Fall, which I think in the current moment you can't seem to get moved for commentary about this being the end of Western civilization or the end of America or all of those things.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose that does happen periodically.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh over a hundred years ago, Oswald Spangler wrote the decline of the West.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And yet in 1999, as you both point out in the opening of your book, Bill Clinton is giving a triumphant speech less than nine years after the fall of the Soviet Union, saying the possibilities for America and the liberal world order are limitless.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: And yet you draw comparisons with the um penultimate period of the Roman Empire in the West, where the Roman Emperor at the time gives a similarly triumphant speech about the opportunities available to the empire, and yet not long after it dissolves into the various warring states that it becomes.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think that we are witnessing perhaps a rhyming moment in history, today's civilizational decline as it is seen being similar to the Roman Empire's?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'll just throw in a little backstory and then answer the question.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: And the little backstory is this that John Lyve first started talking about this um a long time before the book appears.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: The book has uh had a long gestation period as we thought about how to do it.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's uh, you know, we're both agreeing on the central idea behind it, and we'll put that's the answer to your question, we'll come to that in a minute.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: But uh working out how to do it in practical terms took a long time.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: But uh the point of putting in the backstory about how long it took us to get there is that we're talking about this um in the early to mid-2000s to start with and on, uh, before all the you know manure hits the uh air conditioning, uh, as far as the current political discourse is concerned.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not claiming huge prescience, you know, it's not shamanistic powers or anything like that.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's just actually there's there's a structural uh argument here, uh, and that's the thing that interests John and I, and that we found in common between the two eras that we work on, John working on the modern period and me working on the late Roman and early medieval European contexts.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and the central thesis of the book um is that big imperial systems, and you have to think about them as systems with moving parts, change the world in which they operate.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: And they change the world around them as well as they change themselves.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Both things are changing, but people react to the different stimuli that imperial systems offer to the world around them uh in ways that will eventually make it more difficult for that imperial system to exercise the same level of dominance that it exercised when it first came into, existence, when it first began to operate it.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that's that's our central thesis.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, empires create their own uh at least uh well they don't they don't have to create their own collapse, but they will uh cause a diminution in the level of uh regional global power that they exercise because they transform the world around them.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that's what we're trying to argue in the book.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's that's the the big argument which we think has a lot of length in it.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um if I summarize it.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think what I would add to that, John, is that uh what Peter and I, I think that looking at very different time periods and um uh you know, Peter being a uh scholar of antiquity of the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages in Europe, and me being um somebody who's uh sort of my career has been based on this study of the global periphery, you know, I'm in development economics.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: So we're both we come to this with a similar perspective, which is that we're both, as it were, students of the periphery, and that's something we've been since you know since we started out.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think that what kind of struck us in this conversation we were having in uh I think it was around 2005, but you know, I've actually we've known each other since the early 90s when we were both young academics at Oxford.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this was sort of a random conversation when we were talking about uh each of the books we'd just written.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Peter had just finished or was just putting the finishing touches on what would be his bestseller on the fall of the Roman Empire, and I just written a book on contemporary globalization.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're talking about totally different, you know, what are you doing now?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: What are you writing?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we're talking about totally different topics.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: What we were struck by is this resemblance that we had looked at um the modern the rise in my case of the modern West and Peter is the the rise of the Western Empire, and the way in which it transformed the periphery in such a way that ultimately in the later stages the periphery actually moves from being you know the dependent variable, if you will, to being the mover.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is there where the change is beginning, and a change that is largely missed by the scholarship which focuses on the core, if you will.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in Peter's case, you know, the the legacy not among historians so much anymore, but among uh those who armchair historians who use Roman history to explain what's happening in the modern world and a focus on you know the sort of the gibbon uh interpretation of history, which is uh internal decay.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And Peter says, this is nonsense, this is not what's driving the process, it's what's happening in the periphery.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that was very similar to my argument that I was starting to make then about the changes that are taking place in the world economy.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I won't claim prescience, but I did say in 2000 book I published in, I think it was 2006, uh, that you know, there will be a financial crisis and recurring financial crises in developed countries because of changes that are happening again in the periphery.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we said, you know, it could be there's an actual, you know, recurring theme in history here that you and Peter is the one who really came up with the idea of a life cycle.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, could it be that you, you know, you sort of the very thing which makes you rich is ultimately which comes back to undermine you uh the exploitation of the periphery, you know, we sort of pursued this idea and came up with uh essentially an economic, a political economic explanation for the life cycle of empires, which is uh, you know, they grow rich and powerful off the exploitation of the periphery, but in the process of exploitation, uh inadvertently lead to the development of the periphery until it can ultimately sort of begin to first restand and ultimately roll back the dominance of the core.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so we just um pursued that.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we, as Peter said, we were looking at various ways of writing this book and uh experimenting with different models.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it was actually my agent who said, uh, you know, when Tim Snyder's book on democracy came out, he said, What about just putting out a short idea book?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, rather than develop a systematic argument uh and get into endless arguments with uh, you know, I I'd be constantly arguing with the economists that it wasn't good economics, and Peter would be constantly arguing with the medievalists that, oh, you've missed this and that.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: That what we're suggesting is an idea that is relevant to anybody looking at the rise and fall of cores and peripheries throughout history, not just this particular one.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Although this, you know, when people ask, but why should we even study Rome?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I always come back, you know, why are we surprised that in the Western world Rome exercises such a fixation?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Our political, legal, linguistic um, you know, traditions all emerge from the fact that in one way or another, the Western all Western countries had some kind of um legacy that has shaped us, and we're always mindful.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in that sense, you could take a histoire de la très longue durée view of this and say that you know this is a 2,000 or 3,000 year cycle, we don't go that far.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: But you could, and um, you know, the civilizations themselves uh rise and decline, and and of course, what we argue in the book is that decline doesn't necessarily in the modern period, the big difference is it doesn't have to mean fall, but it could with the wrong choices.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: When you're talking about the core of an empire or or a civilization uh expanding and being very successful and it impacts the periphery, are some examples of that?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: For example, um America uh and Britain's development of the petrochemical industry in the Middle East, and now we look at the Middle East as a very uh powerfully wealthy region of the world, which uh is um is is dominating many of the capital markets, and perhaps even China with um becoming the the um the factory of the world, uh it has since managed to expand its own capacities and then start to build its own uh neo-imperial projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, for example.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, that's exactly what we have in mind.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: So these things start out as um imperially driven projects to benefit the imperial core fundamentally.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, uh both the uh petrochemical in the uh uh in the Persian Gulf uh and uh the investment in China, that the shift or of manufacturing to China to make cheaper goods because labor costs were so much cheaper there.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um they were understood that they would have they were a kind of deal, of course, they would have benefits for the uh societies in which they were being generated, but the the investment from the center is driven by the desire to uh bring benefit to the center, both in terms of um investment income and cheaper goods flowing into the West.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: But uh you start that chain reaction um and you end up with China being marginally the second largest economy um on the planet.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and as a historian, the one thing I would always say is which sounds very pompous anyway, it's a very simple point.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh power is cash, follow the money, you will see power.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: So if you change an economic balance, you are changing power structures.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: If you make China the second largest economy on the planet, you will make China a major global power.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's sometimes a time delay, of course.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it is only a time delay.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: If China is structurally going to be the second largest economy on the planet for a number of decades, then China will be the second most important global power.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Straightforwardly.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Let's think about why you have put forward that we can we are witnessing this decline, this potential um civilizational moment, as it were, uh where the West's dominance uh is now um seriously under question.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you've outlined a uh a number of different ways in which that's come to pass, and one of them we've touched on already, which is financial, uh, and um you said follow the money, and that's where the power will be.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: To what extent does, for example, the high national debt to GDP ratios that you see in uh in America, Britain, France, just about any Western country you can think of suggest that the dominance is really waning.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think to put a finer point on that, I I saw a stat over the weekend that America is now spending more on its interest payments to service its national national debt than it is on military spending, which surely doesn't do anything for hard power in the long term.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I sure.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um I definitely I think that's an issue.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the things that's actually there's a couple of things that are largely overlooked.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when we talk about debt to GDP ratios, almost always when you read uh business journalists, they will be talking about government debt to GDP ratios.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, one of the things we look at in the book, which is really interesting, is look more broadly.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is household and and um private sector corporate debt is when you add that to the mix, it's on an upward trajectory and there's no sl sign of reversal.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: But there's another element too, and that is uh something that we don't discuss in the book, but I've discussed elsewhere is net public wealth.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: That the if you look at the sort of net financial position of most Western governments, uh they have been running down their capital stock.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of the ways, you know, back in the wave of privatization of public sector enterprises in the 80s and 90s, um the money that was raised off the privatization of public enterprises generally was redistributed to the population in the form of tax cuts or, you know, sort of keeping a lid on taxes.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And but what has happened in the process, of course, as we know all too well in Britain, is that the stock of public wealth, just looking at the state of infrastructure in most Western countries, has been running down quite badly.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this has deleterious effects on the economy.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think it's probably getting far too little attention.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think you so I think this is important to realize or to highlight that.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what is that debt being used for?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: China, for example, has a similar scale of debt.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, China has a vast network of you know high-speed rail and it is adding infrastructure.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say China has real problems.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to minimize the problems that China faces in the future.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: But um, on the other hand, I do think that uh there is a sign of a sort of a forward-looking um strategy in what they're doing.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in Western governments, um, I don't detect much of that at all.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Everything has become very much preoccupied with um in politics uh relatively short-term visions, and of course in in finance with you know quarterly statements, even the way in which pension funds are required to manage their investments.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: In most constituencies, uh they are required to basically maximize returns, minimize risk, but there isn't a sort of sense of in what ways are you built are you actually investing for future generations, or are you just trying to keep your current beneficiaries in the style up to which they've Own of custom and that requires some kind of running down of capital.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we're at that stage, which is a real concern, which I think is probably getting too little attention.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: The focus on, even if you look at um, you know, the British election campaign and the focus on, well, we will keep taxes low or we will keep the debt, um, bring the deficit down, it's very narrowly focused on a set of relatively short-term measures.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: But if, as has been the case in Western countries, when there has been significant deficit reduction, what you've had is a rise in private debt, uh, that actually outstrips any saving from the public sector, you still have a problem, but you're just redistributing it.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I what we're only in the book and broadly is that the the this increase in debt is uh effectively replacing the income that Western countries used to get by selling to the rest of the world.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: So uh, you know, the the economic flows of the imperial system used to bring a lot of wealth into the West.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: This extraordinary figure uh from 1999 uh that 80% of world GDP is made and consumed in the West, you know.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that is a staggering, staggering figure, and it's one to hold on to.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um if you shift manufacturing and the production of wealth somewhere else, uh you're gonna need to replace the wealth flow uh within your own country, or you will have political problems, of course, uh, unless you have a really honest political discourse, and obviously you'll have to do a mixture of the two over time.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: And we've certainly not had an honest political discourse about this, uh, and we've effectively replaced it with debt, uh, and that is going to uh have what it is, the the chickens are seriously coming home to roost.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: But I would echo what John says about you know polite campaign.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: When was the last time you heard a politician say, well, you know, the way you really make your country wealthy is by selling stuff to other people who are not in your country.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, exporting is how you actually uh generate extra wealth within your economic domain.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: The six ways in which we make uh currency uh and get wealth from people overseas is by doing X, Y, Z, you know, A, B, C.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: So we need to focus on those and get the wealth coming back into our country.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: I've not heard a single politician frame an argument in that way for donkeys years.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: There are there are briefing papers which talk about this kind of thing.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen um I've seen some of them.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: They're not secret or anything.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's just my son brought them to my attention.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, you don't hear you don't hear that being talked about, uh, that level of honesty that actually, you know, the only it's not by uh bulking up the hospitality sector that you will make the country wealthier.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: That that's just pushing around stuff that's already within your economic domain.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: The way you make your country wealthier is by selling stuff to other people in other economic domains.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, that that otherwise you're just gonna keep racking up the debt, you know.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: Or that's the that's the short-term reflex.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: But as John suggests, that's and as I think your question was suggesting, other John, uh I'm here talking to two Johns, which is not immediately straightforward.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um that that is going to lead to a deeper crisis.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, yeah, and I know we're not here to talk necessarily about policy and what might get us out of this, but I I think um it is striking when you live in a place like Britain, or even if you look at some of the um policies, I suppose, coming out of the European Union of late, which is tourism above all else.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that's where we're getting lots of our inflow, but high energy costs mean you don't have a lot of industrial action um or industrial or industrial industries remaining.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously in the UK we've we've not had any for a long time.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: And um as someone who's worked in and around financial services for a while, I know that that is the one gravy train that Britain has, and yet um even that's uh open to debate as to how how long that'll remain um you know in supremacy, albeit it's it always seems to hold its own.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: But that can't be the only thing, particularly as someone from the that another gravy train is actually what I do at universities.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but you know, all we get is this discourse about oh, you've got to stop master students bringing their mothers in, yeah, rather than actually, you know, as though it's some kind of dangerous thing to have bright, intelligent people from other countries coming to study in your country.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, some of them stay.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's obviously a terribly bad thing.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: Universities, we have a fantastic university sector, the whole world operates in the English language.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, this is uh left to its own devices.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we can generate a lot of uh foreign game, not on the services scale, obviously, but you know, we are another asset.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and but that's not because you're not analyzing the problem clearly and bringing the problem to the forefront, uh, you end up looking at the wrong dimensions of question and what focusing on what uh universities can really do within the economy, which is actually the useful generators of account for those size, take it.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: What what what cultural factors can be behind the decline as well?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Presumably elites have some part to play in this.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, typically that's where we can take our cues around around culture, and uh this isn't any going anywhere near as far back.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I suppose this bit is.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we we know that the West is built on Judeo-Christian principles, albeit they morphed into various secular versions of those uh in the last 500 years.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then since the 1960s, we've seen a staggering change in principles, social mores, and I would say people waking up who were born before that period would probably find themselves in a bit of a foreign country in that respect.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: How much does a cultural change lead to the disintegration, for example, of a previously cohesive um civilization or culture?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think um I'll quickly answer that, but I think Peter is probably a better person because um Neil Ferguson once actually tried to weaponize his book uh on the fall of the Roman Empire and misrepresented it.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that to some extent we tried to get even by pointing out the way he's misused history in um and the way we're correcting him.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I I would say uh my own view is to see culture as being more a response to rather than a motivator.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it is a signpost of change, it's not the thing that's actually driving change, and it's usually culture that um those who actually try and say, look, we can learn from Roman history tend to focus on.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the the uh as um you know, as um Ferguson put it, you know, basically that loss of cultural self-confidence and allowing foreigners to come in and redefine your culture, that's really heralds the end of an empire.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think the cultural change we and I think the big one, which I think uh bears noting, Peter pointed out the way and we developed this argument that in the late stages of uh the very final sort of decades of uh Roman imperial history, uh you get the growth of this internal division as the elite start fighting among themselves.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: This in a sense they're no longer living off the surplus of a periphery, so they have to internalize their exploitation.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: One one aristocrat's gain must be another one's loss.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: So who's going to be the winner?
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Who's gonna be cut off?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we warn that that's a real danger that we reach that point that we begin to see, and I think there is, and certainly this is one of the temptations that some I think opportunistic politicians in Western countries, I don't have to name names, I think we know who we're talking about, are trying to exploit this by saying, Well, you're poor because this person has been allowed in, uh, and they've taken your job, even though all the evidence is the contrary, and they in most cases are intelligent enough to know that it's the contrary and that they're actually lying, they find this a very resonant message because it's something one can get, you know, it's visible.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can say, Well, yeah, that's true.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, my living standard has gone down since these people have been showing up in my neighborhood.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: That seems to be the link.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's this kind of um us and them, this division that's emerging in society.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's an inevitable challenge.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we argue that you know if throughout the 20th century, the high, the peak of the Western age, when we argue that the empire reaches its highest level of evolution under the sort of US-led system, um, there's a net subsidy coming from the empire throughout that whole period.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so everybody is sort of you've outsourced exploitation to the periphery, as it were.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's a harmonious society.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's rising.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: But now that that has been lost, and so if you're going to continue maintaining share values, it means you've got to outsource manufacturing to low-wage zones to boost your profits, and that means, okay, you're going to have to abandon the traditional working class.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: And um these kind of divisions inevitably sort of begin to work in.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, and the question is, do politicians rise to it and say we're facing real challenges?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to have to look at how we adjust to this new world.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And again, the temptation is just too great to say, well, we'll just resist it altogether and go back to the way things were.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this is something that has to be said.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, obviously I'm thinking of, you know, conservative politicians primarily, right-wing politicians.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I mean, if you just look at the political debate in in the current election campaign in Britain, I mean, uh, I don't think Labour is really being honest.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're saying they'll make the economy grow.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, you're not going to make the economy grow unless you make really tough decisions.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not, you know, they're not prepared to take those because they keep sort of maintaining this idea we can somehow pull it off painlessly, like we did it another time because somebody else was bearing the pain.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh I agree with what John said, of course, and we we do take cabinet responsibility for everything that we put in the book.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: We both agree that uh just add quickly uh a couple of other dimensions to it.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: The cultural challenges are real.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you've got people from different backgrounds with different ideas of what's right and what's wrong, and you can't um you can't pretend that they aren't there.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, you do have to be much more honest, and there are two points of the where politicians and political discourse in general needs to be more honest.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: One is it's not the arrival of migrants into the West that is taking away worthwhile jobs from the traditional Western working class.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: It is actually the transfer of production out of the West.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so, you know, if you worry about migrants within the UK or in America or whatever, you are missing the point.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that is not where the wealth has gone.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: The wealth has gone to China, the wealth has gone to the Brit countries, the wealth has gone to India because that's where manufacturing has gone, where wealth production has gone.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: So you need to be crystal clear about that.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing you need to be crystal clear about the changing demographic patterns in the West.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the fact that uh apart from Israel and Iceland, uh, no developed Western population is reproducing itself.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: And in some places, um you're way below that canonical 2.1 child per woman for a population to per adult woman for a population to reproduce itself at the same time as healthcare has got better.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: So we have aging populations uh and we have growing dependency ratios of those who are past the age of working uh to those who are working.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and migration into the West has been very much uh about solving the problem of our aging population, a declining birth rate.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and people don't talk about that.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so uh that's not to say there are cultural problems, that's not to say there are things that need to be talked about, but uh on the whole, migration into the West is helping Western economies, is doing Western populations a favor.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: It means that our parents are being looked after by a real person and not by robots as they uh decide to be in China when they go into retirement homes and whatever.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and actually, it isn't migrants into the West who are taking jobs, it is the shift of production to the developing world that has taken away the traditional access to the production of wealth that the Western working class had from the mid to late 19th century onwards.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, two real points of clarity that need to come into political discourse, or you will be coming up with the wrong answers the whole time.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it does seem to mean that it is what we're seeing typically down to the focus on resource.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, in this case, okay, we we we know, as we've talked about, that politicians will typically talk about GDP, growing GDP, growing the economy, and that becomes a single point of metric in which to base their success on, and they'll do anything they can to try and grow it.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: And we know that high immigration can increase the GDP uh at a at the state level, um, even if it decreases it per capita, uh, which isn't necessarily making other people poorer, it just means it's spread out over many more people.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um is this, and I think I've seen it start being used as a kind of human quantitative easing, really just covering up that there are these structural problems, and actually instead of, for example, continuing ahead with a mass immigration policy in the hope that you can just keep on feeding people in that will fix things in the end, that we we know that it will cause, you know, unless it's in the boardroom, diversity can cause lots of social cultural rubbing together uh on the in the on the neighborhood level.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um it it seems to me that you would uh think about what it is to structurally fix things instead of looking to the rest of the world to bring people in when the jobs aren't there in the first place, and you as a government have um a duty, I suppose, in the first instance, to govern for the people already there.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: What would you say to that?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see that within empires uh and civilizations that as part of their success, once they're on the way and they're doing anything they can to keep it going, so they're pulling in from the periphery, but it only delays the inevitable and causes additional problems along the way.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: I guess uh when it comes to the question of culture, because you know, as Peter points out, uh you know, I agree, you know, I mean it is a challenge.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: It is a challenge.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: Look, when we had this initial conversation about the book, it was actually we bumped into each other one Easter holiday in the south of France, where I was then teaching at a university in the south of France.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: And having lived, you know, for quite a time in France and observed the changes that are taking place, you know, it's visiting small villages where the final, the last artisanal, we'll call it artisan, they're not called artisanal in France, they were just bakeries where you baked the baguette from scratch.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: The baker got up at at three or four in the morning and you know, prepared the dough and and everything, and and the closure of the last bakery.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very sad moment.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: You sort of see those things disappearing.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that's not entirely due to immigration, but there's no question that you know this immigration does cause that.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I think uh um, and I can quite understand that a politician would say, but we don't want to lose, or an individual voter might say, we don't want to lose uh our way of life.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: But the trade-off is they say we don't want to lose our way of life, nor do we want to lose our standard, material standard of living.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the question then is how do you keep this economy growing?
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when I the other day I heard uh Nigel Farage and you know talking about British nurses who can't get jobs because the government is importing, you know, foreign nurses.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, there may be somewhere in Britain a nurse who can't get a job because a Nigerian nurse is brought into his or her place.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I personally I haven't met that person.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly in the data, the British nurses who can't get jobs aren't getting them in Britain because they're packing up and going to Australia and Canada where they can get much more pay and less of the kind of demonization that they're getting in uh in the you know by the UK by these kinds of politicians who say they're lazy and you know, shutting down the system with strikes.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: We are relying on foreign nurses because it's the only thing which is keeping the health system operating.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Is you know, we talk about this briefly in the book.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Without foreign nurses and foreign doctors, it would collapse.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now you could say as a politician, we want to create a system in which you're only treated by British medics, and you could, but you'd also have to say, but we can't then treat X, Y, and Z, you know, certain things you'll have to go private.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: But because they are clinging to this idea, and it it came out of this period in history when nothing seemed to have a price, everything seemed to be free.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: But that was because, as we argue in the book, during that period of imperial history, the price was being paid by someone else.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: You were exploiting somebody else's labor and generating a surplus and enabling yourself to both preserve your standard of living and your style of living.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: And now that that imperial subsidy is gone, and you either resort to immigration to keep the economy and the public sector going, or you know, reason honestly with the voters and say, well, what do you want?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to continue um earning a pension that is as valuable as before and have your property value be as high as it is now?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you want the bakery to be the old-fashioned bakery where in you know in Britain we're getting sort of jelly rolls and uh you know everything, you know, and and and the butcher who sells meat pies and all the rest of it.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think we need to have to we need that kind of honesty, but instead what we're getting is uh continually is uh politicians who are saying we can have it we can still have it both ways somehow.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: And inevitably that brings us back to the question of debt.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how do they keep, in fact, supporting this system without telling people they'll have to pay more in taxes?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, we run up debt is what we do, or we run down assets, you know.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: We sort of say, well, okay, we'll reorient the public uh health spending towards salaries and away from proper maintenance or building or maintaining hospitals or you know, adding it, you know, maintaining equipment.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so ultimately you do run it down by stealth rather than face up to the decisions, honestly.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's kind of a roundabout answer.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's clear.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I think we need to just um just to sum up, I would say I think I think we need to be honest here.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we have to make a choice.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: We can continue to maintain our material standard of living, or we can focus on preserving our way of life.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: And um I think we need to have that honest conversation.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: Dear classmate John here, this isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you are watching or listening to Thinking Class on.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at Thinking Class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser, and you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I hear you, and I think they are common talking points that you hear in the political landscape.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one thing that I would say, probably to try and bolster that side's argument a little bit, is particularly on the doctors and nurses point, is I know that many of the complaints um seem to be grounded in the idea that the effectively the union, the British Medical Association, has capped the number of doctors, nurses places that can be trained within the British populace.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so the accusation on them is that there's a bit of a political decision there.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and I know you both work in the university sector, so whilst I'm throwing some dissent out there, uh I the the the uh international student point, I I know there are those I would say, are they on the right?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not too sure.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think you can find this on on the left as well.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: Where yeah, you find it across where they'll say, okay, we uh it's okay to have international students, but someone, I can't remember who it was, but there was something released recently which showed the difference in the entry grades for British students and international students.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: So not only do international students come over and have to pay so much more, but then they can get in with much lesser on the qualifications front.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so people would say, well.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, why is that?
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: Why would we uh prioritize the international students potentially for soft power purposes and spreading influence in the future over the over the British populace?
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then they would cynically say, and perhaps not without a foundation, that it looks like an economic point and that there are many universities apart from the really prestigious ones that are running a deficit.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're covering it up through through this international student system.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I understand what you're saying, that these um points can quickly descend into, well, we don't want it, let's cut our nose off to uh cut to spite our face.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there's other things to it where people will say structurally, it looks like things are stacked against British folks, whether it's through the BMA or the university system.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: I would and I wouldn't disagree.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let me just quickly make a point, Peter, and then you can take over.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, on the issue of universities, and Peter can tell you this, and it's and it reaches right up to the very most elite universities.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: The reason they're prioritizing foreign students is because the budget coming from the government isn't sufficient to maintain these universities.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the revenue is simply not there.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: 9,000 pounds a year isn't enough currently to cover the cost of an education.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: So they are using foreign students to cross-subsidize the local ones.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's an example of what I mean.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, let's be honest.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say, okay, well, listen, we simply can't produce as many graduates as we do because uh we need to reduce the number of graduates, but maintain the funding uh and therefore rely less on foreign students.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: But rather than face that choice, it's been a convenient way for governments to um, you know, transfer the money.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the same I would agree with the doctors.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is not a problem peculiar to Britain.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's sort of the use of a closed shop approaches whereby you limit the number of positions available, and therefore you concoct a sort of a supply and demand imbalance and inflate the wages.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, doctors, that's that's a I'm here in Canada at the moment, and that's you know, one of the reasons why doctors are so well paid in Canada.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: But it's leading, therefore, but again, rather than face up to this, well, you know, it's a competitive world, those doctors go south of the border to the US.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we either have to pay them a whole lot and therefore demand more on taxes to support the system, or we accept a different, you know, we just start saying, well, we what there's a lot of things we won't treat.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's an example of what I'm trying to get at is having an honest conversation.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: But rather, in instead of doing that, and it just becomes easier to just say, well, it's because we have, you know, foreign doctors, or the doctors are selfish rather than saying, well, we're all being pretty selfish here.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: Peter?
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I agree.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: And you I think one might say about the university sector, well, actually, we're getting, we're able to take more home students because um the extra income that you can make from foreign students allows us, therefore, to uh teach British students um that we're not being paid properly to teach.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and certainly uh we don't have any, if you if you think about the massive expansion that's taken place in Ugh sector, you've got to think about um how what sort of percentage of your population should go to university, you know, in in economic terms.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: Who are there?
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what sort of percentage of your population um are you training for graduate level jobs?
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, in other words, uh, because the one thing that I that really annoys me, because of course, yeah, I went to university in the late 70s and early 80s uh when tuition was free, and about well, I think in my day it was 17% of a generation went to university of one kind or another.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um now it's nine uh grand a year and it's high 40s over generation, but there aren't jobs for there aren't graduate level jobs for you know nearly 50% of the population.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: So you're landing these students with uh a kind of small mortgage level of debt with no prospect of them having a job, and this that that uh makes taking on that level of debt at all appropriate or sensible.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I find this absolutely horrifying.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, uh I just think again that the lack of connected thinking about you know what does your economy look like?
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_02: What uh jobs have you got in what sector?
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: What sort of training is appropriate?
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Britain's always been crap at things like um you know uh proper technical skills, the things that Germany does better, you know, of rating those as important uh as in uh very academic skills.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I obviously have skin in the game.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_02: I think academic skills are important and help a lot in all kinds of ways, but I absolutely see that you should be not regarding technical skills as in any sense lesser, just different.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what is the appropriate mix in your educational portfolio given what your economy does and how you make your living uh in this planet, in this new global world uh in which you all operate?
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_02: And do you see any connected thinking about that in political discourse around?
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: Damned if I do.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: No, not quite.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: We can we can keep hoping.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so uh we've we've spoken um quite a bit about how decline comes about through the rise of the former periphery that which starts to become in their own way a core in itself or in themselves, and then they rub up against the previous core.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it seems then that, and whether it whether people talk about history repeating or rhyming or it's cyclical or whatever, um, that decline becomes inevitable in some way.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh from what you've seen, looking at the historical record, is there anything that has been done successfully to slow down or reverse decline?
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: Or is it about waiting for the new to be birthed?
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_02: In our argument, we're not looking at mere repetitions, um, in the sense that uh I do think the Western imperial system, like the Roman imperial system, created the seeds of its own eventual blunting so that it couldn't keep operating in the same way.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the Roman world operated with uh, you know, as did most of the pre-modern world up until 1850 or later in most places, an agricultural economy where growth of any kind um is very limited.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you can't generate new wealth in straightforward ways.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_02: And when you reach political crisis points, it's about ownership of existing wealth.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_02: You can't uh, as it weights, as it were, leverage your way out of it by generating new wealth so that as it were, more people can share and you blunt that political competition over control of wealth.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_02: In the Roman world, it eventually came down to a pretty brutal struggle for control of what was there, because you can't generate anything else.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's the good land that there is, good agricultural land that there is in Britain.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: You can't make more of it, you know, you can't suddenly turn the highlands into good farming country and solve an argument that way.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's not possible.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: The modern world is very different because uh you can generate new wealth, uh, we hope, without destroying the climate.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: That that is the other dimension, of course, which we're not discussing here, but we one should.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, new wealth can be generated.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you can accommodate perfectly reasonable human aspiration uh across the planet by generating more wealth for more people to share and blunt the struggle for control of assets uh to some extent by doing that.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and you know, the decline uh in the modern West is uh relative to the rest of the planet, it's not absolute.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_02: We are wealthier than we were in the 1950s when we ran the entire planet.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you know, let's keep things clear as to what we're talking about.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we just can't run the entire planet anymore.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, maybe that's a good thing, to be honest.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so there are more ways forward, in other words, is what I'm saying, in the modern context, if we think clearly about what's going on, what the real trends are, why we can't run the planet anymore, um uh than think about what do we do from here.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so uh how do we now make our living selling stuff to the rest of the world when the rest of the world can do what Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield did in the 19th and early 20th century.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_02: They can do that perfectly well.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_02: So, modern world, it would be bonkers to import war cotton from India, turn it into clothes in uh the the northeast and then send it back to India.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's what happened in the 19th century.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you do that?
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, only because India doesn't have a cotton manufacturing industry.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's why you would do it.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, you once uh development is equalized across the planet, you would not do that.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so what do we do now?
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_02: How do we make our living now?
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: What can we offer the world that means that people will buy stuff from us uh and that we can share in the still developing wealth of the planet and be taken seriously, hopefully, in the important discussions that have to be had about how we develop uh human society without destroying climate and damaging the environment further.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_02: So uh there is uh a repetitive pattern, but it's taking place in a very this pattern is repeating itself in a very different context, and that means where we go from here will be very different than what happened in the right context.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: Just to say, uh as we say near the end of the book, the real issue for the future of the West, I mean, is it how does it engage the rising periphery?
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: What is its relationship going to be?
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, how does it engage with China?
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the unanswered question.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_00: I am observing with great interest China's own approach to its own periphery, which is becoming increasingly significant.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's a saying in Kenya when the Chinese uh come, they give us a hospital, when the Europeans come, they give us a lecture.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I find it really quite fascinating that China China doesn't want to deal with the slowdown on its economy by bringing in immigrants.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's like Japan in that respect.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a great place.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, foreign students who go to China are not expected to stick around after their studies.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_00: In some places, that's a good thing.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a Nigerian student and you're told, well, you're not really welcome here, go back to Nigeria, you take your engineering skills back to Nigeria and benefit your country.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: But the other thing which is interesting is that what that anecdote from Kenya illustrates, the Chinese are actually pouring a great deal of investment into the development of the periphery.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: And part of that is because they see it as, well, you know, if if Western countries are becoming more protectionist, where are we going to sell all these electric vehicles that we're producing?
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_00: Where are we going to sell all these solar panels to these other developing countries?
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: They're not going to be able to buy them unless their own incomes are rising.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: There seems to be a model emerging of sort of Chinese imperialism, which, if you will, might be a little bit more um, I don't want to say enlightened, but it is it it recognizes that um there's something to be gained from the rise of a periphery.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a zero-sum game.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I do think there is that kind of zero-sum thinking.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: The assumption is if China is rising, by definition, it's a threat to us.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now that may be the case.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: I am not a sinologist and I'm not an expert on uh, you know, international strategic studies.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: I do it, but I would never call myself an expert.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it could be that there's another model there, and we should be take a step back, be a bit more humble.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: And part of that is, and it's going to be uncomfortable.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be uncomfortable because it means that there might be areas in which we say, well, we're going to have to let the Chinese hold sway.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: We simply can't dominate all the seas of the world anymore.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's going to, there will be definite real moments of decision, which is, you know, sooner or later there will be some kind of a point will come when Taiwan either is or is not reintegrated into China.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that simply can't be avoided, or perhaps it can be, but it will have to be avoided at great cost.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the question is, uh, on what terms is Taiwan?
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it could be that we can find terms that leave everybody happy, but I think the idea that we just sort of say this is this is our the stand we will make and we will not budge is looks like we're headed towards inevitable conflict.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_00: But it may be that there is another approach to the world.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um there may not be.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: It may be that Xi Jinping is himself so imperialistic and so anxious to dominate, you know, if you look at the way he's behaved in Hong Kong, uh, you know, perhaps there really isn't any hope other than a clash of civilizations.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: But there may be another model available, and I think it's worth actually being open to that and sort of seeing the world with different eyes and considering.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, Peter talks about this, or we talk about it, but it's Peter's research, obviously, in the you know, the late stages of the Roman Empire.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: There was a period in which they had to decide how to deal with the Persian Empire, and they decided to see it as a rival, and it's you know, one of us is gonna win, we'll be the winner.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not entirely clear that that was the only choice available to them, wouldn't you say, Peter?
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, absolutely.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Persia and and the Roman Empire coexisted for several centuries, and then internal political reasons led them both into a head-on confrontation, which basically destroyed the two of them.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's the analogy.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_02: So uh, you know, uh fine uh when they're living with one another, they talk about themselves as the the twin lights in the firmament.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_02: So you know that maybe we need to think about that a bit more.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and I think the other thing I'd add to you know, whatever China does, uh you know, whatever its kind of um internal political weaknesses, however that drives it to behave on the planet, uh, that doesn't vitiate actually that policy of positive engagement with the developing periphery as your new markets.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, uh that the we quote the statistic in the book.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh um John will, it was his statistic, you'll remember, for every pound invested in the in the periphery, you get you get more than one how many more than one pound back do you get John?
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_02: You you get several back, you know, but it's a good thing to do.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_02: You should not be cutting foreign aid budgets.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_02: That is a bonkers' thing to do, uh, especially if you need to make your way in the world by selling more stuff overseas, you should be investing strategically overseas.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_02: That is one message that's loud and clear.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that's what China's got right, whatever it then turns out to do on a global political uh strategic level.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_02: That is just the right thing to do.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_02: We're in the modern world.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: We need uh places that don't hate us to buy stuff from us.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, uh let's get on with the new world and start kind of hankering after an old one that doesn't exist anymore and can't possibly exist.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: So learning from China, it would be getting over there, actually building capacity.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's sometimes where the pushback on foreign aid comes from is the are we giving cash handouts to governments where it doesn't get down to building capacity?
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know how the Chinese have managed to get there and build factories and all the infrastructure, but they have, and clearly it's it's having an impact.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: So clearly there's something that can be learned from there.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose that the big question being is where we get the finance for it from, particularly as we talked about the high debt to GDP, you're always going to have people looking at that going, well, hang on, spend the money here, spend the money um in levelling up, for example, or whatever other political policy that we've we've got.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, clearly, clearly there is stuff to be learned from those who we've come to see as geopolitical rivals, and I suppose are in some ways, but you're right, there's a there's a framing in there uh that that helps with your communication and the language that you use around them, which is probably going to lead to either frostier or friendlier relations.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it will vary, you know.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Xi Jinping is already he's older than I thought he was, isn't he?
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_02: He's 70-something.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_02: I thought he was younger than that.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_02: He's not going to be there forever.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_02: Especially authoritarian regimes are very dependent on who's in charge at any given moment.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, that's another lesson from history.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_02: These things come and they go.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he is not China, China is not him.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we'll see what happens.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you've talked about the the question marks over the future of China, and I suppose right now they really are on the ascendant, even if there are things in the medium term like housing bubble, debt bubble, which is starting to impact them, perhaps not in the same way as the rest of us in the West at the moment.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I know recently there was also that big uh news piece about the population, and I can't remember exactly what it's going to be, but something like half of the population will remain by the end of the century.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it's 1.2 billion now.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think the UN came out and said something like there's a population bomb, that means it'll be more like 700 million by the end of the century.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so if, for example, a lot of political economists' ideas about more people, bigger economy is true, um, then that's a problem.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: But then I know others would come and say, well, this is why everyone's trying to invest in tech, in AI, to try and make sure we can keep this whole show on the road without having to have one plus billion people.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, depending on which way you look at it, that can either be a bit of an anti-human response to things, or it becomes one which is focused on sustainability, which I know we've we've referenced a couple of times.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: John, you look like you had something to say there.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, just I think we are, I think it we we have to approach this with a great deal of humility that uh we are in uncharted territory.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the mistakes, you know, in economics has been to extrapolate from a relatively brief period in human history and assume that these are the rules for eternity.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the period, as we you know, show in the book, the period after 1800 is a period of extraordinarily rapid economic growth, unprecedented in history.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it is possible that it will also, you know, it it will not serve as a precedent, that it was just an exceptional period, and that we are now headering heading into a period in which growth, I mean, there is evidence that you know the economic growth is on average almost everywhere slowing, that most of the growth in the world economy now at the moment is due to the rising periphery, and that the relative stagnation of Western countries since the financial crisis is not, in fact, just a problem to be overcome, but actually the new norm, and that China will head into this sort of similar kind of steady state, and the rest of the world may.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we need to at least be open to this possibility that we're we're gonna need an entirely new set of tools and economic models to really predict and to sort of say, well, how do we organize societies?
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in a society with a declining population that isn't able to rely on a magic bullet of um artificial intelligence to in fact maintain the growth rates of the past, what do you do?
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when when when whenever I hear these uh, you know, visionaries talk about people living to, you know, the technology that will enable humans to live until they're a thousand years old, I said, so that would does that mean retirement will be at 965?
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, are you actually, have you thought about this?
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: They keep thinking, well, no, we'll have 900 years of retirement.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_00: How on earth are you going to support that part?
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these questions aren't being entertained, and they need to, because we now live in a time where people in I have met have spent more time collecting a pension than they did paying into that pension.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: That is simply not a sustainable model.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: But nobody wants to actually say, well, you know, they're talking about lowering retirement ages and increasing benefits.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: And how on earth do you do this?
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: And these are the kind of questions we really need to start talking about seriously because I think this could become more than just a local problem.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_00: This could become a human problem because we're seeing that demographic transition throughout the world.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_02: And um did a talk in a local pub here in Oxfordshire about some of these ideas to uh an audience um that was similar in vintage to me.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_02: I I can't remember if we're on film, but you know, I'm 64 uh white head, reasonably healthy and vigorous still, but you know, uh male, pale, and hopefully not stale, definitely.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, the problem is not migration, the problem is old white people.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_02: That is the problem.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we're not contributing to the economy.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there we're living way beyond where we were expected to live when the welfare state is uh created.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very happy about that as a 64-year-old male.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, my grandfather, just after World War II, had a life expectancy of about four years, where I am now, and I have way more than that, and I'm extremely happy about it.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_02: But you have to be honest, this creates an economic issue, a serious economic issue.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that economic issue has to be addressed uh straightforwardly and sensibly, uh, obviously, I hope, as a 64-year-old, with compassion as well.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, uh these are the parameters that changed, and you have to think about what expectations are reasonable in a world with uh uh a much older population and a much smaller working population, uh, and a world where the production of wealth has shifted to other places, so you can't just magically produce loads of wealth where you are.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, um, I don't think it's an insuperable problem.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'm not consumed with despair, I hasten to add, but you have to think about the big things that have moved since 1950 and think about where the logic then pushes your response to those changes.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_02: And this is uh as an analytic historian, this is what drives me to despair about non-political discourse because I just don't see that.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_02: I just don't see that level of reflection.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_02: And if you don't give that reflection, you're not offering the electorate reasons why they have to make tough choices, and they don't make tough choices, and then the dare, as you mentioned, John G, quite rightly the debt keeps on growing.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we've talked a bit about reflection here, and uh a question that I like to ask all of my guests, so I'll ask you both in turn, is is to reflect, actually.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_01: So what we'll start with you, Peter, have you changed your mind about in the course of your life, something you might have previously thought was an unshakable uh certainty, or perhaps even something you changed your mind about recently, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think the the the thing that has changed my understanding of the world is actually looking at demographic patterns, uh which I I didn't really reflect on.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_02: The the single most extraordinary um uh fact that came out of the research that we did for the book, um, to me, I'm sure other people knew this perfectly well, but I I did not, was the fact that up until about 1830 or 1840, uh between 30 and 50 percent of European children were dying in childhood, born European children were still dying in childhood.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_02: Staggering 50 percent in Germany in the 1830s of children don't make it into adulthood.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh I checked back with one of my 19th century colleagues because I found that very surprising that Germany would be worse than Britain and France, right?
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_02: With only 30.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_02: But they said, yeah, no, that's right, because and eastern parts of Germany were very poor agricultural areas as late as 1830.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_02: That you that does make sense, that death rate should be even higher there.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_02: So this first demographic transition is uh healthcare, uh, inoculation, etc., and all these children survive.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so between 1850 and 1900, people are still having massive families.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_02: My grandfather was one of 11 children, um, and they all survived to adulthood.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_02: So around 1900, you've got Europeans breeding like rabbits still, because they still think all their children are going to die, but they're all surviving.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_02: And this is the era of obviously Western colonization across the planet.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_02: You have far more Europeans in that era than at any other era uh in of time, because uh it takes two generations or a generation and a half more people realize their children are surviving, and you don't have to have children anymore.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and there's enough wealth, so your children are not supporting you in retirement.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, the great era of Western colonization is uh associated with that first demographic transition, but then we get the second demographic transition, and this is this is the thing that I think people are not thinking about.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_02: What it means if instead of the canonical 2.1 children, uh your uh adult women are only having on average 1.5 or 1.6 children.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_02: That is that is a huge game changer, and it's hidden because uh it's hidden, our populations are not declining yet because um better healthcare means that people are living longer.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_02: So you're not seeing it in total population figures, but it is changing the ratios within your population, and I think it's kind of understanding that that has made me uh realize uh that's the sort of uh there's a there's two component, there's two moving parts to the model world that make it different from the world that I grew up in.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_02: One is the shift of manufacturing to the periphery, but the second is the shifting demographic pattern within our own societies.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and we have to square uh the circle, work out where the the shifting of these two things leads us.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what is the lot, what is our best logical response to these two mega changes?
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_02: And they are both mega changes.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in answer to the question, what have I changed my mind about?
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, I'm tempted to say I've finally given up on my annual ritual of saying next season will be Manchester United's good season.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think for taking picking up where Peter left off more profoundly, uh this issue of the demographic transition, which is part of a series of questions we sort of only just raised at the end of the book, but we just decided it wasn't, you know, the book didn't allow us to possibly investigate.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_00: The other one we do refer to is climate change.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And but this is something I give a lot of thought to, and a lot of I spend a lot of time researching and actually writing about these issues.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the one possibility, you know, I've always been very dismissive, uh, as we both have been, of those who talk about civilization collapse, you know, look at what happened to Rome, it's gonna happen to the West, and we're saying that's utter nonsense.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the possibility of of complete civilization collapse, of human civilization now, not Western civilization, is one that I'm you know I'm actually being forced to entertain for the first time because these are not insurmountable problems, but they do take human will to face and to confront.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, how do you maintain endless growth with a declining population?
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what if you know technology doesn't provide a solution?
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh many of my colleagues are bad optimists who say don't worry, it's all going to be solved by AI, but uh they haven't they don't produce much evidence to that effect.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's really just an expression of hope.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, I keep going going back to Robert Solo's famous statement, the computer age is everywhere, but in the productivity statistics, um, you know, we heard the same thing about the internet, we heard the same thing about computers, but productivity growth has been trending downwards ever since.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the kind of uh examples that I get of how artificial intelligence will revolutionize human productivity are based on assumptions and also I think in some cases mistaken models.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're based on a human uh calculus-based model of human decision-making in which you can actually create an even uh more intelligent human.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_00: But but uh again, the research economists are not great at you know researching outside their field, and a lot of the research, as I understand it, and neurobiology says, you know, it's a lot more complicated the way the human mind operates.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, there's quite a body of literature that says the human body is fundamental, the way we acquire knowledge uh is you know, the human body plays a fundamental role, and and none of this is being captured in this sort of idea that we can create super intelligent humans or super intelligent robots, all of which to say that if we're on a path and our solution is don't worry, technology is somehow going to rescue us, but it hasn't yet.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think we have to start saying, well, what happens if it doesn't rescue us and we continue on this path?
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um what happens if we have the acquire the capacity to extend human life to you know the kind of lengths they're talking about, but human productivity doesn't uh increase at that rate.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Are we going to create a society of sort of serfs and aristocrats and you know, a very small privileged elite living off the labors of those who don't have the luxury of retiring at 65?
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I see that around me in Western societies where you see people who are working well into their retirement, uh having to take second jobs because their pension isn't sufficient, and you know, in some cases, physically demanding jobs that are running down their health.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing widening gaps in life expectancy within Britain because of this sort of thing.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So some people living the best lives and other people essentially supporting them in the style to which they've grown accustomed.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think these are unsustainable trajectories.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_00: We have to face up to these as a society, and if we don't, I think there is a real danger that um you could and what path that goes on, I can't say.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think um I don't think we can just assume that we don't have to take tough decisions because somehow we're going to be rescued by a Deus Ex Machina of technology.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think until that technology actually proves itself that it can do this, we have to err on the side of caution and I think begin confronting these decisions now.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in Western societies, I see very little of that.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_00: I see a lot of, you know, either dooms, you know, on the one hand there's sort of the doom mongers and in the other hand the optimists, but not someone in the middle saying, Well, we have the capacity to do it, but we have to take, we have to have the will and make the decisions.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I I I I I'm hearing very little of that, certainly in political discourse and even in journalistic discourse.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um whether or not other societies are more open to that task, that's a possibility.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_00: But uh that is a concern of mine that we could just sort of end up in denial, not facing with any of, you know, not dealing with any of these issues while things and certainly to listen to my colleagues in climate science, you know, it gets it gets worse by the year.
• 1:18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and I'm guilty of this myself sometimes, and I mean I focus on on all the benefits of of the energy transition, but when you look at the aggregate data, yes, we're electrifying the world economy and shifting to renewables very quickly, but our aggregate consumption of fossil fuels still keeps going up, uh, you know, because growth is rising faster than the trend, you know, transition can keep up.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And is that sustainable?
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, according to my colleagues in climate science, no.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we're we're getting very close to a crunch point.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yet, you know, I hear in Canada you can have wildfires, you know, bringing the economy to a halt.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And people still talk about how don't worry, you know, next season will be better.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_00: And sort of like my hope for Manchester United.
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_00: At some point you have to say, well, you know, you're not going to be rescued by a new signing, you know.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think that's the main thing I would say is that I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic because I'm not, but I think for the first time I'm really starting to say we may really be, have been the beneficiaries of an extraordinary time in human history, but that might not be the model for all human history.
• 1:19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe we should actually take a step back and think of do we need real deeper imagination?
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_01: John, Peter, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_01: I've followed your work besides the book that I've read recently, and Peter, I've read your book on Christendom as well.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've read both of you, your works in Unheard and various other media outlets.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so the listeners, the watchers know where to go to find you.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_01: What can we expect from you and where can we find you in the dark corners of the internet?
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think in both our cases, honestly, anybody just googles our names, quickly come up with a list of our publications and our various outlets.
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I um I write obviously, as you just referenced, John.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I write regularly.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I'm a contributor for Unheard.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_00: I also write a weekly column in the business pages of a Canadian newspaper called the Global Mail, all of which I post on my LinkedIn page.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_00: And um, but beyond that, as I say, I think, you know, and you just do the same with Peter.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you put Peter's Heather, Peter Heather's name in a Google search, you come up with no shortage of stuff to read.
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I if it were up to me, I I leave it to Peter to say, but if it were up to me, I'd say I'll I think always start with his book on the fall of the Roman Empire, because it's uh relatively short and accessible and easy, and then that will open your mind to I think probably with the books that you would probably want to be defined by Peter, I would think sort of some of your later works on uh where we where you really go beyond the empire to look at the periphery, and that's where it gets very interesting, including Christendom.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_00: But um, what would you say?
• 1:21:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean the the running theme in everything I've done is actually the way in which uh relationship with more developed societies uh alters less developed societies.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_02: I I realized that um about 15 years in.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_02: It took me a while to realize that that's what interested me.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_02: But it is what's interesting, it is what interests me.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and the the Christianity book has is a a very particular uh expansion of that um application of that idea, I suppose.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_02: So that that is what interests me.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh just you know wouldn't want anyone to be holding their breath, but I'm now working on Vikings with that dimension in in line as well.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, I'm having great fun working with a guy who's the curator of the Viking Ship Museum, and also because this is well, it comes back to John's reflection in a sense, but because what's not really uh noticed about the Viking period is that uh Scandinavians have been using waterborne transport for 3,000 years before the Viking Age, but they get sales exactly when the Viking Age begins.
• 1:22:21
  SPEAKER_02: So technology is behind the whole range of Viking phenomena because without sales we don't have it.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_02: So that's where the new stuff is going.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, excuse me.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, hopefully I'm not cutting you off, Peter.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_01: I know you're you're having a drink of water there, but we'll we'll close out there.
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_01: You both being very generous with your time.
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing else to say.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_01: I've taught you taught you into a submission.
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks both for coming on.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I'm looking forward to seeing what else you produce, and it'll be great to have you on in the future.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a pleasure.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having us.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we've always been happy to come on talk.
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, enjoy your travels.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Take care, guys.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_01: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_01: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Engage with me on YouTube or XT or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.