 I don't think that we should assume there'll be a post-COVID-19 era any more than there's a post-influenza era, or for that matter a post tuberculosis era, or a post-AIDS era. Welcome to World Versus Virus, a podcast from the World Economic Forum that aims to make sense of the COVID-19 outbreak. This week, historian, Nyle Ferguson. Historians are more alert to these disasters because we spend a lot of our time studying disasters. Nyle Ferguson challenges our assumptions on how and even if we'll beat the virus, and how fast we'll be able to rebuild the global economy. You get these wonderful V-shaped projections suggesting we'll be sort of back where we were at some point in 2021. And if you believe that, I'll sell you a bridge later in this interview. Also, still in lockdown, looking for a good read, award-winning Green Business consultant Tariq Al-Olaimi has three book recommendations. For me, reading this book is like taking a walk in a forest. This is really a wonderful book to guide as a compass, but also how we connect to the wider natural world. Welcome to World Versus Virus on Apple, SoundCloud, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robin Pomeroy, and this is World Versus Virus. I'm joined by my colleague Charlotte Biel, who's in London. Hi Charlotte, how are you? Hi Robin, I'm well. Thank you. How are you? Not bad. Thanks. So, you interviewed this week's guest, Nyle Ferguson. Who is he? And why did you want to interview him for this podcast? Nyle Ferguson's an economic historian. He's currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford. I was very curious to talk to him. He has been writing about coronavirus since, well, since we were all at the annual meeting in Davos in January. And he said, look, we're all talking about climate change here, but we need to brace ourselves for a coronavirus pandemic. And he followed it through February as it grew and grew. And I really wanted to find out what he thought about how it had all unfolded. This is Nyle Ferguson talking about the historian's eye view of this kind of thing. I think historians are more alert to these disasters because we spend a lot of our time studying disasters. And this was a very interesting illustration of the point that if you've read a lot of history, you are kind of sensitized to that sort of risk. And the red flag was very visible to me, even as other people, including at the World Economic Forum back in January, were focused on climate change. I take the issue of climate change seriously, but it is a relatively medium-term threat compared with the pandemic, which was bearing down on us at high speed when we were meeting in Davos back in January. So he's an economic historian. What did he say about the economic impact of the pandemic? He pulled no punches about the economic repercussions and pointed out that they could be a lot longer lasting than many of the reports that are being put out at the moment. We are now in the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression, and it's moving faster than the Depression because it took actually years to get to that kind of unemployment rate in the early 1930s. We're getting there in weeks. So this is like a high-speed depression. And the big question is, can we get out of it equally quickly? Now, if you look at the kind of forecasts that investment banks produce and indeed governments, you get these wonderful V-shaped projections suggesting the Bank of England did this, for example, that we'll be sort of back to where we were right at the end of 2019, at some point in 2021. And if you'll believe that, I'll sell you a bridge later in this interview because there's no way that this is going to be a V-shaped recovery. Even the much smaller financial crisis of 2008-2009 was followed by a pretty slow recovery. If you remember, people used to worry about secular stagnation. It took six years for unemployment to get back to where it had been prior to the 2008 crisis. And I'm afraid the idea that we're just going to merrily go back to where we were in a matter of months is entirely at odds with economic history. A shock like this can inflict a very, very sharp decrease in economic activity, but you will not get an equally sharp recovery. That's a pretty clear lesson of history. So there are two things that I think one has to take away from the economic history and the history of pandemics. One, pandemics take a while. You know, typically two years. There's usually more than one wave. Sometimes you get three like in 1918-19. And a lot depends on whether you get to a vaccine in that two-year time frame. There's no certainty that we will, although I think the chances are better than probably at any time in history because of the sheer number of projects to find a vaccine right now. The second point is that any economic shock of this sort takes time to recover from. And although fiscal and monetary policy are being used on an impressive scale. In fact, on a scale we haven't seen since World War Two, pandemics not a war. In a war, you employ a lot of people, mostly men, to go and fight. And then you employ a lot of people, including women, to make things they can fight with. But that's not what pandemics are like. There's no great production stimulus. We already passed the point at which the world is short of ventilators. Even if ventilators were useful, which is itself not clear. So it's much more of a deflationary shock, a pandemic, than a war, because there isn't this offsetting demand for labor and resources that you used to get in the 20th century in time of war. These shapes have become a sort of game, really, a sort of parlor game for economists. So I just say, imagine the tortoise-shaped recovery where you start up here on the shell and you go down to the point at which the neck connects with the body. And then you go up, but the head where you finally get to is quite a way below where the shell was. So I do think that there's a need to recognise how difficult it will be to get the world back to where it was at the end of 2019. Now we're in a much different place. And remember, it's not clear that normal service can ever be resumed in air travel, in tourism, in entertainment. As long as there isn't a vaccine or a very effective therapy, those activities that essentially were predicated on gregariousness on people being in quite close proximity to one another can't recover. You can tell people the lockdown's over, back to work. They've already done that in China some time ago. But you can't tell them go out shopping, go to the movies. They're not going to do that because people are rational. Up to a certain point, they adjust their behaviour and they really try to avoid getting into situations that would likely cause disease spread to resume. And as the world cautiously returns to work, what will it mean for globalisation? Niall Ferguson has been saying for a while that we have already reached peak globalisation, that we are on the downward trajectory and that the populist governments that we have seen in the West in recent years are a symptom of this. However, he's clear that it's because we are so globalised and that global networks are so entrenched that the pandemic has been able to take such a hold. Globalisation was in retreat already. And I'd been arguing for some time that high, high globalisation, peak globalisation was probably 2006, 2007. Financial crisis dealt a blow. Then there was a political backlash that produced populist governments like Donald Trump's. And protectionism was suddenly back on the agenda. All this has been playing out for more than 10 years. But the pandemic's a real shock, a real setback for globalisation, because it exposed something that I've been arguing about for a while and most recently in my book, The Square and the Tower. If you build a highly integrated global network, if you really integrate all the sort of markets in the world, then you are actually vulnerable because highly integrated networks are just great at spreading things like viruses. In the same way that highly integrated online networks can spread fake news and malware, computer viruses, a transport network like the one we had built by the end of 2019 was sort of perfectly designed to make sure that a virus like SARS-CoV-2 could get to global, could spread to pretty much every country in the world in an amazingly short space of time. So we can't in fact go back to the world of 2019 in a number of respects. First, I don't think that we should assume there'll be a post virus post COVID-19 era any more than there's a post influenza era, or for that matter, a post tuberculosis era or a post AIDS era. There are a whole bunch of diseases that we simply learn to live with as a species because we can't actually eradicate them and we can't successfully vaccinate against them. So I think it's better at this point just to imagine a world with COVID-19 rather than a world after it. Now, in that scenario, I think a couple of things are really clear. First of all, bigger isn't always better. The countries that have handled this crisis the best are not the big ones. The big guys have really underperformed. The winners, if you want to use that terminology have included really quite small countries like Taiwan, South Korea, which did a pretty good job, Israel, New Zealand. So small is beautiful in a pandemic. There are disconomies of scale. If you're very large, you've got a very large border, you've got a whole lot of things to handle. It's hard actually to keep a virus out of a country like the United States. You can't exactly shut the state border. I mean, even if we wanted to here in Montana, we couldn't actually just shut out traffic from, say, New York, where the disease has done the most damage. So I think that's point one. Point two, Cold War two, which I have been talking about for more than a year between the United States and China is very clearly a reality. And if you doubted it last year, when I first started talking about it, it's surely very obvious that the relationship between the United States and China is very badly damaged. And a common enemy and a virus like COVID, a virus like SARS-CoV-2 hasn't brought the two sides together quite the opposite. There's been a war of words. I certainly look back on the endless conversations about trade deals last year with a certain amount of amusement, because at this point, the whole issue of trade has, in a sense, receded, because we're now much more focused not only on this info war, but also on a whole bunch of technology war issues that I think are really more important than the trade war. So I would say that's really the key takeaway right now. Cold War two is a reality. He's a self-confessed doom monger. Does he see any benefits from the lockdown as some people do that we might come out of this better people? He was clear that the lockdown and the pandemic are going to leave a lot of people a lot poorer. However, for the people who do have somewhere safe and comfortable to be, and especially for people who like being at home, like books, like a more solitary life, the way that life has slowed down over the last few months and is going to stay socially distanced could be a positive change of life. But most people do like socialising, do like going out for those people. The next few months, the year ahead is going to be challenging. Well, I certainly that we will not go back to travelling around as much as we did for meetings and people that kind of adjusting to having conversations on platforms like like zoom. I think that's that's a good thing for a whole variety of reasons. I won't say the obvious one, namely that if we fly less often, we'll shrink our carbon footprint more generally. I have never been somebody who liked parties or crowded bars. I was always somebody who liked to live in a relatively isolated spot. So from my vantage point, the world's going my way and all the things I used to hate about the world like flying far too frequently and having to go to conferences, all this is going to be rather satisfyingly diminished. I wrote a piece this past weekend saying to learn how we'll change our behaviour socially, ask how we changed our behaviour sexually after the discovery of HIV AIDS. And I think the answer is we'll change a bit, but not entirely. Because in fact, even when it was clear that HIV AIDS was lethal and before there was any kind of effective therapy, people didn't wholly change their behaviour. They continue to have unsafe sex. I think we'll continue to have unsafe socialising, even when this virus is threatening our lives, because that's how humans are. We're not terribly good at radical adaptation of our behaviour. But my own personal response is to say hurrah, I can spend much more time with my wife and children than I used to travel much less, live in a more secluded way. For me, that's a clear win. The trouble is, I think that for the majority of people who are much more sociable than me and don't have the option to live in a remote part of Montana, this is not good news. And I think most people will find a permanently socially distanced world rather a miserable, depressing world, even as I'm enjoying it. And that was Niall Ferguson, a historian who's enjoying being locked down and away from people. My thanks to Charlotte Beall. Thanks Charlotte. Thank you. I'm joined now by Linda Lasina in New York. Hi Linda, how are you? Hi Robin, how are you? Yeah, not bad, thanks. So this week you went out in search of reading recommendations and you spoke to someone who recommended three books we should all be reading in a time of Covid-19. Who was it you spoke to? I spoke to Tariq Alamey of Three BL Associates and that's a think-do tank that focuses on climate issues and changing how businesses conducted. He has been recognized by a number of organizations for breaking ground on sustainability innovation. He was named a climate trailblazer by the Global Climate Action Institute. He's also a member of our global shapers community. He's an all-around thoughtful guy and a fine person to go to for a book recommendation. And so we thought we would talk to him. My first pick is made for goodness by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Archbishop tells these incredible stories of how they approach the HIV AIDS crisis as well in South Africa and what it meant to really take up this mantle, acting from that place of goodness, that place of trust, even when all of the surroundings around us would probably tell us not to. I think for anyone who's ever heard the Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak, there is a real astonishment that despite the incredible horrors that he's witnessed, how much love, how much hope, how much trust he still has in the goodness and wonder of human beings. I know that this podcast has spoken to some of the many psychological effects of the crisis. I think connected to that is really testing the trust between citizens, between our communities, between friends and colleagues, between us and our governments. And this is a remembrance for me of believing in the goodness of human beings, but also really having a response that is really rooted in love and thanksgiving, but also centered around justice. Tell me a little bit about your second choice. The hidden life of trees by a forestry by the name of Peter Ulleben. There's these incredible facts and ideas and just wondrous statistics that are laid in each and every single page. It tells this fact that there are more life forms and handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet. Under the mere sort of teaspoons full contains many, many miles of fungal filaments that all these work to to really nourish and transform the soil. That when we start to think about this moment that we find ourselves in, of biodiversity loss and destruction of nature, and where viruses like COVID-19 are so deeply interlinked, and we're really trying to step up nature conservation and enter into the UN decade of ecosystem restoration. And it's a way for you to cultivate bi-empathy. So we talk about empathy with human beings, but I think when we talk about empathy of nature, this is really a wonderful book to to guide as a compass both for restoration efforts but also how we connect to the wider natural world. For me, reading this book is like taking a walk in a forest with the trees whispering, its secrets for how we can best work. And your third pick, why don't you tell us a little bit about that and why it's so important? So the third book is Emergent Strategy by incredible author and activist Adrienne Marie Brown. It is science fiction combined with Black liberation theory and really a manual for how you can enter into a meeting and run it with your organization according to the principles of nature. There is this wonderful line about the art of flocking. The art of flocking is staying separate enough not to crowd each other, aligned enough to maintain a shared direction, and cohesive enough to always move towards each other and build together. And I think that's a beautiful metaphor for how we should look at maybe social distancing and really embracing what it means to to not social distance but really to embrace the art of the flock. Tariq Alolemi was speaking to Linda Lassina. You can find all of our coverage of COVID-19 at weform.org and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube and on Twitter using the handle at wef. Please subscribe to receive the podcast every week. Just search World vs Virus on Apple, SoundCloud, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to Gareth Nolan for help with this week's podcast. We'll be back next week with a slightly new look format. Until then, goodbye.