Networks, Hierarchies, and Tyrannies

>> Audience 1: My name is Sherene, I've come in from Houston, but I'm originally from Oman. And I wanna give you a gist for five second briefing of where my question comes from. I'm a product of the great American dream. I grew up in Oman. Till the first decade, most of my summer vacations were in Singapore, spent a lot of time in Dubai.

The next decade of my life was in India, which is democracy. And I want to focus on the slogan that Trump said, which is make America great again. And my question is, do you believe this statement is false propaganda? And if you don't think America is great, what would your definition of greatness be?

And what do we need to do to become great again?

>> Niall Ferguson: MAGA is a fascinating slogan because it appeals to nostalgia.

>> Niall Ferguson: Make America great again means it's not great. No, but it was. And if you look at the age structure of the Trump vote, it's skewed towards people with memories of a different era.

If one looks back at the America of the 1950s, 60s, 70s or 80s, and one could really say that the recollection applies to any of those decades, it clearly wasn't as wealthy a society as America today. In fact, if we used the time machine again, and we took a trip back even to the 1980s, we'd find ourselves quite surprised by how shabby and poor the country seemed by comparison with today.

The argument that Trump's critics on the left make is that it's implicitly a racist argument, that what he meant was encoded, make America white again. But I think that's implausible. And here's why? If one looks at the content of Trump's campaign in 2016, there was a good deal of content in it.

It was content about trade, it was content about immigration, not about race relations, but about immigration. And it was content about a global elite, the beneficiaries of globalization. That was the content of Trumpism. And the thesis was that free trade policies, free migration policies, had benefited a corrupt wall street and Washington elite at the expense of the average American family.

The reason he won was that that was not propaganda. That was an accurate depiction of reality. The median household income, adjusted for inflation between 1999 and 2015, stayed the same. It did not move the real median household income between 2016 2017, rather, when the administration came into power and 2019, increased 9%.

So I would argue that a part of the appeal of Trump remains that he diagnosed why middle America's incomes had flatlined in real terms. He identified that free trade and migration were the causes he set out to do something about that, and to a remarkable extent, until COVID struck, he succeeded.

Even with COVID, even at the end of the term, the real median household income was 6% higher than it had been when he came into office, having flatlined since 1999. That, I think, was the essence of Trump's appeal. And the attempts by his critics to misconstrue or infer a racist or profoundly anti democratic impulse, I think just misreads the reality.

He's a populist. America has had populists before. It's quite a familiar combination. Restrict immigration, put on tariffs. It's 19th century America. Maybe the reality is that it's an even more profound nostalgia that's being tapped here for an America that predates the new deal. But I think for most voters who were attracted to it, what they were really attracted to was the idea of an America with a manufacturing base at its core and relatively rapid income growth.

For the middle and working class voter, that, I think, was its appeal. The next question was, I think, here, yes?

>> Audience 2: Hello, thanks for being here. I read the ascent of money a few years ago, and it really changed my perspective on everything. So, I really appreciate the way you look at things.

My question is kind of for the democratization of knowledge. I feel like academia kind of writes for themselves. Steven Pinker talks about this, how academia is kind of inaccessible to the average person. And I figured, since you tend to write more popular books, do you see as though that academia kind of is doing everyone a disservice based on how they write to each other?

Especially when you look at how podcasts and popular books are becoming more popular now, and we're kind of taking to those as far as knowledge is concerned. So do you think that academia could do better to, I don't know, make itself look better in the eyes of the public if it maybe wrote for normal people, not for each other?

>> Niall Ferguson: I can write really inaccessibly if I want to.

>> Niall Ferguson: Just to be clear, the peculiar thing about it is that universities are really these medieval institutions which are designed originally to train the clergy. They weren't really designed to produce mass education at all. They're really for the priesthood.

And at each stage in the history of the university, there's a tweak, there's a modernization. The Germans come up with the idea of the research university in the 19th century, and that's imported into the United States. But at no point does anybody say we're here to educate the masses.

On the contrary, a lot of what goes on in academia is founded on the pretense that everybody potentially could be a professor. This is a particularly eccentric idea, because hardly any people who get PhDs become professors, and in that sense, embarking on a PhD course is quite irrational.

The six or so years that you invest in it are quite unlikely to be rewarded with a tenure track position, even in the sciences, and certainly in the humanities. So universities are strange institutions that are almost deliberately designed to be indifferent to the needs of the society outside.

That's why so many of them are cut off, geographically and physically from the outlying society. They're in remote, rural locations, as on things called campuses. So I think that that's just inherent in the nature of these institutions. When someone like me. Having paid his dues, writing inaccessible articles for peer reviewed journals, writes newspaper articles, or does television series, or writes popular books that are published by trade publishers.

The contempt in which he's held by most respectable academics would amaze you. It doesn't gain you any credit to address a wider public, it's held against you. And that's why the term public intellectual is really a term of abuse. It's a little bit like public convenience and it has the similar characteristic because people are always pissing on you if you're a public intellectual.

Just the same way as if you're a public convenience. In that sense, being a professor who wants to address a wider public is just a contradiction in terms and you're bound to get grief for it. Should more people do it? Well, yeah, in theory it would be good if more academics had to explain themselves.

For the simple reason that if you can't explain your idea to a smart ten year old or to a smart truck driver, there's probably something wrong with the idea. That's something I learned working in the real world. But most academics don't want to put themselves to that test.

Because part of what they do, particularly in the modern humanities, is to learn a language which is incomprehensible to the ten year old and the truck driver. That's why the great grievance studies hoax was so important, because Peter Boghossian and his co-conspirators showed that they could get absurd articles published in peer reviewed journals.

Ludicrous articles that must have had them falling about laughing as they wrote them. Because the level of gobbledygook is so high that even the editors of these journals don't really know what is being said in the articles that they publish. I think you were next, but the microphone will have to rove.

Yes, please.

>> Audience 3: Hello, Doctor Ferguson. It was wonderful listening to you. I will confess I was the one who yawned.

>> Niall Ferguson: It's just a way of keeping everybody engaged. It's an old, low classroom trick to single people out and tease them, and I'm sure it'll soon be grounds for disciplinary action at Stanford.

But so far.

>> Niall Ferguson: So far so good, go ahead.

>> Audience 3: Yeah, I found your presentation very interesting, especially in terms of how you talked about how networks are used and misused within totalitarian frameworks. And I kinda wanted to ask you because you made some analogies between, say, Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia and present day China, in terms of kind of the level of control that is permeated to literally every single person.

Where people would literally go and report, even if they themselves felt oppressed within a system. And I kinda wanted to gain a little more insight from you on that about why, even within these massive countries. Where I'm sure there is a lot of dissent, if you actually talk to people truthfully, why it doesn't seem to manifest itself into some kind of tangible movement that can actually work against the government.

>> Niall Ferguson: So thank you for the question. I've spent a reasonable amount of time in China over the last 20 years, I was a visiting professor at Tsinghua in Beijing for five years. And my observation is that if you do something if you do something illegal in China, within minutes, the authorities will manifest themselves in the form of party members who keeping an eye on you.

We tried filming without a permit in Chongqing once when I was making a documentary. We hadn't been able to get the permission that we wanted to shoot in a particular location, so we thought we would just do it. And it was fascinating how little time we had to get the shot before people would appear in plain civilians and tell us we had to stop.

The extent of the surveillance is without parallel in history. Even the German Democratic Republic, being German, had the highest levels of surveillance in the Cold War era, couldn't match it because it didn't have the technology. But now you have the combination of large platforms, large scale surveillance of online activity, and the phenomenon of the party person on every apartment block.

There is no society that is under greater surveillance. And in that sense, it's the perfect totalitarian system. When people say to me, well, the economy's stalled and youth unemployment's at 20%, wouldn't there be some protest? I say, have you any idea how impossible that would be to organize a protest.

We know this from experiments that have been done by researchers in the west. Any collective action that is proposed on social media is immediately clamped down on, even if its purpose is entirely unpolitical. You may have seen, recently, protests by frustrated depositors at a provincial bank who were lining up protesting that they couldn't get their money out of their wealth management products.

And there was a sort of extraordinary charge on these, obviously middle class people, by a horde of men in white shirts. So this is a totalitarian regime, we should have no illusions about that. And it has the defining characteristic that it's not really trying to convince people of Xi Jinping thought.

Remember, that's Hannah Arendt's point. The propaganda isn't really there to make you believe, it's just to make you incapable of dissent. That's how I think about it. Right, I'm now gonna make sure that I cover the room. There is a gentleman over there with a white shirt who's gonna get a question.

And then there's a lady there and also in a white shirt, so I'm just discriminating against dark shirts now? No, no, that young woman right there, and then we'll go to the gentleman there. Yes, then we're out of time, right? Okay, three questions and then that's it, and then we'll mill around afterwards for a bit.

Go ahead.

>> Audience 4: Thank you very much, Doctor Ferguson. It was wonderful to hear you speak in person. By entirely coincidence, about nine months ago, I picked up the tower in the square at a local Barnes and noble and I read it all cover to cover and it's fantastic.

So I had already read it before today. In the book you talked quite a bit about as well, the expansion, I know you had a slide about it as well. The expansion of big technology specifically, and how they are networks that are, at the very least it seems to be, for the moment, seem to be outgrowing the hierarchy in the United States.

You have all of these network technologies that, unlike in China, aren't really as beholden to the government. Ever since the 70s that's been happening, do you see the more hierarchical authorities in the United States, States, the government being able to reimpose control over Google or Facebook or something like that?

Or do you think it's indicative of more primitive shift to a more decentralized level of power, even within the Internet?

>> Niall Ferguson: Thanks, that's the central question. In 2017, at the end of the book, I said there'll be a collision between the square, the Silicon Valley network platform, and the tower, Trump Tower.

And it duly happened, culminating in January of 2021, when they deleted him from not only from Twitter, but from all the major platforms. So that I think I got right in the book, the fact that Trump had used Facebook in particular in the 2016 campaign was the unforgivable sin that never was supposed to happen.

We're now in a very different place, there's a good piece about this in the Wall Street Journal this week in which the government used the network platforms to police speech on public health issues. And this is a subject dear to my colleague Scott's heart, this is a very dubious proceeding in which the government is seeking to curtail speech through the network platforms.

I have absolutely no sympathy with the views of Alex Berenson, I think he's quite wrong about his opposition to vaccination. And I think anti-vax conspiracy theories did a great deal of harm, especially last year. But I can't possibly stand by and watch an administration use the technology companies to censor on behalf of the government's public health bureaucracy.

That's a violation of the First Amendment, and it can't be allowed. We are in a very dubious area now, in which section 230, which fostered the growth of the network platforms, is now being abused by the platforms with the government's connivance in ways that I think we will have to address if we wish to retain a free society.

Remember, free speech is about defending the right of people to say things that you disagree with and defending it in a meaningful way. I'm gonna take the two more questions I promised, and then I, you'll breathe a sigh of relief, it'll be over. Yes?

>> Audience 5: Hello, my name is Ashton, thank you for speaking today.

I am a data science major, and so I am interested in the methodological approach to networks. Networks are fascinating, and I saw that you did, the historical ones, so I'm interested in how those happened. But I'm also interested in your thoughts on networks created from programming and through social networks, and how those might be used as informational tools.

>> Niall Ferguson: So the book is really about that, it's an attempt to take data science, which I have an amateur's knowledge of, and apply it to history. I think it's a reasonable, I mean, I know it's reasonable cuz I ran it past properly trained network scientists. I think it's a reasonable attempt to explain the key concepts about network structure to a lay audience and then to use them to explain history.

You might have noticed that one of the things I did in this talk, which was a bit naughty, was to draw a distinction between hierarchies and networks. But actually, what I should have said is there's a distinction between hierarchical networks and distributed networks, that's all explained in the book.

But in a 45 minutes talk, what are you gonna do? So there's no question in my mind that we need to understand the contemporary world and the historical world using these tools. And it's an amazing omission of historical scholarship that so little is understood about networks, how did Hitler come to power?

It's a network question, how did the virus of national socialism spread so rapidly through the German population, how did that happen? It can't just be that he went and gave a speech here, and everybody was convinced, then he did another speech, and they were convinced something else was going on.

There is, as yet, no serious study of that phenomenon. How did the most pernicious ideology in the history of western democracy spread to the point that Hitler became the German chancellor? That work still hasn't been done. So what I'm saying to the data science people is come and join us in an endeavor to understand how illiberal ideologies spread.

Cuz until we know that, we're as vulnerable to the next crazy ideology as we are to the next pathogen, the next pandemic, and last, but by no means least, Gabriel.

>> Audience 6: Hi yes, my name is Gabriel, it's an honor to be in attendance at this wonderful talk, thank you.

I wanted to ask you about, you talked about how the history of the United States and the western world contained similarities and parallels with some of these totalitarian regimes. And my interpretation of that has been that the United States has had mixed aspects of freedom and democracy versus collectivism.

And I was wondering if you shared that interpretation or if you had other views of some of the parallels in how the United States in the past and even in the present, has resembled and does resemble totalitarian regimes.

>> Niall Ferguson: This is a good note on which to end.

If we're to talk seriously about the history of the United States, we have to understand what's good about it and also what's been bad about it. You can't possibly be nostalgic for the 1950s, forgetting that it was a time of segregation and systematic racial discrimination. What seems to me important about the history of the United States is that it's an experiment in republican government in which there is loyalty to the Constitution, and citizenship is ultimately available to all.

It isn't defined by religion or by ethnicity or anything of that sort, and this is what's extremely interesting about it. There are other things about it which are not admirable, but they're not that exceptional. The least interesting feature of Britain's American colonies, in many ways, was that some of them had slavery.

Slavery was the standard form of labor organization in much of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries. It's a great mistake to think of slavery as something very specific to the United States, that's not right, it's actually really a very widespread system of organization, nor is it peculiar to the Americas.

So I think much of the debate that goes on about American history, which one can associate, for example, with the 1619 project. Consists of exaggerating the importance of relatively commonplace things and underestimating the importance of those things which were unique, and we need to study both. But we have to get a sense of what's distinctive, what's novel, and what is clearly novel is what they attempt at the founding, which is to design the constitutional order based on enlightenment ideas and applying history.

Applying the history of why previous republics had failed, and arriving at a solution which has proved remarkably dynamic, capable of adaptation, capable of addressing the problems of racial inequality that were there right at the beginning. This project isn't over, let me conclude with the final observation, could it go wrong?

Yes, absolutely, it could go wrong. The history of every republic that's ever existed is a history of it going wrong, but it won't go wrong in the way that so many public intellectuals have been arguing. Tim Snyder's one of many I could have chosen, it's highly unlikely to go wrong in the direction of totalitarianism, whether of Gilead or the Third Reich.

I can see it going wrong in this direction of civil strife, I can see it going wrong in the direction of dysfunctional government, I can see it going wrong in a whole range of ways. But the one way that people keep going on about somehow we're reverting to 1930s Germany or Iran in the 19 post 1979 era.

That just seems to me fantastically unlikely, and that's the point of what I had to say today. Thank you all very much indeed.