On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Associate Director Dr. Samuel DeCanio interviews historian Niall Ferguson from the Hoover Institution. This episode is titled “Counterfactual History with Niall Ferguson”. Some of the questions they will explore are:
- How did historian Niall Ferguson become interested in the discipline of history?
- How can policymakers learn from history?
- How does our past inform our present?
- What is counterfactual history?
- Is counterfactual history useful for historical analysis and policymaking?
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The Guest
Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is also the author of multiple books on a range of topics, most recently, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.
Transcript
Samuel DeCanio
Welcome back to the Governance Podcast. My name is Sam DeCanio. I’m a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy and the Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and society here at King’s College London. Our guest today is Niall Ferguson, who is currently the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. Niall’s the author of a number of books discussing a range of topics in political and economic history. His most recent book is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. Nialll, thanks so much for being with us today.
Niall Ferguson
It’s great to be with you, Sam. I even have one of my children doing a master’s at King’s right now. So I’m kind of doubly engaged intellectually and in a family way.
Samuel DeCanio
Fantastic. Um, I wanted to begin by asking you, How did you become interested in history?
Niall Ferguson
I was a teenager in the 1970s. Growing up in Glasgow, and history was all around. My grandfather had served in the World Wars, in the first one and the second, the school I went to; Glasgow Academy, dedicated the entire school as a war memorial to the deaths of the First World War. And my first history book was AJP Taylor’s illustrated history of the First World War, which my parents had a copy of. So I remember being drawn to the great question, why was the 20th century so horrifically violent from quite an early age? The thing that really swung it, though, was reading War and Peace, a great novel. And at the end of War and Peace, Tolstoy offers this essay on the philosophy of history, which I can honestly say changed my life, because it was reading that that decided me to study history at university rather than literature, which I had guessed had been the other option up until that point.
Samuel DeCanio
And what was it about, about that essay, that was so influential, that you found so engaging?
Niall Ferguson
Well, I was simultaneously studying the 30 Years War at school. And I was toggling between writing an essay on the 30 Years War and writing an essay on Hamlet, for my English teacher. And one afternoon, at the suggestion of my history teacher, a wonderful man named Ronnie Woods. I went to the Mitchell library, which was my first experience of a serious research library. And there were all the books on the 30 Years War, an entire shelf of them. And the first book that caught my eye was Schiller’s History of the 30 Years War. And I remember thinking, there are so many books, and so many different views of this conflict. What a formidable intellectual challenge. When I went back to writing about Hamlet’s encounter with death in the play, it felt like a narrower challenge. And so that was the turning point. The realisation that the great question, why high levels of lethal organised conflict?, was a history question that I couldn’t really get answered by Shakespeare. But I needed just a huge array of historians to help me answer it. That was that was the turning point.
Samuel DeCanio
So much of what you’ve written, alternates between political history and economic history. And what you’ve just discussed is sort of a very interesting account of your early interest in history and literature. When did you acquire your interests in economic history?
Niall Ferguson
I was a numeral child. History was a subject I liked, but mathematics was probably the subject I was best at. And I remember realising, shortly after arriving at Oxford in 1982, I suppose that I was more numerous than my English contemporaries, and that this might be an edge. So I steered towards economic history, because I thought I could do it well. I also had an interest from my school days in economics. I remember reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations at my father’s suggestion one day when I was off school sick, he just handed me the book and said, if you’re taking the day off school, you’d better read this. So Smith was my first encounter with economics. I then delved into more modern economics and was put off. I can remember looking at the textbook that was then widely used by Samuelson by people reading economics at undergraduate level. And I thought it was awful. It was awful, because of its profoundly historical approach. The attempt to reduce the great relations of human beings to highly stylized graphs and equations struck me forcibly. And I remember the feeling of revulsion. Well, emotionally it’s wrong.
And so I remember also seeing that chart in the textbook that projected the Soviet Union’s Gross National Product overtaking that of the United States, and I was sharp enough to think that must be wrong. And so I turned away without much inner debate from economics and decided I would do economic history, which is a whole, wholly different discipline. And that suited me well, because with economic history, you don’t start the lecture by saying, imagine two economies, each with, you know, two products, that kind of thing. You don’t imagine anything, anything, you sit down and look at the real world and try to tease out such statistics as having survived what was going on with trade or prices in the past? I was really interested in that and found that I was able to do well at Oxford as an undergraduate by choosing economic options. Everybody knows about those days, pretty much everybody used to do political thought. Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, and I chose the minority option of economic thought, which involved rereading Smith and Keynes and Marx and Ricardo and much else and it was enormously difficult. I can remember reading the general theory three times, congealing my brains to try to understand it. And that was perhaps the hardest thing I did as an undergraduate, but it forced me forward into economics.
Then as a doctoral student, I followed the advice of Norman Stone, the late, great professor of modern history at Oxford, whose advice when it came to dissertation topics was to do something that involved his phrase number crunching. I had actually wanted to write on satirical literature in late 19th century Vienna. I was greatly impressed by the writings of Karl Kraus. But Norman’s argument was that the jokes would be very hard to translate, which was true. And it would be more sensible to choose an economic topic. So I flipped from that to the German hyperinflation that followed World War One. And that really involved a crash course in economics. This was also partly parental advice. My father’s view was that history was a legitimate thing to study, but he didn’t want me to starve. And so he advised acquiring some expertise that might be marketable, even if my academic ambitions came to nothing. And when I explained that my project required me to learn both economics and the German language, he was satisfied that I wouldn’t starve. So that is how I came to write my first book about the hyperinflation of the early 1920s.
Samuel DeCanio
What did you learn when you were writing that first book?
Niall Ferguson
That history is really hard to do? I remember the the sheer horror of sitting in the Hamburg state archives, contemplating enormous leather bound books that you were supposed to use to find the documents that you wanted to read and even they were illegible because they were written in Alta shrift the supervillain handwriting that Germans no longer use. I remember, as I ploughed into the documents that I first called up being aghast, because they didn’t seem to notice that hyperinflation was happening. A lot of the bureaucracy of Germany just sort of carried on, formally sticking to the conventions of the pre war time. And so there was nothing there was terrifying. I felt as if I’d stumbled into some strange, parallel universe in which the historic event I was interested in had somehow not happened. And then I was saved by a meeting at the British Consulate with Eric Warburg, who said, Oh, if you’re interested in that period, you should come and look at my father’s papers. And his father was the banker, Max Warburg, who had been one of the great merchant banks of Hamburg, in the late 19th century, in the early 20th century. I went along, and there were his father’s papers in a beautiful oak panelled study, and it was all there. All that I had been looking for the debates about how to deal with the costs of the war, the letters from Keynes offering his advice about how to handle the reparations burden imposed for side files upon files of extraordinary correspondence illuminating the role that German Jewish bankers like Warburg had played and I was off I’d found the, the thing I was looking for, which was the history of that inflation, but its political history, because I never bought the notion that you could somehow create a silo called economic history which you which you separated from the political history and another silo. My view was from a very early stage, that inflation was not a purely monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman famously said it was a political phenomenon, because only through politics, could you explain why the German government couldn’t balance its budget, didn’t really try to stop the currency depreciating, and therefore let this hyperinflation happen. My argument was in the first book, Paper and Iron that this was an avoidable disaster. And it was the result of a profound miscalculation about how to handle the reparations burden imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.
Sam DeCanio
So you often championed a counterfactual approach to the study of history, which I think is, you know, fairly well illustrated by what you just said at the end there about the policy choices that were available to German policymakers during the period you’re examining. Um, can you explain what counterfactual history is? And what is it about counterfactual history that you think makes it so valuable, as opposed to other approaches historians might adopt?
Niall Ferguson
Counterfactual history is about making explicit the choices contemporaries confronted, and showing that at the point of choice at the point of decision, they had no certainty about the consequences of their actions at any point in the past multiple futures. Live before one. And at that moment, which to the contemporary is the present, there are, there are forks in the road, there are paths that need to be chosen. If you lose that, in your historical account, if you write as if the path that is chosen is somehow predestined, you do a huge violence to the nature of historical experience. There’s a good illustration of this approach in Phil Zelicah, his recently published book on the failure to end world war one in 1916, The Road Not Taken. I came to realise through doing history, through reading documents, and trying to reconstruct the thought processes of the participants that there are multiple moments of choice and not just for the people at the top. For ordinary people. There are choices based on assessments of future scenarios and rough, roughly probabilistic thinking. If I do X, the chance of Y happening is so and so percent. People, even the least educated people can think this way. So that was the kind of experience of doing history.
And then I ran into a philosophy of history that repudiated this reality of human experience by saying, think here of E.H Carr, the historian’s job is just to tell what happened. And it’s just speculation and frivolity, kind of after dinner parlour game, to think about what didn’t happen, what might have happened. There is a tremendously strong strain of deterministic thoughts in historical philosophy that goes all the way back, even to before Marx. And it has persisted in the historical profession. To the extent that the former Regis Professor of History at Cambridge, Richard Evans has written an entire book explaining why counterfactual history is wrong, that is, in fact, a sinister conservative plot or some such rubbish. And I find this baffling because it has absolutely no basis in either philosophy or science.
So in philosophy, in any serious discussion of causation, this is also true in the law, by the way. Any statement of a causal nature obviously implies a counterfactual. If you think about that, for a moment, the claim that his Hitler was responsible for world war two has to be tested. Because it implies that if Hitler had been killed, prior to 1939, the war wouldn’t have happened. So for as officially any causal net, any causal statement applies a counterfactual. The question is just do you make it explicit? And my argument is, yes, you should. Because by making it explicit, you help the reader to understand how exactly you’re reasoning works. In the case of the Weimar Inflation, I argued that there were a series of policy decisions taken in 1919-2021 that made the inflation happen. And if they had been done differently, it would not have happened. And I think I was able to show that in the first book. But when I wrote an article for the economic history review that tried to spell out the counterfactual showing that the Germans could stabilise their fiscal position and their monetary position in 1920, I was denounced in a very long reader’s report by the then Grandmaster of German economic history for daring to ask a what if question, and I can remember receiving back this reader’s report, it was very lengthy, single spaced and damning. I thought for about half an hour, my career is over. That ball cart has basically just torpedoed the whole intellectual project, not just to the article, but of the first book. But then after 30 minutes, I realised, no, he’s just wrong. He’s just basically completely wrong.
Of course, there have to be counterfactuals. Of course, they have to be explicit, there was nothing determined by hidden historical forces about the great currency collapse of 1923. And so I dusted myself down, addressed the comments, and the article was duly published. And that then led to two things, a change in the way that I taught so that Cambridge and then back at Oxford, I would make students explicitly talk through counterfactuals, the one that kept coming up was, what if Britain had not intervened in 1914. Given that there was a clear option not to that the cabinet discussed right down until August the second of 1914. At the same time, as I was giving tutorials along those lines, I was trying to gather support for the counterfactual project by getting friends to write essays in the counterfactual vein and that produced the book virtual history, which I think is a good book, full of brilliant essays about different periods of history, exploring the counterfactuals and doing it rigorously according to a very important rule that I imposed. And it’s spelt out in the introduction. You couldn’t consider a counterfactual that contemporaries didn’t consider; you had to show what people at the time thought the alternative future might be like, and that that, in a sense, addresses the criticism that it’s just idle speculation. When you look at, for example, the German plans for the occupation of Britain, which exists and we can read all when you look at the discussions in 1914, about whether or not Britain should intervene, the alternative futures are there, we can see what contemporary thought the alternative path looks like. And that keeps the enterprise scholarly. You are in a sense living up to RG Collingwood’s great imperative, which is to reconstitute past thought, from such documents and other things that have survived. And as you reconstituted, you reimagine that past thinking process. Well, that is exactly what counterfactual history does, because it allows you to recapture the futures that did not happen and the paths that were not taken, but which contemporaries did think about and talk about and write about, at the point of decision.
Sam DeCanio
So as a description of the human condition, it seems as though whenever human beings make decisions, they’re always counterfactual options that they wind up discarding the road.
Niall Ferguson
I was discussing one this morning, about a rugby match that happened at the weekend, when Stuart Hall, The Scottish captain, chose not to pass inches from the Irish tryline. If he passed, Scotland would have scored, and the game would have been on but he held on and was tackled and failed to score. And my friend David Williams was torturing me, by reminding me of this alternative history in which Scotland would have stayed in the game, and perhaps might have held our Ireland to a drawer even beaten them. So we are constantly engaged in this kind of activity, whether it’s sports, if only he passed, or our private lives. Why on earth did I agree to date that person? We are creatures programmed by evolution to think counterfactually. Why we repress that, when we turn to write history, is a mystery that I can’t solve, I think perhaps because it makes it easier. This is my ultimate explanation for the kind of Neandertal tendency. It’s just a lot easier to say we don’t have to think about this stuff. Let’s just write down what happened.
Sam DeCanio
So how would you respond to somebody that accepted your descriptive account of human choice as unavoidably involving counterfactual scenarios, options, decisions that we did not wind up taking? It accepted that description of the human condition, but then asked, How is it that we are supposed to assess the causal claims that are being made by historians about the specific forces that wound up leading to a given outcome? So in the sports example that you just gave? How would we explain whether or not it was an error made by one of the defensive players that led to the point being scored or a master athletic maneuver made by the ball carrier, which was causally responsible for the outcome that we observe? Um, that’s one question. I guess I had a second question involving the discipline that you imposed on this, this collection of essays on counterfactual history where you limited people to only describing counterfactuals that were available in the minds of political actors at the time. Isn’t it possible that that limits the historians account of causality, if there were causal variables, which were responsible for producing a given historical outcome, which the political actors did not understand at the time that they made the decision?
Niall Ferguson
I’ll take those questions one by one. In the case of the missed try, hog had to decide in a split second, which was riskier to pass, or to try to touch down himself, and he underestimated the probability that an Irish defender would tackle him and tackle him so well that he was taken out of play. So that’s a straightforward enough answer. It’s like the question, Why did Putin invade Ukraine and put himself in an extraordinarily disastrous economic situation? He underestimated the tenacity and destructiveness of Ukrainian resistance and assumed quite wrongly that it would be like when he last invaded Ukraine and resistance had been very weak. So usually we can narrow down quite easily the decision making process and identify, even if it’s not explicit, in some written record what the calculation was. So I think it is methodologically straightforward enough. It’s better, of course, if we have documentation and at some future date, no doubt, when Putin has gone from this world, there will be a way of accessing the documents that survive the decision making process, if indeed any do, I think that we as historians need to remember that our core competence is different dusty, old letters, minutes of meetings, that kind of thing. Because we need to start there, to try to reconstruct these past thoughts that we’re interested in. Of course, it’s possible to say what contemporaries did not know was x. And if they’d known that, then they would have done why. But you are a good deal distanced at that point from the core exercise of re constituting the past thought process. I do a certain amount of this because there is historical data other than letters and minutes of meetings that we can use. In particular, historical statistics allow us to see things that might have been missed by contemporaries and I did that in the first book. I showed that what they thought they were doing by letting the mark the German currency weaken was to boost German exports. Their theory was that if you let the mark slide, German exports were tremendously cheap. And this would hurt the British and French economies so much that they’d revise the terms of the reparations settlement. And I showed using the trade statistics, which were pretty messy for that period. But salvageable, what they failed to see was that although it was true that German exports went up, German imports went up even more, because by having this very easy fiscal and monetary policy, the Germans caused their economy to boom at a time when the other European economies were in a postwar recession. So they missed that. But some, but it was there in the statistics. So I felt as if I was sticking to the Collinwood principle that I was, I was working with real historical materials of the time. So there is a way of addressing counterfactuals that contemporaries missed. In particular, I think that they had misunderstood the macroeconomic consequences of what they were doing.
Sam DeCanio
So I think that that’s a very sort of clear set of principles that can be applied to explaining why a group of political elites may have made specific decisions. So you can, you can use the historical record to analyse what the thought process was, and the justifications that political elites used to take one policy decision and not another. But I suppose there’s a second kind of historical question, which I think might be a little bit more difficult to apply counterfactual argumentation to that I think I’m trying to I’m trying to get at here, which involves causal questions about the outcomes of specific historical events, which are not simply focused on trying to analyse why a group of political elites made a policy decision that they made. So I’m thinking in particular, of the rival historical arguments that people have given for why Nazi Germany lost World War Two, or what the turning point of World War Two was whether or not the Nazi regime actually could have defeated the Soviet Union had they continued advancing on Moscow. Whether or not the turning point of the conflict was Stalingrad if it was Kursk, or if it was actually not a battlefield outcome at all. So Phillips O’Brien has a famous book, suggesting that it was actually sea power and air power essentially decided the outcome of World War Two, and that these land battles that many military historians focus on analysing were actually unrelated to the outcome that we observe. So given that there are these sort of contending explanations that historians give for these relatively well studied, historically important events?
Do you think there are challenges that counterfactual history has a more difficult time answering or addressing that are not focused perhaps solely on elite decision making, but answering these sorts of larger historic causal historical questions about why, for example, the not the Nazis lost World War Two, or what more specifically what this turning point was in World War Two that led to their defeat.
Niall Ferguson
I want to make it clear that in my approach, I don’t just focus on elite decision making, though that obviously, is something you can’t ignore. Working in the early 20s, I was, in fact, just as interested in how ordinary Germans form their expectations of inflation, something that you could tease out by looking at the interaction of news reports and prices. In the same way, when I studied World War One, in a book called the pity of war, I was interested in the strategic decisions that the German government took, including some very disastrous ones, like the ones that led to US intervention in the war. But I also was interested in why German soldiers began to surrender in large numbers in the summer, and fall of 1918, which was crucial for the end of the war. So I think you have to take the approach I’m describing and apply it not just to elites, but also to the masses of conscript soldiers whose decision making in the end, decided that the war ended when the German soldiers began to surrender in large numbers, it was over. And I wrote a long essay about prisoner taking and prisoner killing, trying to establish why people surrender as the they did in large numbers in 1918, so I’m really interested in counterfactuals at the grassroots level, because in the end, military outcomes are as much about the morale of of soldiers as they are about the decisions of generals, as Putin is perhaps going to discover. He thought he had a great superiority in terms of firepower. But the morale problem seems to be really crucial. At this point, Ukrainians are fighting, I think more effectively than the Russian invaders because they feel a stronger motivation. Turning to World War Two, I wrote a book about this called War of the world, which directly addresses the question that you’ve raised, and from which Bryan raised. In World War Two, economics dominates. It dominates because once the US is a competence, the axes can’t lose. Or rather, the Allies can’t lose. The axes can’t when you could run a simulation 100 times. And maybe once the access would win, the probability of access victory is enormous and is really, really low once the US is in the war, because it is so massively stronger economically. And that’s why economic historians should dominate this debate. It doesn’t really matter what happens on the battlefield. If the United States is competent, it’s as simple as that.
Sam DeCanio
And I guess from the question that I would have in response to that point…
Niall Ferguson
I mean, I’m oversimplifying. But you see the point that, ultimately, the reason that there is allied dominance in the air and at sea is the US economy. There’s nothing else that’s really remotely as important. The reason that the Japanese are bound to lose is they’re fighting the United States, they can’t possibly possibly match it, then the United States is capable of devising the atomic bomb. So from my vantage point, the story of World War Two is in some ways, much simpler than the story of World War One. It’s an economic story. Now you can get into the nitty gritty, a lot, Adam twos does in his book on the German war economy, and you can even ask, could the Germans have fought the war more efficiently? And the answer to that is certainly, but I don’t think they could have altered the outcome of the war. Once they were fighting both the Soviet Union and the United States.
Sam DeCanio
And in the case of the current Ukraine crisis, even though Ukraine has a much smaller economy, then Russia does. What would be the explanation for why you? You would, you would, I’m assuming you’re making a prediction that Ukraine is going to fare better given the earlier comment you made about their morale. So I guess I’m kind of curious why economics would perhaps not dominate in the example of Ukraine.
Niall Ferguson
Economics doesn’t always dominate and war and ‘Cash Nexus’, which was a book I did 20 years ago makes the point that if you think economics always dominates, how does the Vietnam War fit into your framework? And in the same way, this war now, is extremely hard to predict because there are potential ways in which Russian dominance in say missiles turns the tide of war against Ukraine in the next few weeks. We’re speaking on March the 23rd, almost exactly a month since the war began. But there’s also a scenario in which the morale of Russian forces begins to erode as the war becomes a war of attrition. And the Ukrainians are able to keep inflicting sufficient casualties to at least achieve a stalemate. So we don’t really know. And anybody who says with confidence, they do know is bluffing how this turns out. But most wars are, because they are localised unlimited. Don’t have this simple economic explanation to drive them. But World War Two because it was Unlimited, it was a total war that was bound to be decided by economic factors. Regardless of the scale of German generals, I think that’s the way I think about it. I sat down when I was writing World War and I read all the counterfactual essays, I could find all the different ways in which people have fought through alternative outcomes. At the same time, I encouraged my eldest son to use strategy games. To play around with scenarios, I should say that there’s a whole other way of approaching counterfactuals that we haven’t talked about. And that’s to imagine that you can model the past well enough to run simulations of alternative pasts. computing power reached the point in the last 10 or 20 years where you could create quite sophisticated strategy games.
I was involved in the design of one ‘making history’, and ‘making history’ is a world war two game, which has pretty accurate inputs in terms of the capabilities of the competent powers, and a pretty good AI interface, which means that it generates plausible alternative paths. And so with this tool, you can test out hypotheses. For example, you can see what happens if Britain intervenes in 1938 following Churchill’s advice. So you can see what happens if the Japanese attack the Soviet Union instead of the Western empires. Now I regard this as a kind of supplementary activity to test out counterfactuals that you might be too attached to I was very much attached to the Chilean counterfactual of early intervention over Czechoslovakia topples Hitler, but when I played the game, perhaps because I’m bad at playing computer games, it went horribly wrong. My son, as a teenager, was much better at computer games. And he played around until one day he came down to breakfast. And, and said, I’ve done it, I’ve done it very enthusiastically. And I said, What have you done? He said, I’ve won. I’ve won the war as the Axis. And I said, that’s probably not a good thing . But it was harder, it had taken him a long time, he had to play multiple iterations. It’s the same if you play the board game Axis and Allies. If you have remotely realistic weightings for economic capability, you really can’t win as the axis. And the only way you can I think we established was you really do have to get Japan to attack the Soviet Union. And then the Germans have a shot of defeating Stalin the only way it really works.
This is a long, roundabout way to say that I think historians should be alive to the counterfactual. And we should try to find all the ways that we can to recapture the uncertainty of contemporaries. We know how it turns out. That is not an advantage. That makes it harder to write good history, because we write knowing how it turns out. That if you go back to the betting books of Oxford colleges as ideas and look at what people put bets on. In 1940, 1942, you get a very different picture. I came across a menu in the, in the US Senate, where a bunch of Senators placed bets on how long World War Two would last. And when you do that, you realise, contemporaries don’t know how things will turn out. And if you’re writing history, you need to be faithful to that uncertainty, or you do violence to the past experience.
Sam DeCanio
Do you think policymakers should pay more attention to counterfactual history?
Niall Ferguson
Yes, I think they should pay more attention to history, that would really help.
But I think when they’re studying history, they should remind themselves of counterfactuals so that they see the difficulty of decision making under uncertainty. One reason I was drawn to write a biography of Henry Kissinger is that he’s one of the few people in that realm of strategic decision making who arrives armed with history armed with a strong historical sensibility. And an understanding that decision making takes place under uncertainty, there is not going to be magic data that arrives just in time to help you make your mind up. You do not know at the moment, at the moment of decision, the way that the path you’ve chosen will turn out. And you will never know how the alternative path would have turned out. His problem of conjecture is a brilliant insight, which I’m really glad that I got from writing the first volume of the biography. The problem conjecture is that at the moment of decision, if you are seeking to avoid some national disaster, and you think there’s a way of avoiding it, but it will incur costs, there is an asymmetry. Because if you take the hit if you pay the cost, and avert the disaster, you will not be thanked because people aren’t grateful for disasters, that didn’t happen because you averted them. If you take the line of least resistance, and you don’t incur the costs, and you just hope that the disaster doesn’t happen. You may get lucky. Maybe it doesn’t happen. And then you’re a genius. But you may not be lucky, the disaster may happen. And you will wish you had incurred the costs. So there’s this asymmetry, which is a particular problem for democracies, that there is, there isn’t much gratitude for disasters that you averted. Who knows maybe George W. Bush’s war on terror averted multiple, nine elevens. Maybe it did, there’s no way of showing that it didn’t. There really isn’t. I suspect that it wasn’t invading Iraq, or Afghanistan, that averted other 911. But one has to at least consider the possibility that something the Bush administration did prevented another 911 from happening, but they get no credit for that. By 2008. This was a deeply unpopular administration, that certainly wouldn’t have secured reelection if Bush had been able to run again. So there’s a very important point here that policymakers need to understand. Not only is there a counterfactual, or multiple counterfactual sitting there on the table, when you make the decision, and you’ll never really know if you made the right call. Worse than that, if you didn’t make the right call and you avert national disaster. Nobody will thank you.
Sam DeCanio
Well, on that hopeful and sunny note, I guess. Just wanted to say thanks so much for appearing on the podcast. It was a very interesting discussion. And hope to hear from you in the future.
Niall Ferguson
Thank you. So if anybody listening has been swayed in the direction of doing more counterfactual history, I will feel that my work has not been futile. Thanks a lot. Take care.
