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Harold James, "Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization" (Yale UP, 2023)
00:50:39
An interview with Harold James
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hi everyone. Welcome to your podcast, New Books in Economic and Business History. I'm your host, Javier Mejia from Stanford University. And today I have the great pleasure to be with Harold James. Harold is professor in European Studies at Princeton University, where he's also professor of History and International affairs at the School of Public and International affairs at Princeton and an associate at the Benham center for Finance. He's the author of a book that is going to be published soon. You can pre order it already. It's called Seven Crashes the Economic Crisis that Shape Globalization. We're going to be talking with Harald today about the book and his career. How are you, Harald?
- [01:55]
C
Thanks. It's good being with you, Javier. It's really nice having this opportunity to talk.
- [02:01]
B
No, it's great that you're here. And before getting into the book that I found fascinating, I would like to ask you about your origins, about your life and your career. There's something that I find very interesting about your career, which is that you have been able to mix very well and fit well in different communities. So you work in a history department, but you're very close to public policy, even to management and entrepreneurial environments. What was the path to reach to that place? How did you end up being the scholar that you, that you are today?
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C
Well, thanks. I mean, that's obviously also a question about chance and serendipity because, you know, many things just occur in a kind of rather random way. I started off working on the Great Depression in Germany. That was what my PhD thesis was on, on monetary policy during the Great Depression. And then I came to Princeton in the middle of the 1980s and it was very, very stimulating environment and I thought about lots of things. And Princeton had a, has a great economics department. But there were some inspirational figures there. I particularly Peter Kennan, who did international economics, and Ben Bernanke who came to Princeton actually in the same year as I did and was interested in the US Great Depression. And so it, it was just a wonderful chance to have the opportunity of talking to those, those figures. And then later in the 80s, Paul Volker came to Princeton after he'd been the chair of the Federal Reserve. And it was, it was a dynamic and interesting environment. And you know, that's when I started interested in the story of depressions, how they can reverse globalization, what the future of globalization is. And that was obviously a topic that was beginning to be really interesting and hot in the 1990s.
- [04:11]
B
That's interesting. I mean, now that you mention it, it's true that Princeton seems to have this very strong connection with monetary policy and the Fed. Right. But let me ask you a bit more about that. And I'm curious about your opinion on how history is moving probably further from traditional topics of these big questions on economics. And it's probably considering each time more things about culture and social dynamics. And it feels that every time history departments are probably farther away from econ departments and some other type of more practice oriented departments and universities. Have you noticed some of that? Is that something that you have been concerned at all? Do you think that the future is problematic in that sense? What's your take? Sort of bridging those, those two worlds.
- [05:14]
C
Yes, you're right with history as an academic discipline has changed over time. And for a long time it was really concerned with political history. And in the 1960s there was more of a push to do social history and also a lot of economic history and the new economic history in the 1960s, the mathematization of economic history really took off at that moment. And you thought that you could apply economic techniques to history. And then in the 1980s there was really a turning. So just the moment that I arrived at Princeton, as it were, there was a turning away from traditional social history more towards cultural history, as you say. And actually, I mean, that was also A great moment in the life of the Princeton department in the sense that there were these really big figures, Natalie Davis and Robert Darnton and slightly younger Anthony Grafton, and, you know, they were pushing social history, a very novel kind of social history. So history has gone in waves, I think, since the global financial Crisis, since the 2008 crisis. There is more interest in economic history in history departments. And certainly I see that among students and among graduate students. But you're right that many historians don't really have the skill set to do that. And so if we think of the contemporary problems of the world, we're facing big economic challenges, climate challenges, security challenges. Actually, all three of those were really areas that academic history had moved away from a bit. And I hope very much that these will come back into the mainstream of historical writing.
- [07:17]
B
That's great. I mean, I'm glad that you have a rather optimistic take on that issue and I guess that your work helps in continuing those traditions. Right. And with that, probably I would like to start to get into the main theme of your book that are our crisis. Right. And indeed your title is very insightful. Right. So very early on you said, well, these are seven crashes, these are crises, and we're going to learn about them. Right. And I have this sort of like meta level question before we get into the argument of the book, which is how you think about crisis in the sense of forces of change in social and in history, let's say, and I'm asking you this because I'm teaching this quarter, of course, it's called societal collapse. It's for undergrads here at Stanford. And we start the course, some ideas of how time is perceived and how it can change. And there's this sort of tradition of catastrophes. And if you think about some of the natural sciences, in the very long term, they think that the world has evolved as a result of massive extensions. For instance, if you think about George Cuvier, he would say, like, you know, this massive crisis have been an essential fuel of the reshape of the world. Right. And I, I perceive some of that spirit in your view of crisis as a sort of force for the regeneration of, of the system. So it's not a view of, of how tragic crisis are, but they seem to bring the seed of, of something good. So I want to hear your, your view about that. How crisis are important or an essence for the evolution of the system.
- [09:24]
C
Yes, I, I mean, you're absolutely right that there are moments when events seem to be moving very, very quickly and our sense of time is shorter and shorter and our horizon gets narrower because everything is. Is happening so quickly. And, you know, obviously at the end of his life, Cuvier was living through the French Revolution. And the French Revolution is exactly that kind of moment of a crisis when many, many things are. The book, as it were, is a little bit of a push back against the idea that either the current crisis or every kind of crisis leads to a falling apart or to a deglobalization. And I'd worked a lot before on the Great Depression, and the Great Depression did strike me as being exactly that moment when the world falls apart and it's segmented into regional blocks and there's a strong emphasis on national policy autarky. And a famous article by John Maynard Keynes on national self sufficiency in 1933 that was then taken up very widely cited in the United States. It blends well with the thinking of the New Deal. It was also taken up enthusiastically and translated into German. So it fitted with the thinking also of the Nazis in Germany that they wanted to turn. Turn in on themselves. So, you know, we'd had that moment. And what I wanted to do in the book really was to suggest that not all crises work like that, that they don't always splinter up the world, but some crises actually push the world in a different direction, and some crises push for more globalization, more interconnectedness, more flows of goods, of people, of capital. And so that's really, as it were, the fundamental observation of the book. But, you know, your general point, your meta point, as it were, that crises are moments of opportunity where things need to be rethought. Many, many things have to be rethought. The role of government has to be rethought. The role of private business has to be rethought. How the economy works has to be rethought. And, you know, obviously you saw in the book also that I wanted in each section to have a treatment of how economists were thinking about the world and how economics is also contingent on the way in which the world is changing.
- [12:12]
B
Right, right. That's great. And I would like to ask you now, and moving from that very meta level to more concrete dimension in which your book is very rich, and the details of the historical context and the discussions of the moment. And it's about the fact that these are seven crashes, right? So I want to ask you why these are 7 and not 8 or 10? And how did you pick this specific crisis? What are, what were the elements that made you consider these were crucial, the crucial crisis. And I'm thinking that, for instance, you don't have here World War II. And actually a good way of thinking about this would be to this what are the seven crisis. So our audience is going to be start to get familiar with more specifically what you're focusing on. But how were you thinking about this? Why this crisis were part of the book and not some others? Were there some that were just below the threshold?
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C
Well, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a very good question. You know, obviously there's a kind of charm about the number of seven, if you like number mysticism that we have, you know, the seven deadly sins and, and, and so on. But it's not just I really wanted to think about the moments when economic thinking changed. And you know, that obviously is difficult because time flows into itself and crises are always complex. And so there's not one simple crisis in many of these instances. So let me just list the crises maybe for our listeners. Viewers. I start with the crisis of the middle of the 19th century and particularly the shortages and the hunger crisis of the 1840s. And then I think about the what was called by many people at the time the Great depression in the 19th century. The crisis that started really with big stock market panics in central Europe and also then a bit later in the United States in the same year, 1873. I think about the First World War, I think about the Great Depression, I think about the 1970s and the oil shock. I think about the global financial crisis, and finally, I think about both the pandemic Covid and about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Now, you know, you raised the question when you were asking me this, why not some more crises? And so is it really the case that the Ukraine war blends into the COVID crisis? Well, I think in some ways it is in the sense that the COVID crisis raises the question of shortages. And what Russia had done for a long, long time, long before 2020, is to instrumentalize its control of energy supplies in order to try to leverage politics. And a moment of big shortages is an opportune moment to do that. And so in that sense, there is, I think, a connection between the shortages of COVID and the shortages that are then induced by the attack of 24th February 2022. You also raised the question of why I don't think about the Second World War as a crisis. And you know, obviously in many, many ways the Second World War is the seismic event of the 20th century, and it's a kind of central hinge. It's much more of a global war than is the First World War. The First World War, I think is really mostly a European war, though it's fought out a little bit in some of the European colonies. But the Second World War really is a global war. And you know, it's even I think for many people a little bit problematical to say when the Second World War begins or ends. I don't think it begins on the 1st of September 1939 with the German attack on Poland. I think there's a powerful case to be made that it starts in 1937 with the Japanese invasion of China. And similarly it doesn't end with the defeat of Adolf Hitler, but it ends with the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and then the Japanese surrender. But the Second World War is to me very, very much an outcome of the Great Depression. I think it's unimaginable without the Great Depression. And you know, I think you can tell that story particularly clearly if you focus on the Japanese case where Japan is looking for how to maintain this export drive that was characteristic of the Japanese economy in an age in which you're turning into yourself and turning into regional blocks. And so the push into China and then into, into Korea, the expansion in Southeast Asia is I think one story with the reaction to the Great Depression, militarized reaction to the Great Depression. And I think it's also difficult to imagine the Nazi seizure of power and the collapse of democracy in Germany without the severity of the economic depression that produced these very, very large numbers of votes for the National Socialists. And you know, indeed the, you know, a large part of the Nazi platform and the rhetoric is about national self assertion and limiting internationalism. So there are striking speeches that of Hitler where he makes the, the enemy international connections. And you know, that's, that's often a euphemism for, for Jews. So this fits very much in with the anti SEM program. And in some ways he plays out this anti international theme and expects his audience to hear an anti Semitic theme and it mobilizes the audience. So it's, it's a powerful mobilization. I mean all this is just to say that the second World War, the, the evolution of Japan and Germany, even the turning of Italy from, you know, in the 1920s with a fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, Italy played along quite well with the rules of the international game in the 1930s. It doesn't anymore and it starts to expand and wants once empire. So that's why I don't do the Second World War. I, you Know, I think of it and I treat it in the book as well as an outgrowth of the, the policy decisions of the Depression.
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B
It's, it's great that you, you mentioned this and you expand on the connections between these different crisis because, I mean, that helps me to think about a couple of concepts that are very important in your theory that you try to push in the book, which are the different roles of the shocks that societies are being exposed to. Right. So I'm going to ask you to take us through what the theory is and you're going to point out in the book that supply shocks are fundamentally different from demand shocks. And I think that it's great that you have made this connection between different crisis because that already signals what are really the shocks that matter. Right. Or the exogenous dimensions of the story. And that's, I think that's a great element there. But yeah, please take us through that hypothesis around why maybe supply shocks are convenient depending on the, on the sign of those for globalization.
- [20:55]
C
Right. I mean, so absolutely, first of all, you know, that's absolutely right. That's the theme of the book. That's, that's really central to the argument of the book. And you know, you might think you're an economist, you've heard this in economics 101, that you can neatly distinguish between supply shocks and demand shocks, because in, for instance, a negative supply shock, the quantity that's produced is, is going down, but the prices are going up. And so prices and quantities move inversely to each other. In the negative demand shock, the prices are falling and the quantities that are traded are falling as well. So the Great Depression is a big collapse of prices, but also big collapse of world trade and a good, you know, big collapse of the amount traded in particular countries. So GDP is going to fall everywhere in the world. And, you know, you also know that economics gets more sophisticated as you go on. And so, you know, you're often taught that what's taught in economics 101 is not really ever true and that it's all much more complicated than that. And that's true. And often it's difficult to distinguish supply and demand shocks, and in particular the First World War I kind of do that exercise and try to unravel that a little bit. But the neatest ones, I think, are the negative supply shocks, the 1840s and the 1970s, and they correspond. I mean, the most important figure of my book, really the key to the argument of it is the figure that shows the growth of world trade relative to GDP. To world GDP. And you can see in the middle of the 19th century, that's the first great surge after the 1840s, that's the first really great surge of this globalization. And that's the era that, I think it's now conventional among economic historians to call it the first era of globalization, as distinct from the second era of globalization, which people sometimes have problems getting the precise chronological definition. But I think if you look at the trade story, it's very clear that it takes off from the late 1970s and that's where the share of trade in GDP is growing. And so what follows from that is more and more globalization. So it's got a kind of self accelerating, self developing process that is then launched from the end of the 1970s. But these are the two moments where, you know, both the, there's a severe, severe crisis. And you know, in the 1970s, I, I remember that still because that's when I started to go to University in 1975. And there was a sense that institutions were failing everywhere, that democracy was failing. And in the middle of the 19th century there was even a greater sense of crisis. I mean, this was when there were the European revolutions and the whole of the continent was swept by revolutions and the old rulers were swept away, incompetent rulers were swept away. And you know, both cases, I think there was a search for competence in government and there was a search for capacity in business. So business had to adjust. And that involved also resetting the legal framework for business so that joint stock companies were largely the product of the crisis. At the middle of the 19th century, you think you need something to manage the new technologies. And one of the things I wanted to do in the book was to show how both of these moments, the negative supply shocks in the middle of the 19th century and in the 1970s, they're driven by technologies which were fundamentally around already, but which had taken up as a response to the crisis. And so the steam engine is really old, but the, and there are, in the 18th century, it's mostly stationary steam engines pumping water out of mines. In the 1820s and 1830s, there are a few isolated railroads, but they don't really connect with each other. And it's only in the middle of the 19th century that you really see what the railroad can do, which is establish a network or what the steamship, the equivalent can do across the oceans, is to link the world together in a new way. So, you know, this is, this is, this is transformative, but it's an old technology. In the 1970s, container shipping, again, it's a rather older concept. There was a regular container shipping line just between New York and Florida since the 1950s. But in the 1970s, it becomes a big network. You need the container ports in order to be able to do containers. And, you know, my thoughts about the COVID pandemic and the recent episode of a negative supply shock is that this was also a moment when some technologies that were already there in medicine, but also in communications got widely taken up. So, you know, we could have done a video chat years and years ago, and people did do these video meetings, but the massive popularity of it is a product of the COVID crisis. The use of the MRNA vaccine is a product of the COVID crisis. And we're learning now that it can be used in many, many applications. You can treat cancers and the whole range of diseases that can be treated with the MRNA technology. So each of these three crises, I believe now, is really prompting a revolution in technology and then a revolution in globalization.
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B
I would like to continue with this theme of extracting the lessons from each of these crisis. And I'm glad you made this parallel, because I was going to ask you about this.
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C
The.
- [27:53]
B
The similarities between the great famine or this crisis in the middle of the 19th century and the great inflation in the 1970s. And I think you very eloquently show the similarities, but I would like to hear about the differences because certainly they were very similar, and you ended up with this, in both cases, push for more globalization. But they were different, many different ways. Right. So you could argue that the great inflation had. The supply shock was happening from the point of view of the Western world outside, if you're taking into account all shortcuts and so on. But, but. So I guess my question is, what were those differences, and why weren't those differences leading to a different sort of direction? Why was at the end this. Similarities that were related to both being a negative supply shock, the ones that are driving this big takeaway, which is the push for more globalization.
- [29:16]
C
Right? Absolutely. I mean, nothing ever repeats itself. Precisely. You know, having said that, I am struck by the way that we keep on returning to the same, even the same geographic areas that look as if they're at the center of a big problem. So, you know, I partly wrote the book, finished writing the book in Istanbul, looking over the narrow strait of the Dardanelle and looking at the ships that were coming through or not coming through, the ships with Ukrainian or Russian grain that were needed to feed the eastern Mediterranean. And without that, there was the Likelihood of hunger and unrest in many parts of North Africa, but also as far away as Indonesia, this was having an effect. So, you know, you could see this narrow waterway. But that was exactly the story in the middle of the 19th century as well. It was the story in the First World War that the Dardanelle were really, really crucial to the, this, the supply. But you know, you're right about the differences, obviously, because the fundamental problem in the middle of the 19th century was the question of getting a food supply for Europe. And that couldn't be solved without the development of large scale agriculture and the opening up of the communications that allowed those farmers in North America and South America, in the Russian Empire to export their grain. So the 19th century globalization is fundamentally an exchange of foodstuffs and other commodities from a group of countries that some people then call the periphery or it's subjected to a, either formal imperialism or a kind of semi colonialism. So people think of the relationship of South America to the North American world and the European world in the 19th century as a kind of semicolonialism. In the late 20th century, it's a different story. The fundamental issue there in the 1970s is about scarcity, but it's also about the conditions in which you produce. And so the globalization of the late 20th century is, is really about the, the development of production all over the world and the creation of complex supply chains. And you know, there's a, there's a beautiful book on that. I think the best analysis of it is by Richard Baldwin. But, but this globalization is as a result, very, very different to that of the 19th century. And you know, in the same way, I, I don't think that what we're going to see after the shocks that we're living through at the moment is going to be a repetition of either the first globalization of the 19th century or the second globalization of ever more complex supply chains. It's going to be about the application of, of data and the use of, of data, the services that can be done in a weightless economy across the world. So the next globalization seems to me to be already developing. But it's clear that it's not a repetition of the first two either.
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B
So these were the ones that were more. Clearly, you could see a supply shock being at the core of the events. At least three of the seven crises that you defined, they were characterized more than anything as the man shocks. What's the story there? So help us please, like think about what was happening here. I guess we're talking about, well, the great Depression and. And the global financial crisis at least, and. And then the Great War probably would have to put it somehow, there would probably a more messy.
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C
It's more messy.
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B
But yeah, I would like to hear then, what's the outcome when crisis seems to be driven by demand shocks?
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C
Yeah, indeed, that's right. And that looks like a very different breed of crisis in the sense that the diagnosis can be clearer there. And the really brilliant diagnosis and compelling diagnosis is offered in the middle of the 1930s by John Maynard Keynes. And the most famous exposition of it, the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is published in 1936. And now the story is really simple, that if you have a deficiency in demand, then you need coordinated action above all by governments to remedy that and to supply more demand to make up the gap in demand. And you deal then with macroeconomic aggregates. And that's also, I think, very much the response to 2008 and 2008 drives the resurgence of Keynesian economics. And Robert Skidelsky has a really nice book on the Return of the Master. And one of the economists that I look at, Larry Summers, stands very, very much in that tradition of thinking in terms of big aggregates. And you know, it's right, in those situations you need more demand. You also need a stabilization of the money supply. I mean, this was a story about the Great Depression. And the version of monetarism that is associated with Milton Friedman is also about aggregate macroeconomic stabilization, but in this case, more in the case of not allowing the money supply, the money stock to collapse as it did in the Great Depression, but to maintain the money stock. And both of those lessons, the not allowing the money stock to collapse and putting the fiscal stimulus in, were effectively learned in 2008 and then, then pursued. And you know, if Larry Summers is, as it were, the inheritor of the Keynesian tradition, Ben Bernanke is also very, very explicitly the heir of the Milton Friedman tradition of not allowing the money supply to collapse. And he did that with enormous success and with a great deal of attention to the particular details of that. Yes.
- [36:43]
B
I mean, I'm trying to think now about some of the crisis and I'm thinking specifically about one crisis of the seven that you mentioned and how it fits in this model of supply versus demand shocks. And it's a crisis of the late 19.
- [37:06]
C
Right.
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B
In the 1870s, you have a crisis that seems to be driven by financial outcomes, at least like a financial crisis. And it's one of these crisis that I think that at least in the public opinion it's not particularly present. Right. So probably many people would have been able to guess at least 5 of your 7 crisis I'm thinking now. But probably they would have missed, if they would have missed one, it would have been that one which for an entire generation was the Great Depression up until the other big Great Depression, the title for that. So help me navigating that crisis. What was it about? How does it fit in this discussion between supply shocks versus demand shocks? What were the consequences of it?
- [38:04]
A
Well.
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C
Maybe, and that was your very first question as well, maybe it shouldn't deserve to have a separate section on it. It's not really a fundamental collapse in the way that really basically all the other events that I look at are. It's, it's actually the response to a positive supply shock. So it's the financialization of the process that we were talking about, this opening of the continents, the construction of railroads and both the original crash in 1873 in, in May and then the, the crisis later in the year in, in the United States. Both of those are fundamentally focused around railroad construction. And its, the railroad stocks that companies that fail and bonds that are defaulted on railroads. So it looks much more like a financial crisis. And you know, so I also talk a little bit about, you know, the way that it really isn't a crisis in the sense that the other's a crisis. And Anna Schwartz, Milton Friedman's collaborator, used to use the word pseudo crisis to describe this sort of situation. So it's a pseudo crisis. Why it's important to me though is that this is the moment that cements the view of the world that relative price movements matter and the interest is in relative price movements rather than in the overall rise of prices in a famine or the collapse of prices in a business depression. But it's prices moving against each other that set the signals. And so it's, it's, it's a fascinating moment because you know, the ideas are already around but they don't get a lot of acceptance. And then more or less simultaneously in the English speaking world, Stanley Jevons, in the Francophone world, Leon Valras, and in the German speaking world, Carl Menger in Vienna have this vision which you know, now we, we think of as marginalism and that everything is shaped by the, the movement of prices at the margin. And so the, the terminology basically and also, I mean even the discipline. Stanley Jevons was the person who coined the term economics to describe the discipline that you're in. Before that it was called political economy. But you know, Jevons thought that that was unnecessary. It isn't really politics that set these, these prices. They're set by the balance of supply and demand and they motivate actors to respond to them. And that that kind of central observation is really a product of the crisis of the 1870s. And it's in the 1870s that marginalism becomes the key of our discipline.
- [41:31]
B
I want to add, I guess I want to go back to the beginning of our conversation and to reflect a bit on this idea of how crisis are crucial. And I'm wondering now, what do you think about the non crisis periods? Right. And I guess I would like to hear how much do you think that we actually do need indeed this crisis to move on a certain type of direction. Do you have any specific thoughts on that sense? Have you ever thought about a sort of like counterfactual in which some of these crises didn't happen and what would have been the outcome of the world, or more specifically of globalization in the absence of those? I don't know. I would like to hear about that.
- [42:33]
C
Yeah, that's a fascinating question. I don't really think all that much in terms of counterfactuals. I can't really work out how I would construct, for instance, a counterfactual in which the First World War doesn't take place. And the First World War is a kind of crucial moment. And it, it produces a pushback against this kind of marginalist view of what economics is all about. So, you know, what's the best way of thinking about that? I mean, maybe to think that any of these processes, these crisis moments, they lead to institutional reform and to new structures. And then, you know, those new structures gradually produce inefficiencies and injustices and growing discomfort with the injustices and the inefficiencies that are resulting from it. So, you know, the middle of the 19th century, the world accepts the idea that migration is good, that trade is good, that capital flows help countries to develop. And by the early 20th century, already before the First World War and actually back in the 1880s, already in the United States, there's a growing disenchantment with migration, a feeling that migration is eroding the incomes and the wages of, of those who are already in the country, the trade is damaging and is leading to a loss of jobs or the capital flows are destabilizing. And so there's an increasing sense that for political backlash against globalization. And again, it's been nicely studied. Kevin o' Rourke and Jeff Williamson have done, done really the fundamental work on that. And so in many ways the, the kind of sentiments that then erupted in a radical way in the Great Depression are already there before the first World War. So these anti globalization forces and then they're, they're unleashed by the military conflict and by the security conflict. But you know, I think, I think you can tell the story in those terms of backlash is developing.
- [45:21]
B
I would like to ask you one final, probably also difficult question because I would like to hear what you're saying about globalization in the future. And considering that a good part of the way you think about it is the result of crises that are to begin with, hard to predict. I know I'm asking you, probably something very difficult, but how do you feel, are you an optimistic about globalization? You explore some of this when you reflect on the consequences of the pandemic and so on, but. Yeah, how do you feel about that?
- [46:01]
C
Yeah, I mean, the last sentence of the book is really a riff on a quotation from John Maynard Keynes at the Paris Peace conference where he said in 1919, all this makes it increasingly probable that things will have to get worse before they can get better. And I, I think that's a, that's a wonderful quote. You know, it would have to get worse. You know, you can see, and we're in many ways in this moment currently that we're in, everything looks as if it's getting worse. The war in Ukraine looks insoluble. How do you get to peace there? Things will have to get worse before they can get better. And, but I, I also wanted to emphasize the second part of the sentence. They can get better and we have the technologies, we're using the technologies already that will help them get better. And you know, what I think gives me the confidence about this is that, you know, now even more than in the early 20th century, citizens in countries and voters make judgments about the competence of their governments. And if they see governments dealing with things incompetently and inefficiently and unjustly, they revolt against them. And we, if you want to be optimistic, we might see that happening in Russia. The military campaign is managed with appalling brutality, but also appalling incompetence. The economic mobilization is also really running into the sands. I, I expect a protest movement there to, to, to develop. And you know, that looks like the world of the middle of the 19th century, but what's created after the, those collapses is a better world. And the, in that sense, we already see the glimpses of a possibly optimistic future.
- [48:08]
B
I love that I love that you finished with this optimistic note. Akasha's optimistic one, but optimistic nevertheless. I want to thank you. You wrote a fascinating book. I hope that most of the people that are listening to and seeing our conversation take the time to, to go into details. It's full of rich context and interesting stories. And, and also I want to thank you for taking the time for having this conversation. This was, this was very nice, Harold.
- [48:42]
C
Well, thank you so much, Javier.