In this second installment of audience questions, viewers and listeners from nearly three dozen nations spanning six continents ask Hoover senior fellows Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster and John Cochrane about the durability of America’s “empire,” Putin’s war crimes, Henry Kissinger’s worldview, and the future of Western universities. Preceding all of that: an on-the-ground report from Cochrane in Tokyo, who is amazed that “it’s possible to run a city that is not a zombie apocalypse.”
>> Letters we get letters we get stacks and stacks of letters. Letters we get letters we get stacks and stacks of letters.
>> Bill Whalen: It's Thursday, March 23rd, 2023, and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution Broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a hoover distinguished policy fellow.
I'm your moderator today, joined as usual by the three stars of our show, our Goodfellows. That would be the historian Nial Ferguson, the geostrategist, Lieutenant HR McMaster, and for reasons I'm not quite sure, the economist John Cochrane. What are you doing in Tokyo, John Cochrane?
>> John Cochrane: I'm visiting one of my kids who is teaching English in Japan and having a wonderful time here and showing us around.
So it's great to be here.
>> Bill Whalen: Do you have something special about Tokyo?
>> John Cochrane: I have some tourist notes from Tokyo because I haven't been here for ten years, since before COVID and it's an interesting place to visit. Message America, your cities. It is possible that cities do not look like zombie apocalypses.
There is no trash on the street and there are no trash cans, fascinating combination. There is zero crime. There is zero homelessness. There isn't this sort of army of drug addicts and mentally ill people. There are clean public restrooms anytime you need one. If you go out and listen in the streets, it's amazing how silent it is.
Nobody beeps a horn in Japan, people are, of course, unfailingly polite at everything. Taxi drivers and bus drivers are polite. People take pride in their jobs, even the most humble jobs. I saw a guy directing traffic and doing so in a clear, professional and proud way. There's, of course, some signs of, I'm sure not everything is perfect in Japan.
I haven't seen anybody under the age of 16 in quite a long time, especially in central Tokyo. But cities and public transit, by the way, is flawless, impeccable, clean, safe, and all the rest of it. It's possible, America, it doesn't have to look like our cities. That's all.
>> HR McMaster: Hey, John, I just pulled this off my bookshelf. This is the 1979 book by Ezra Vogel, the great Scholar Japan called Japan as number one lessons for America. I mean, it's exactly on your point in terms of what we can learn by how Japan has organized its urban areas, how it, I mean, there's anyway, just wanted to make that.
>> John Cochrane: Yeah, no, I'm not saying everything's perfect here. Japan has all sorts of social problems and economic problems and so forth. But just the fact that it is possible to run a large city so beautifully is striking.
>> Niall Ferguson: Since you bring it up, Japan has, I think, the largest public debt in relation to gross domestic product of any of the major economies in the world.
Where's their inflation these days?
>> John Cochrane: The fiscal theory, the price level about which you are needling me, is not so simple as
>> John Cochrane: Debt causes inflation. And I'll turn it around. If Japan proves that 230% debt to GDP doesn't cause inflation, then what about Turkey? And what about Brazil?
What about Argentina? What about dear old UK, who seem to run into the limit at about 100% debt to GDP ratio, where the US the same. So, things are not so easy. And there's lots of reasons for why Japan is different, which I won't bore everybody with.
>> Niall Ferguson: It's kind of worth exploring for a second, because these are issues we talk about a lot in the show.
We had a show on demographic trends recently. And in a way, Japan is the experimental laboratory of the society of the future, because it's the society that's aged the fastest. It's the society where fiscal policy has driven up debt the highest. It's a society where the central bank has had to essentially become a debt management agency to control long-term rates.
And you as an economist, are really well placed to tell us, is this where we're all heading? Or are there very special features about Japan that make all of this compatible with the kind of social stability that you describe? Which impresses me every time I go there, I go to Japan.
And I always think this is the nearest thing to going into another planet that you can do on this planet, because it's so profoundly different from our messy ways. But is that just because Japan is so different, or are there lessons here for the rest of the developed world?
>> John Cochrane: Well, Japan is, of course, culturally different and culturally much more homogenous than the US. My son, who teaches in Japan, notes that they spend a lot of time on inculcating proper behavior in the schools, which our education system doesn't. They consciously pass on a culture, which is part of what they do.
>> HR McMaster: There's a chapter in the book on that, on basic education, by the way
>> John Cochrane: Yeah, Japan is still highly populated. The demographics are ratios, but the population density is quite high in Japan. Tokyo is not an empty city by any regards. I think their debt situation it's not quite so strange as it looks like.
Their debt is mostly held domestically, mostly long term debt. Our debt is mostly short term debt, held by foreigners. They ran a trade surplus for year after year so there's lots of assets around. They are still a quite high tax country. They're not treating their debt as a free money magical monetary theory piggy bank to spend things on.
And every time anything looks touchy they raise the taxes. So, the idea that Japan will default on their debt or inflate it away seems much further away than it does in the US. And I'll leave the economics there. But there's plenty of reasons why Japan seems to be doing okay and there's luck.
Debt is always about the interest payments in the end. So, as long as interest payments are low you can afford that huge mansion in Palo Alto. But then when interest rates go up things start to look a little dicier, which is I think something were gonna learn all around the world soon and possibly even Japan.
There's always the just wait argument for apparent bubbles.
>> Bill Whalen: Okay, the five minutes we have left in the show shall we get to questions now or?
>> John Cochrane: You asked.
>> Bill Whalen: Thank you, my fault. All right, here we go, GoodFellows, this is part two of our mailbag show. Question from Peter in the UK.
Given that most empires since the Middle Ages have lasted about 100 years, how much longer do you guys think the US empire will last? And what can honestly be said for its lasting legacy to the rest of the world beyond Coca-Cola and McDonald's? Well gee, I don't know.
Apple, Hollywood? In fact we're all not speaking in German right now. Niall, why don't you take it empires?
>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I wrote a book about this 20 years ago and you don't need to call it the American empire. The United States is still the number one superpower 20 years on.
It's not true to say that there's some average lifespan of an empire. In fact if one looks at empire duration they're not normally distributed at all. Some empires don't last any time at all. Think of Hitler's empire, which really barely lasted a decade, in fact somewhat less if you date it from the first expansion of 1936 to its destruction in 1945.
Other empires, take the case of Rome, last not just for centuries but for a millennium. So, I dont think its true to say that there's a sort of average duration. That's actually one of the most fascinating features of history, that empire duration seems to be governed by a power law.
The United States is a very curious kind of empire. As I try to argue in the book, Colossus, it's an empire in denial. It doesn't like to acknowledge that it's doing imperial things, even when to everybody else it seems pretty obvious when you're invading Mesopotamia and sending armies into Afghanistan.
That's what empires have been doing for a very long time but Americans are deeply uncomfortable with the idea. And that, I think, has to do with the legacy of being formed in a struggle to leave an empire. And so I think as long as Americans have that strange ambivalence about global power, perhaps that will ensure that it endures.
I think that's a really distinctive feature of American power, that it's as much empire by invitation, to use a phrase from the academic literature, as empire by invasion. If America said, we're pulling all our troops out of Western Europe with immediate effect, which of course, a republican president might do in January of 2025.
I think the Europeans would be up in arms in opposition to that decision, which tells you something about the nature of American power.
>> John Cochrane: But Neil, don't empires fall from within? I mean, I look America, and it takes ten years to get the permits to build the windmill and another ten years to actually build the windmill.
Even the Roman Empire, didn't it? And the Ottoman Empire, red tape, I think, was invented by the Ottoman Empire. Literally, you had to cover bundles in red tape. So I see the huge colossus that is no longer functional inwardly. And then when a great challenge comes, is unable to rise to the occasion, isn't that the story of ends of empires?
>> Niall Ferguson: Perhaps wrongly, I associate red tape with the British in India, but-.
>> John Cochrane: I may be wrong historically on that one.
>> Niall Ferguson: The rule of thumb, which I've used for many years and writing books about empires, is that when debt service. This will appeal to you, John, when debt service charges exceed the defense budget, you're heading for imperial decline.
It's a rough and ready rule, but it certainly applied to the Ottoman Empire.
>> John Cochrane: Didn't Queen Victoria at the end of the Napoleonic wars? UK is the prime example of paying off its debts, sorry interrupt you, I just wanted to get that fact straight.
>> Niall Ferguson: But the military budget was higher than the debt service even at that point, because Britain was running the largest navy on earth by far.
So I think this is a good role. I mean, British history is actually quite an interesting illustration of this, cuz the empire has this very successful debt management system. Debt service costs are very low on the very large British debt because Britain has an anti inflation strategy or commitment called the gold standard.
So I think the answer to the question is that those who predict the decline of American power are in very good company with the people who predicted the decline of American power in the 1930s. Who did it in the 1970s, and who've been doing it for the past 20 years.
And these people are always wrong because the United States is very, very easy to underestimate. This was one of Hitler's perhaps most fatal mistakes, and I can see Xi Jinping doing it now. I think the United States has this superpower which will, as long as we don't lose it, keep the United States in a dominant position for generations to come.
And that is the part to import talent from the rest of the world, equip it with capital and opportunity. And that's the thing that I think has set the United States apart from its very, very inception. It's that openness to talent combined with the resources that it can make available to the talent, and nobody can match that.
I don't see anybody matching it in my lifetime or my children's.
>> Bill Whalen: John Cochrane, let's send this question your way. It's from Don in Ontario, Canada. He writes, short question, big answer, or bank failures, government failures. I want Neil to answer this as well, cuz he wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal Germaine, to this.
John, go ahead, are bank failures, government failures?
>> John Cochrane: Not necessarily, there is a central problem of banking. If you let banks do whatever they want, which is to borrow money via deposits and invest that risky, there is a danger of a run. So it's a combination, it is a failure of a government to set up the rules of the game.
You need rule of law and rules of the game that make sense. So it is partly a private failure if you take on the extra risk, but also a failure of a bare bones minimum regulatory legal system. You need to stop that kind of throwing dirt in the, well, sort of activity.
>> Bill Whalen: Niall, you recently co authored a piece in the Wall Street Journal with the very clever headline, life, certainties, death, taxes and bailouts.
>> Niall Ferguson: Well, the world that I wouldn't like to inhabit would be a world in which no bank ever failed because the government controlled the banking system.
And I get nervous every time there's a banking crisis because Martin Wolf and others rush into print. My friend Larry Kotlikoff with radical reforms to transform the banking system by abolishing fractional reserve banking and turning banks into utilities. And I don't believe in this and I find it amusing that these articles always appear whenever there's a banking crisis.
Look a few banks have failed, they were really badly run. That happens in every sector of the economy. The issue, in my view, is, did the governments new regulations that were created after the last financial crisis. Which we call Dodd Frank for short, but there were a bunch of regulatory changes at the international level, did those fail?
And I think John and I are in agreement that they did. They must have failed because they were thrown aside not only in the US, but also in Switzerland as soon as it became clear that bank runs were happening. So I think one has to look back and ask, did we learn the right lessons from the last financial crisis?
I said at the time, I wrote this in the revised edition of the Ascent of Money in 2018, that the Dodd Frank rules would fail on contact with another banking crisis. Because, in fact, in many ways, they made the system more vulnerable and not less vulnerable. So we told ourselves a story, or rather the authorities told themselves a story, that they'd made the banking system safer.
And the last few weeks have shown that that wasn't true. So it's not so much a failure of government, I think failure of bank management in the case of Silicon Valley bank and Credit Suisse, that's for sure. But I think one has to give the Monetary and Regulatory Authorities very low grades indeed for the way they handled this crisis.
And by the way, this crisis isn't over precisely because of the uncertainty that's been created by the improvisation. When the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, says, actually, not all deposits are insured, we'll decide on an ad hoc basis which ones are. You see just how big a mess they've got themselves into.
Watch this space, the show ain't over.
>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let's turn to our crisis, now approaching its 14th month HR question from Wayne in Austin, Texas. It seems reckless that the international crime court charged Putin with war crimes, that is, their international rules based order versus a nuclear head of state.
They have now explicitly made this into an existential struggle for both parties, yay or nay?
>> HR McMaster: Nay, I mean, that's what happens maybe when you kidnap 70,000 children. If you look at really the devastating effect that this reinvasion, we're going back to 2014. The initial invasion of Ukraine has visited on the Ukrainian people.
I think it's difficult to overstate the degree to which Putin has committed crimes against humanity, and I think his actions have met that standard. It's a well known standard, actually developed by a philosopher and an attorney who was based in Lviv after the First World War. And I think you just have to look at his actions and recognize that it was certainly worthy of that sanction.
>> Bill Whalen: The HR McMaster cult of personality continues to shine through our mailbags. The last episode, we had you running for president. Now we want to relive your glory days in the military. We had a question from Nagarjuna in India and Miguel in Shenzhen, China, asking variations of the same question.
Can General McMaster please recount his experience of the great tank battle in which he fought HR? This is the battle of 73 eastings, which was, what, 32 years and a couple of months ago, right?
>> HR McMaster: Yeah, it's hard to believe it's been that long ago. Well it just comes down to a well trained team, and we were confident in one another.
We were confident in our equipment, our Abrams tanks, and our Bradley fighting vehicles. But that confidence serves as a bulwark against fear in battle, and we were able to gain an advantage associated with surprise, not like, in a classical sense, that the enemy didn't know we were there.
But the defending Iraqi brigade had no idea about the devastating effect that an armored cavalry troop could have on them in a very short period of time. This was an army that had fought against human wave attacks by the Iranians in the 1980 to 1988 war. So their whole conception of close combat was way off, as were their sort of idea of time and space relationships.
So whereas they had a fundamentally sound defense, that defense was quickly overcome by the devastating power of nine Abrams tanks in a wedge, driving at them at 20 km an hour and firing around every three seconds. You multiply that times nine, and everybody shooting different enemy vehicles, and we had a devastating effect on them within the first couple of minutes and then assaulted through that position.
So we gained not only a physical advantage, but a psychological advantage over the enemy. And then we continued the assault, really against my higher command's orders, cause it was a right thing to do, given the situation, until we entered their reserve position of 18-T 72 tanks and destroyed them at very close range.
I could see the expression on the enemy tank commander's face just before that tank erupted into flames, and he could tell the difference between gun going off and the enemy tank being hit and the sparks and metal arcing back over your head. But that reserve was trying to deploy against us but didn't get a chance to deploy because we had assaulted too rapidly.
So I think it comes down to confidence in our training, confidence that serves as a bulwark against fear, which can lead to inaction in battle, proficiency in all of our weapon systems and in our ability to fight together as a team. And then it comes down to the initiative, right?
Seizing and retaining the initiative in battle, which you can do in desert warfare once you get that first blow in, if you can follow up on it in a relatively featureless desert, although there was some rolling terrain and a couple of different plateaus that we attacked across. You can finish that action with the initiative and have the kind of lopsided victory that we enjoyed.
>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Niall, two questions. One, Brian and Canberra, when is the second volume of the Kissinger biography coming out? And Brad in Pennsylvania, who has a statement more than a question. Henry Kissinger was right, we want to seek a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Let me turn that into a question.
What is Henry Kissinger's position on Ukraine right now?
>> Niall Ferguson: Well, the book, which I'm currently in the midst of writing, 11 chapters written, I should think another eleven at least to go, that will come out next year. I'll finish it this year somewhere a little after his 100th birthday in May.
What is fascinating about Henry Kissingers view of Ukraine is that it has changed as circumstances have changed, and some people have criticized that, but I think that's a naïve criticism. Back in the period after 2014, Kissinger wrote an insightful op-ed arguing that it would be extremely dangerous to continue with the pretense that Ukraine would one day become a member of NATO.
This was a path to conflict, and it would be better if Ukraine were to be a neutral state, somewhat like Finland or Austria in the Cold War. And I think that argument has been borne out by events. I think our strategy of offering NATO membership without delivering it utterly failed and indeed incentivized in some ways, Putin to risk war in 2022.
Kissinger's view most recently has been that Ukraine has now earned membership of NATO. He said at Davos, and he said it elsewhere, that Ukraine has established itself as a serious military power in Europe in its own right, that it has won the right to NATO membership by exposing the limits of Russian military power.
And that's quite a significant shift. And I think it recognizes just how radically the situation has changed. But he's also said, and I think this must be right, that we must have some concept as to how this war ends, and that without such a concept, we run the risk of creating an open ended and potentially a dangerous commitment.
And I think the open endedness of the war is the thing that troubles him right now. Of course, I'm just his biographer, and really, anybody who wants to know what Kissinger thinks about the war in Ukraine should just look out for his next article. A book, television interview or speech for a man approaching his 100th birthday, he has the energy of a good fellow.
Perhaps rather more than that.
>> Bill Whalen: Well done, John Cochrane, I'm going to ask you a non economic question, my friend. It's from Luke in Manchester, UK. He writes, love the show, long time listener, first time question asker here. I work in international education and sometimes wonder in a world where it feels that the advantages of the western intellectual tradition are increasingly being challenged.
What do the GoodFellows see as the key selling points of a Western university education in 2023?
>> John Cochrane: Well, there's the university education that Western could provide, and then there's the university education that increasingly is providing, which I find it harder to defend. Certainly understanding your culture, its values, where it all came from, the wonders that the enlightenment brought us, and learning a lot of math and science is a useful thing to do.
Learning the kind of problem solving and intellectual abilities that kind of freer western university education versus the sometimes wrote take the test education you get in other places can be a wonderful experience. As we all know right now, especially the humanities and social sciences in Western universities are busy throwing a lot of that away.
It's harder for me to recommend that Neil may have some better insights than I do.
>> Niall Ferguson: It's a difficult question to answer because what western university. By which I take the question as I mean American and west European, and kindred universities offer today so different from what they used to offer not so very long ago.
And there has been, I think, a really startling decline in the intellectual freedom on campuses in the United States especially. This has been driven, I think, by an unholy alliance of administrators, ideologically, quote unquote, progressive or work administrators, somewhat weak university leaders, and a relatively small minority of radical, illiberal students and faculty.
And this has led to an assault on academic freedom which manifests itself in cancellations in the disruption of events. This happened at Stanford very recently when an invited speaker of the Federalist Society was shouted down by students and then by a dean representing the law school administration. One of the better features of that particular episode has been the response of the dean of the law school, which included a rather good restatement of the principles of academic freedom that Stanford is supposed to uphold and which weren't upheld on that occasion.
Though I was somewhat discouraged by the consequences for those who disrupted the event, which seemed, I thought, insufficient considering what had happened. But right now it's pretty hard to say to a young person, you really must go to college, you'll have a great experience, because it's obvious from the surveys that heterodox academy and others do that the experience is not great.
That undergraduates feel they have to self censor, that when one speaks to them, they seem unhappy, that mental health is a problem which is absolutely out of control in many campuses. Something's gone awfully wrong, and I think something has to be done about it, because we can't allow the elite institutions, the institutions that complete the formal education of our young people, to be run in this way.
It's completely contrary to the founding spirit of these institutions. The wind of freedom is supposed to blow on this campus, and it really doesn't. So, as listeners, viewers may know, involved in trying to create a new university in Austin that will model academic freedom in the belief that it's really important.
And if we can just remind people of what university is supposed to be like, not only intellectually, tremendously stimulating, but challenging, exciting, risky. If we can do that in one institution, maybe we'll remind the established institutions of what they're supposed to be for and bring about a renaissance in higher education, that would be nice.
>> John Cochrane: Could I understand the experience that I had, and I think the others of you, both of you also had. The university is a place where you get to go try on seven crazy ideas before breakfast. Meet the young Trotskyites out in the plaza, stop by the federalist society, live in a dorm or flat that has self organized activities, make a couple mistakes, do some dumb things, change your ideas, express crazy ideas and hear other ones coming back.
That sort of wonderful experience is now very much on, I would say, and I'll just pass one anecdote on. The Stanford Band marching band was well known for its wonderful pranks and much more interesting than the football game used to be this Stanford band, they of course did, said some things that weren't appreciated.
Now they're put under intense faculty control to the point that the faculty director of the Stanford Band now must approve all nicknames given by band members to other band members. If you wanna see your chance of forming your own organizations and learning yourself, being a little transgressive, all that things that cause Silicon Valley falling apart, having to get nicknames approved by the faculty sponsor, just that says it all.
>> Bill Whalen: We can do an entire show on the Stanford Band beginning with the fact that you don't even have to play an instrument to be in the Stanford Band, you could just play the air guitar if you want to. Let's do one last big picture question, I want each of you to take a shot at this and we'll go to the vaunted lightning round.
This is from Karyn in Phoenix, who writes, we, myself included, her, not me, are all basically of the same generation. We were taught that America, though flawed, is the best country and that capitalism rewards hard work. I read the other day that millennials now outnumber we baby boomers.
What effect will a majority of Americans with differing values from our own have on the way our country governs, projects, military strength, HR, and sees itself in the world order?
>> HR McMaster: Well, I'm optimistic, I think that some of these orthodoxies, these reified philosophies have become prevalent or taken over humanities departments and universities, we're just talking about that.
But I think what helps people come to their senses is responsibility and real life experience. And I'm hoping that on the college campuses, as Neil's doing with the University of Austin, but really, when I teach at Stanford, we raise these questions, right, we have meaningful discussions. Nobody's canceling anybody in the classes that I teach.
And I think that what you want is to maybe encourage young people to question these orthodoxies and ask them if it makes sense to them. I mean, does it really make sense to you to judge the man or woman next to you based on their identity category rather than by their heart and their soul and their character and their empathy they have for one another and their work ethic, for that matter, or their intellect or.
Of course not, it doesn't. It doesn't make sense to anybody to organize people on sort of, strata of oppressor and victimhood, of course it doesn't. So, I think just encouraging our young people to question these orthodoxies and then to really, I think some of the positive developments in the academy in recent decades is a broadening of curricula, the bringing in, for example, of different types of literature and philosophy and history.
But what happened is those new forms, aspects of the curricula, sought to dominate and to squeeze out the older elements of the curriculum. I mean, hell, diplomatic history and military history broadly. So, I think that it is time for a correction, but I'm confident that the young people who've been subjected to what I call the curriculum of self loathing in our universities will get better.
Kind of like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the person claimed to have been a newt but got better.
>> What makes you think she's a witch? Well, she turned me into a newt. A newt, I got better. Burn already! Burn!
>> John Cochrane: Yeah, get better or die out.
Increasingly, businesses are saying we don't need college degrees, governments are doing it, too. New apprenticeship programs are showing up, new universities are showing up, and enrollments in humanities and social sciences are just absolutely crashing. Well, humanities especially, colleges are still a great place to learn to do math and program a computer and build a bridge or something of the sort, and will remain so.
So the fundamentals of America are so common sense that I do think you're right, and I love what you said. Young people, the old joke about being a socialist when you're young, unless you have a heart and being a conservative, unless you have a brain. But that comes from responsibility and getting away from the college campus, and to the business of having a job and raising a family and making the mortgage does sort of bring you back in contact with that deep common sense in America.
So I'll join with HR and the optimism and hopefulness of America's capacity to go back to common sense and reform these institutions.
>> Bill Whalen: Will we be optimistic all around, or do you want to strike a different chord?
>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I did some work on this a few years ago with my former student Ike Fryman, and we wrote a piece about generation politics.
It's been my view for some time that generational divides are now the real divides of American politics, much more so than class or even ethnicity, though people love to talk about race. And in truth, the difference between the baby boomer generation to which we belong and Generation Z, the 20 somethings who are relatively new to political life, is absolutely huge on almost every issue.
And I don't agree with John that everybody kind of starts out on the left, gets mugged by reality, and it ends up on the right, that's actually not the historical experience. Generations often have, their political outlooks formed by a particular salient event relatively early in their political lives, and then they don't move radically away from that.
So if one looks at the, the attitudes of particularly Generation Z, they are far to the left of this group. On the question of socialism versus capitalism, slim majorities say they prefer socialism, one assumes they don't know what socialism really means. Did some work on that at Hoover a couple of years ago, but I rather worry that they do know what it means, so I'm much more troubled about the shift in generational attitudes that is underway in American politics.
I think it's going to create a formidable obstacle for the Republican Party in the years to come, because in so many ways, the young are estranged from conservative ideas, and this is part a failure, I think, of conservatives. They've not understood how to address the concerns of young people, and I think ultimately, to go back to our earlier conversation, it is also a failure of conservatives to maintain any kind of position of influence in the academy.
I mean, look at the political profile of university professors, it's overwhelmingly to the left, will the last conservative professor at Stanford turn out the lights when he or she leaves? And that's why I think that's partly why the attitudes of the young strikers are so far to the left.
Conservatives gave up on higher education or were driven out of it, depending on which view you take, and I think it's a pretty bad outlook we therefore have. The only good news I can offer is I think there's another generation coming, it's aged about eleven right now, and it hates all of this wokeism.
It hates being indoctrinated on issues of race and gender, and ultimately, I think that generation, maybe it's generation South Park, is going to come along and say, enough of this, and revolt against the snowflakes who are currently in college. Here's hoping.
>> Bill Whalen: And is that based on a personal observation, Doctor Ferguson?
>> Niall Ferguson: Let me just say that the younger Fergusons are distinctly not woke, and this has nothing to do with my influence. They seem to have arrived at these positions in reaction to some of the things that they've encountered at school, it's fascinating to watch.
>> Bill Whalen: Well done. Well said by all three of you gentlemen, I will now step aside and it's time for the lightning round.
>> Lightning round.
>> Bill Whalen: Three of you should talk among yourselves, have at.
>> Niall Ferguson: I have a good one for both of you gentlemen, and it's from Douglas in Boulder City, Nevada. Could the GoodFellows describe in specific detail how we, the United States and other western societies can decouple economic, economically from China?
What exactly would this take and how long would it take, for example, do we need to put big red dots on all the products in big box stores if it's made in China? John, why don't you go first, is decoupling something the United States can actually do, and how long would it take?
>> John Cochrane: We could become as poor as we wanted to, sure North Korea decoupled from the rest of the world and look how great they're doing. It just would be a catastrophically stupid idea, both economically and I think diplomatically in the larger world order. So you want to give up, I don't know what fraction of your average income you're going to give up by doing it.
The world is, the globalization is here to stay, unless you want to, I don't know, cut half of your income, I don't want the numbers, cut half your income off. So you know me, I'm not for this idea.
>> Niall Ferguson: HR, there has to be some decoupling because the United States has become reliant on China for a whole variety of things, from pharmaceuticals to military parts to rare earths, that are crucial in technology, things that we can't really rely on a potential adversary.
So you must, I think, favor some measure of decoupling, but how do we execute that partial decoupling that reduces our strategic vulnerability?
>> HR McMaster: I think you have to focus, really on three areas, and the first is supply chain resilience and not giving an authoritarian, hostile power. If you read the four speeches that Xi Jinping just delivered in the two sessions, they were preparing the Chinese people for war, so we shouldn't give them course of power of our economy.
That was the lesson of Germany vis a vis Russian hydrocarbons. So diversifying and making supply chains more resilient, maybe not completely decoupling, but making them more resilient. The second area is we shouldn't be helping the PLA develop the weapon systems they might use to kill our grandchildren. And we've done that over many years with investments into Chinese companies that are providing PLA people's Liberation army capabilities.
And the third area is that we should not, through our economic and trade relationships, be enabling genocide or the perfection of the technologically enabled Orwellian police state, and I think those are the areas. If there are areas where we can have good economic discourse and trade in ways that develop relationships with entities that are not acting as an arm of the Chinese communist party, let's do that.
But the problem is, Xi Jinping is determined to decouple on his own terms. So the space for that kind of economic discourse, even is shrinking, regardless of what we decide to do.
>> John Cochrane: Xi Jinping just made a speech saying, the US is trying to squeeze me economically, we got to go do something about this.
There is the danger of what we did to Japan in the 1930s cutting off their oil supply, and that came back to bite us. So let's not, if the idea is just make China weak, that's a bad strategy, if the idea is, yes, don't give them fighter jet parts I'm with you.
>> HR McMaster: Or John, how about us venture capital firms investing $700 million back in 2014 into a company called for paradigm, which now does all the battlefield artificial intelligence for the People's Liberation Army. That's probably a bad idea. So, I mean, I think a lot we should do for outbound investment screen, but red dots on items in big back stores, that's not a good idea.
>> Bill Whalen: Guys, keep asking questions.
>> Niall Ferguson: Thank you for reminding them.
>> HR McMaster: Okay, I've got a really short-
>> John Cochrane: Well, this fight goes on.
>> HR McMaster: I've got a short, easy one for you guys. Danny from New Jersey wants to know, can we get out of our debt crisis after national debt crisis?
So what do you have for Danny on that?
>> Niall Ferguson: That's John's.
>> John Cochrane: I think, what was the actual text of Danny's question? I remember this one, he said.
>> HR McMaster: He said, can we get our way out of the national debt? Is there a way out of it?
>> John Cochrane: Yeah, yeah, sure there is a way out of it, and this is just arithmetic.
Debts will either be repaid, inflated away, or defaulted on, or grown out of. One of those is going to happen, and our choice is which one of those is going to happen. So there's nice ways out and there's not so nice ways out. I want to emphasize, too, the debt is really not right now, our central issue.
Our central issue is that we have made promises to boomers that we cannot keep. So even if you default on all of the current debt, we've still got promised payments of Social Security, Medicare, and now a much larger other kinds of government spending that we just are not having a way of paying for it.
So even defaulting on the debt doesn't solve that future problem. So these are straightforward problems to solve. You just gotta sit down and do it. Okay, the best one of all that came in from, let's see, the name Johan from Chicago. Professor Ferguson, what world leader has the best facial hair?
I can't imagine any better than Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, but I'd like to hear from a true historical expert, and you seem to be a personal expert now, too.
>> Niall Ferguson: That's a great question. Let me see, facial hair was a 19th century thing. So it certainly has to be a 19th century leader, I've always rather admired, though I probably shouldn't admit, this Kaiser Wilhelm II's mustache.
It was one of the great taches of the late 19th and early 20th century. And I can't say that he followed it to victory. He followed it to disaster and the loss of his throne. But it's hard to think of anything much sharper than Wilhelm II's mustache.
>> John Cochrane: Now, Abraham Lincoln grew his beard intentionally right in response to it.
And then that in response to a request from a schoolgirl, as I remember, that one worked out rather better, didn't it?
>> Niall Ferguson: I think the mustache free beard is one of America's worst contributions.
>> John Cochrane: But it worked for Lincoln.
>> Niall Ferguson: Lincoln would almost certainly have had a more striking facial aspect without it, because he had a most extraordinary physiognomy, no, I've never liked that beard, but I'm glad you mentioned it.
>> John Cochrane: Well, the Germans, the late 19th century Germans certainly did a wonderful job with this. And also a shout out here to our producer, Scott, who will now go out and find some great pictures of 19th century hair for us.
>> Niall Ferguson: The worst, of course, facial hair in all of history was Hitler's toothbrush moustache, a moustache that has been consigned to the trash can of history.
There is a very interesting theory to be explored John, on the subject of facial hair and inflation. I came across a wonderful paper that studied the amount of facial hair that appeared in the illustrated London news in the course of the 19th and into the 20th century. And it posited that large amounts of facial hair seem to be correlated with low inflation and clean shaven faces with higher inflation, which is one reason that I've grown this beard.
>> HR McMaster: Well, I just join you, all of this discussion of hair. No, it's really making me feel like that I'm losing my self esteem a little bit. I'm going to have to retreat to my safe space now.
>> Bill Whalen: So, HR, where are you on the shaved head, full beard look?
>> HR McMaster: That's okay. Whatever you want to do. I'm a libertarian, like everybody at Hoover.
>> Niall Ferguson: It's well known that HR models himself on the character of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, as played by Marlon Brando, like a snail crawling on a razor's edge.
>> I do not know what horror means, horror.
>> Niall Ferguson: The horror.
>> Bill Whalen: Curse comes to mind anytime we do the late afternoon show and the shadows start coming over HR. So anyway, let's wrap up the show. What a great run we had today. We started in Tokyo, we handled some great issues, and somehow we landed on the men's hair club to end it all.
So we hope you enjoyed what questions we got to. We apologize for the many ones we couldn't, but time constraints. But we'll do this again soon because I think we all enjoyed it very much. Next time we do it, by the way, ask a lot of questions. Let's start asking about these gentlemen, about where they like to travel.
Love the question about hair, I think that was a lot of fun. So we'll do it again soon. On behalf of the GoodFellows, Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, HR McMaster, we hope you enjoyed today's show. We'll be back again with a new show in about late April. So until then, take care.
Thanks for watching, thanks for your support these three years. Hope you enjoyed the show. We'll see you soon. If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch battlegrounds. Also available at hoover.org.