—Thich Nhat Hanh
“To live without hope is to cease to live.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
Yesterday as I listened to a video titled Niall Ferguson Stuns World Leaders at ARC Australia - "Are We The Soviets Now?" some thoughts clicked in my head. Ferguson, a historian from Edinburgh, has much to say about the times we live in. In the past hundred years the massses, who for various reasons have felt abandoned by the Church, how been encouraged to put their faith in the State. Today, this folly has become apparent. His talk is less than 20 minutes long and you can watch it below or follow the URL and listen on YouTube.
What follows here are some excerpts from his talk, with a few of my thoughts added in response.
American politics is geriatric. If you look at the chart on the other side of this slide, the United States is a real outlier because its legislators are also substantially older than those of peer countries.
Joe Biden was president when this was recorded, but it was apparent Donald Trump would be his successor. Each would end their terms at 82. Nancy Pelosi was well advanced and others as well. A friend of mine told me that a local congressperson confided that the worst part is that these people spend 70% of their time getting re-elected (to hold on to power) and 30% actually focused on legislation. Its very difficult to unseat those in office due to the massive name recognition advantage they have over new faces.
The Soviet Union's economy was characterized by the soft budget constraint which meant that state-owned enterprises were under almost no pressure to be economically efficient. That's in fact true of the US federal government too. I spend a lot of my time thinking about US fiscal policy. It's really shocking to observe that this year, for the first time, the United States federal government will spend more on interest payments on the federal debt than on defence.
Even without the massive amounts of grift and fraud, the government's fiscal irresponsibility is apparent to all. The blame game seems more important than fixing any of it.
One of the striking features of life in 1980s Soviet Russia was that nobody believed in the system anymore.
It was a crock and rampant cynicism spread like like an oil slick across the culture.
This (above) was the statement that arrested my attention. I've noted it in the past, and have expressed alarm that there have been more overdose deaths each year than all the soldiers who died in Vietnam over the span of ten years. Back then it seemed like we saw in the evening news daily footage of bodybags being loaded onto planes. These news stories produced the pushback against the war that became known as the anti-war movement. Where is the outrage today? What are we doing to end our current tragedy?
Well, Ferguson gives it a context.
What an extraordinary increase there has been in deaths of despair from suicide, alcohol poisoning, or drug overdoses. And if you compare the United States with comparable countries, including Australia, which is in the lower chart, dotted blue line, you see that the United States has a completely unique trend, with an extraordinary upward surge in deaths of despair unlike anywhere else.
Our suicides, overdose deaths and alcohol poisoning among the you should alert us in the same way as those canaries in the mines. Something serious is amiss.
I come from Scotland. We invented the Rust Belt. We did Hillbilly Elegy before J.D. Vance was even born. I remember the east end of Glasgow, they shut down the steelworks, they shut down the shipyards. Glasgow in the 1970s was already a Rust Belt. By the 1980s, deaths of despair was our major export. Anybody seen the movie Trainspotting?
"Deaths of despair." Wow. This is not a nice sound byte. It's a painful reality that few upper crusts think about. Life at the bottom is not something cool.
As I looked at Angus Deaton's work on deaths of despair, and I kept asking myself, why have I seen this before? What does this remind me of? And then I remembered. The only other advanced economy where there has ever been a comparable decline in life expectancy, a comparable increase in particularly male midlife mortality, the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s. And you can see the data here. The extraordinary deterioration in male life expectancy at birth in the Soviet Union compared here with France.
Which leads to Ferguson's doppelganger comparison, our nation's ghostly double being the Soviet Union of 1980.
The explanation in the Soviet case was that people had completely lost their belief in the system and regarded the party as a massive scam. The cynicism was bone deep.
For many, there is still hope. I wish I shared their confidence. Too much of what passes for optimism today is little more than wishful rhetoric. Even here in Duluth, I see few signs that we are willing to confront our deepest problems with the seriousness they deserve. Hope cannot survive indefinitely on slogans. Unless we honestly face the realities before us, we may find ourselves following the same kind of decline and despair that engulfed the Soviet Union in its final years—a society that ignored its accumulating failures until they became impossible to escape.
Related Links
Niall Ferguson on the Breakdown of the Rule of Law
https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2022/02/niall-ferguson-on-breakdown-of-rule-of.html
Decline of the West: Historian Niall Ferguson Sounds Wake Up Call
https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2021/12/decline-of-west-historian-niall.html
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