YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Tooze

lines on the record: 76
first: 2020-05-06
most recent: 2020-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, X's view of problem Y is Z. And that argument, Z, they're making, is different from A's view of problem Y because A's view of problem Y is whatever I'm running out of W, right? So an ability to, as it were, triangulate between the subject matter that's being discussed, the point of view of the observer of that subject matter, and then the type of argument they're offering that connects the two. And that triangulation is crucial for sophisticated history writing. And the more self-consciously one can position oneself in that triangle, who am I in relation to my object and what is the nature of the type of argument that I'm making? Which is, of course, it's one sense to say it's subjective, but in fact it's a repertoire of arguments that are available to everyone thinking about that problem. That's what you're really looking for in somebody who's interested and serious about history.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two things the thing that you're really looking for is you're looking for somebody who loves to read, and then you really want to know how they read. And you're looking for a combination of somebody who has an awareness above all, I think, because after all, history is, I'm not going to say it's not a social science, but it's more than a social science because it's also a literary discipline. So you're looking for somebody who can see, frankly, our conversation has had the feel of a historians' conversations. We started out with economics and we've ended up in a very different place. But it's you're kind of looking for that combination of analysis on the one hand, but then also an awareness of the way in which arguments are made in language and how they're framed in writing and an ability to read through and around that. So another way of putting that same point would be an awareness of the function, the active function of interpretation. So I'm looking for a student who can say,”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, the Rhine Valley, I mean, it's Alsace, you know, it's a merger. If you go, if you go to Alsace Lorraine, of course, the local culture is actually, I mean, the French now call it Alemannic, but it's just German. I mean, it's German with a strong dialect. So that entire region of the Upper Rhine towards the Spiss boundary, that corner between France, Germany, and Switzerland, the standard of living there is just, I mean, it's delicious. That entire zone, either side of the Alps really, northern Italy the same. The standard of living is unbelievably unbelievable. Yes, and the food and wine are wonderful.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a lot of familiar ones. I love sauerkraut, but I grew up in the southwest. And one of the specialties there is a kind of ravioli called maltashan. So they're made with spinach, meat filling, and they look like giant overgrown, somewhat inelegant ravioli. And you have them in a stock generally. And that is wonderful comfort food food.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly heterogeneous place, one of the bizarre projects of German nationalism was to weld it into a uniform country, which it just doggedly refuses to be. It's Catholic and Protestant. It's both rural and intensely urban. So experience that diversity. It is one of the great underrated tourist destinations certainly of Europe, very hospitable, English-speaking.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tour with a historic theme. Unless you're a kanut and you want to experience the freedom of driving a Porsche at 200 miles an hour, which you can do if you do it at 2 a.m., the roads are clean enough and they're smooth enough. But other than that, ride the train, sit in an ICE going at absolutely no kidding, 200 miles an hour, powered by solar power and watch your coffee, not even vibrate. It's absolutely stunning. They have to put speedometers into the trains to make people aware of how fast they're going. You watch the cars on the interstate and these are unspeed limited interstates. Just you zoom past them. You're going faster than a Ferrari or a Porsche flat out and you can literally sit there and your coffee doesn't move and then compare that of course with the experience of your average Amtrak ride. Travel the country, see the countryside, do the extraordinary variety of landscape and culture because it is.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing you'd say is it's an enormously varied place and it's very big, and you really want to get a range of experience. I mean, I grew up in beautiful, sunny provincial Heidelberg, and it's pretty difficult to recommend anywhere more highly than that for tourism and to kind of get the Dolce Vita kind of sense of Germany. But it would also be, of course, crucial to visit a city like a Hamburg or Essen or Berlin. Berlin would be the city where the universities could offer the sorts of terms and conditions and facilities that American universities do, I would probably most like to live and work. That is not the situation, unfortunately, of the German university system. But it's an extraordinary city. So it would be a varied tour. My wife works in the travel business and she has her own travel boutique travel company. We were planning a trip that has just been cancelled, unfortunately, that goes from Berlin to Dresden to Prague to Vienna. So a sort of essential European”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally changed me. I mean, it turned me into a global historian because I was a rather parochial Europeanist. And then I met these people who were operating this global company whose vision was far wider than mine, not academic, but vastly wider. That really shocked me. Before COVID hit, I was working on a book on climate, and I will go back to that. But in so doing, I was really, for me, reconnecting with a set of questions that I'd first addressed 20 years ago under the impact of working with these people.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capitalist corporations, and most of the time, of course, their activities are quite innocuous, but not always, and their impact and their footprint is huge. And they can find themselves in situations which burden them with vast historic responsibility, as IG Farben did. And we happen to know a lot about IG Farben because of the Nuremberg trials. And so I wanted to, you know, it's kind of like a case study that would blow their minds permanently. And that it actually was hugely, I don't mean this at all cynically, it was an incredibly productive exercise to watch them struggle with this problem, for them to scan their own activities and think about where they might be engaged in various sites and bargains. Because we can get inside the heads. All of the IGF corporates wrote rather introspective accounts afterwards when they were in jail waiting trial. We can get quite deep inside the psychology of the decision makers who made those disastrous decisions. So that was one of the sort of thing that we were doing. And it was...”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A session which started with a series of slides which were American bombing aerial reconnaissance of a chemicals plant in Silesia. And I would fly them in still by still until they suddenly realized that we were looking at Auschwitz. And they were looking at a chemicals plant. And they had recognized the chemicals plant first because they're chemical engineers. And then they realized they were looking at Auschwitz. And so the aim of the game was to confront them with the way in which a company like IG Farben, which was a world-beating industrial firm, the best by a million miles, hugely superior to DuPont in its technology. Nobel Prize winners on the board, right, left and center, how totally cosmopolitan globalized company, so not by any means an obvious supporter of German economic nationalism, how it could end up building the largest chemicals plant in Europe at the time at Auschwitz. And that was the sort of challenge that I wanted to confront them with because we have to take seriously that the historic responsibility of giant”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had the privilege of working with BP during the John Brown, the earliest engagement of an oil major with the carbon problem in the late 90s. BP chose to, and it was part of its strategy for entering the US market, was to differentiate itself from Exxon by embracing the climate problem. And so John Brown, who was a highly unusual CEO, decided to set up a bunch of boot camps for the leading 300 people in BP, which I guess had about 100,000 employees. So these were very senior, brilliant people who would spend a week in university campuses around the world. One of the weeks they would spend was in Cambridge. So we worked through the entire leadership team of this oil major. And our job was to unsettle certainly the Cambridge camp. Our job was to unsettle their familiar frameworks. So, you know, the questions were political, ethical. How do you think about your license to operate? So I used to run, just to give one example.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not German, French, Spanish, Russian, some Scandinavian languages, and they would try and synthesize the best and most recent work on key issues of concern for them. And they were materialists, originally Marxists, but they had become deeply concerned with issues of nutrition. You are what you eat in the famous Foyer Bachienne phrase, and they took that and turned it into a politics, which was around malnutrition ultimately and ensuring that the majority of mothers, crucially, were well enough nourished during pregnancy to ensure that the progeny and the future population of the country were not stunted, didn't suffer from the damage of poverty before they were even born.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, I was on the tip of my tongue. So if you ask me where my reading habits come from, I would have said the breakfast table of my grandparents, who if you care to inquire into their history, have a colored checkered past and a very complex political history. They were people of the world and they subscribed to Le Monde, the French newspaper, they were multilingual. And their breakfast table would consist of a series of, oh, have you seen this article? It was basically like kind of analog breakfast table, Twitter. God, you should really check this out. Like I'll save this for you. They would cut things out and shove them across the breakfast table at you. And that experience for me was absolutely formative and their engagement with the real world. I mean, they continue driving. My grandfather basically died over his Word processor in his early 90s. And what they did a lot of was digesting and synthesis. So they would go to the Wellcome Medical Library in London and they would read all of the papers because they were multilingual lots.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I have to say, I mean, you mentioned Twitter early on that's been transformative for me. I've yet to figure out whether it enters into note-taking in any kind of conventional form, but that has been the odd effect of that is that when I'm for whatever reason deprived of Twitter, I feel suddenly that I'm less motivated to read. sharing has become like”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big slice of time, the three or four hours at a weekend or something, you're actually at top of stack, you know where to go because you've been puzzling away at it and chewing on it every day, even if it's only for 10 minutes”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure it's unusual, but I think it's the writing habit that many people have who do write a lot and regulate. I write every day, basically. I haven't always found writing easy at all. I've been through a lot of therapy of various types to stabilize myself emotionally and psychologically. I still do. It's very important for me in handling the stresses that arise in writing. And one of the things I realized in the course of that is that actually rather than thinking it was something terrifying that I had to steal myself to do, the best way to think about it was something I do every day. So it's like exercise if I have the chance I like to exercise. It's a puzzling activity I just treated as a kind of almost as a game rearranging the words trying to fix things. And then I say to all my grad students, like, you can do that for 10 minutes every single day regardless of what else is going on in your life. You can always find that 10 minute slot. So that is the thing that I make sure I do. And that means even big projects slowly move along because then when you get the”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Devices at most European countries that I wouldn't be surprised by that, nor would I think it terribly significant, to be honest. We don't discuss the airport security provisions of Italy versus Germany very much because they're not very interesting and they don't matter very much. And I think that might be the sort of place that we're in. The blanket bans on movement will not continue. They're just impractical, both at a national or regional and an international level.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should take everything I say about Europe in a sense with a pinch of salt because it is my politics, it is one of the things that I'm most committed to, personal biography, all sorts of other reasons. I mean, I imagine that the EU will restore mobility on a similar level to the United States of America. I imagine Europe will move quite quickly towards the sort of regional deal that seems to be emerging between New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Those are the kind of blocks which can move relatively smoothly back towards a restoration of something like mobility. I would be very surprised if there wasn't a relatively free-flowing mobility regime within the EU. It's one of the core values. It's what the EU is for. And I don't think this crisis is going to blow that off course. Does that mean that there won't be various types of pandemic management structure in place? That's a different issue. Will there be electronic passport and temperature monitoring?”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adopted. And what I worry about, many other people worry about is whether we're at that point now on several nations at one, COVID-19 itself, the longstanding immiseration of the Italian economy, and as you say, a refugee crisis that might broke up. And if Turkey is one of the fragile EMs, then of course all bets are off, if you like. Though there are, again, always possibilities for negotiation, maybe a sweetheart deal for Erdogan is precisely the thing that will open the door to some sort of refugee fix.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How explosive that combination was for European politics. We could indeed be heading back to a scenario which was every bit as bad as that. And that's one of the reasons why I say worry about Algeria, because that could produce a huge new flow of migrants from an economically distressed North African country, which France would be ill-equipped to deal with. And it's not obvious that we did anything more than sticking plaster on it. And the Europeans will defend themselves. And I think quite reasonably and say, you know, they move from crisis to crisis and they do improvisations and they move incrementally and they move crab wise and Europe is forged in crisis. All of those clich ⁇ s of a kind of EU pragmatism. And the question one has to ask, of course, is when do you reach the limit? Do you hit an obstacle which is too big, which is too difficult, and which exposes your fundamental failure to come to terms with the basic issues that need to be addressed and the legacy of bitterness, which is built up in the series of makeshifts that you've”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and especially because that then hits two of the very weak members of the Eurozone, Greece and Italy. One of the major sources of resentment in Italy is the sense that they were left on their own with the refugee problem, with this extraordinary Dublin agreement, providing, again, the kind of fig leaf for various types of nationalist selfishness on the part of northern European states, which were in a position to absorb migrants much more easily than Italy was. The Dublin rules are basically they come to your country, they stay there. There's no formula for redistribution within the EU. I agree. I think that is kind of part of a polycrisis scenario, which is what we saw in 15, right? If you think back to 2015, it's this remarkable moment where we see the Chinese economy under pressure. We talked about that earlier, the Greek crisis blowing up, Ukraine crisis still very hot in 15, and the refugee crisis. And we know.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very difficult to tell. I agree. It's flying under the radar right now. It's one of the places where financial discipline might actually help. I mean, Orban has been incredibly fortunate in the macroeconomic conditions, which he's enjoyed for his experiment. Financial markets have not punished him for his economic nationalism. And the current environment, which is much less friendly to emerging market borrowers, may be a lot tougher for him. Likewise, the massive downturn in the auto industry. I mean, Hungary is basically a is an extension of the German car plant system and where global demand for German cars turns down, Hungary gets very badly hit. It's not obvious to me that hunger, Orban's formula will in fact work in a less friendly economic environment than the one he's enjoyed. That's kind of a wait and see kind of a response.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Angela Merkel's Europe policy, or rather Angela Merkel's non policy towards Europe. And that's if that channel was not there, I would say, I'd be totally with you, bury this stuff, bury it deep, and let's never talk about it again. But unfortunately, that is not how the German political system works. Very striking contrast to France. Essentially in exactly the same boat, also a risk sharer with Italy, and it's not even a subject of serious conversation. I mean, it's never been a serious subject conversation there. That's the reason why I find I'm not sure that this status quo will hold, though de facto, I think that's where we're headed.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a very unstable brew. What I worry about is a spiral of delegitimation fundamentally in which an unspoken, as you say, convenient technocratic fix to the problem doesn't in fact remain unspoken. Then you have an insurgent economic nationalism against that, which is where the AFD, the right-wing party, which has haunted German politics in recent years, comes from. It's not an anti-immigrant party in the first instance. It's an anti-Draghi party in the first instance, a party directed against Mario Draghi, and the Outanativa for Deutsche Dam, the alternative for Germany they want, is an alternative to the sort of monetary fix that we're talking about, activism on the part of the ECB. They then bring suits in front of the German Constitutional Court, which is an avenue favored by political activists. And the German Constitutional Court is put in the embarrassing position of having basically to sign off on what everyone understands illegal fig leafs, to avoid the embarrassment of blowing up.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I take the force of that point, and it's a kind of classically Keynesian argument for burying a problem you can't fix politically in some technocratic solution. It would be truly compelling if the German political class had managed to close ranks, and as, say, the French have and basically silence and kill the issue. But they have failed to do that. And far too often, the Bundesbank and quite mainstream conservatives in Germany engage in a monetary populism essentially, which blames the ECB for low interest rates, which problematizes this de facto round-the-back sharing of risk by way of the ECB balance sheet. Hans-Werner Zinn, the notable Munich economist can command the pages of serious German newspapers with his polemics against the so-called target to balances, which are really just a reflection and the balance sheet of the ECB of movements within the European financial system. And all of that makes”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think, to go back to an earlier conversation, one of the outcomes of this is likely to be the warehousing of huge quantities of government debt on central bank balance sheets where we just hope it gets forgotten about. And that's not the worst of all possible worlds. There are many alternatives which are worse than that. And that does appear to be the solution that the Eurozone is drifting towards. And frankly, if the North European states will accept that, that would be, again, one of the more tolerable outcomes here. But the tragedy of Italy's economic development over the last, as you say, the last 18 years is along with many others I have been campaigning and banging the drum for years to try and get the political elites in both Brussels and Berlin to recognize that they cannot expect political legitimacy to be maintained in the face of that kind of economic track record. And you don't need to be a nationalist populist, I think, in Italy to be resentful and furious at the lack of hearing that they were.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very easily overrated. Because we tend to think of them as it were as an order that overrated when you think of the Bretton Woods arrangement as something that existed between 1944 and say 1971, that that's just, you know, that's one of the most common sort of cliched errors that you could make in international political economy. No such thing system ever existed. Agreed, attempted, and then brokered by the British panic in 1947, not then reinstituted until convertibility in 58. Immediately now we know from all of the great recent work supported by various types of swotline arrangement by 67, clearly almost dead in the water. And then in 71 just tossed overboard by the next administration. Funny kind of regime, that, I would say. And altogether, that to me suggests the need to think of international economic history, not in terms of big lumpy regimes which have a certain logic that governs them, but more as a sort of continuously improvised makeshift.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely on the mark there. Yeah, I'm a revisionist on World War I, as is clear from Deluge, I think. So I understand the force of that argument. Yeah, no, Kubrick isn't my favorite director.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've written several articles. I wouldn't claim to be, I've had a great collaborator in Martin Ivanov, who's now the Bulgarian ambassador to Finland of all things. I wish Bulgaria's economic future was brighter than it may be at this moment.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The continental US has, which makes continental United States a largely self sufficient economic entity, or that the British Empire has with the complementarity between the manufacturing and service hub in Great Britain and the agricultural and raw material providers of the empire.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That dependence is a key vulnerability. And in Hitler's paranoid worldview, it's also, of course, where the world Jewish conspiracy brings its influence and its power to bear on modern Germany and its dependence that has to be broken. In practice, what this means is that though you're right, Germany has plenty of land, it is not able in the 1930s to feed itself up at the kind of levels and the standard of living that it's become accustomed to on the terms of trade between industry and agriculture, which people have become accustomed to. And that's the problem. What they want the land for is to improve, if you like, the trade-off between the relative standard of living in the city of the countryside on the one hand and the degree of self-sufficiency on the other. So the fantasy is really that you could have a Midwest, you could have a Canada, you could have Australia bolted on to Germany, and that that would augment and it would provide Germany with the kind of balance that the United States”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I know, but Great Britain in the beginning of the 20th century is 50% dependent on imported food. In Germany, it wasn't as extreme as that, and I don't necessarily have the number in my fingertips right now, but I think it's something like a quarter of Germany's food suppliers is imported. And by that, you don't just think of what the people eat at the end of the food chain, but crucially animal feed, which is vital to maintaining highly productive dairy herds. And what the Germans, the bitter lesson the Germans learned in World War I is that that kind of a highly efficient international division of labor, which is one of the keys to the higher productivity per capita of the overall British economy relative to the German economy, is its dependence on imported food, because better for somebody else to do the farming and you to do the services and manufacturing. In the case of a ward,”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of ideology comes into the picture as an absolutely essential and irreducible element in any kind of meaningful history of the Third Reich, because we have to explain why they went to war, even against odds which really didn't look favorable at all.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll say, in fact, comparing motorization, France is more motorized than Germany by a very large degree. Renault is a far more substantial motor car manufacturer than any car manufacturer in Germany. In fact, the only substantial motor car manufacturer in Germany in the 1930s is Opel, which is owned by GM, and it's only substantial on the count of that. And Ford would be the other contender. So what that means is exactly as you're suggesting, that there are key moments in the history of the regime that can't be explained by economic factors in any simple sense of the word. And clearly the battlefield events of 1940 are one such moment. But in general, the decision by Hitler to go to war against the kind of backdrop that I'm offering doesn't make sense from the point of view, if you like, of a correlation of forces, a material balance type argument. And so the question then is what sense do we make of the fact that the Germans are going to war without an evident material superiority? And that is where then for me the”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yeah, yeah. So the other wager of the book is to say, okay, so as I was saying, the aim of the game is to take those macroeconomic stylized facts and to say, what can we understand and what could we not understand? And having backed out what we can't understand, how do we explain the stuff we can't understand? And so wages of destruction is a sort of crash test of the ability of economics to explain history. And then an effort to make sense of the moments where the economics fails. What do we need to add then? What do we learn by virtue of our limited ability to explain? And there was a school of thought which said this all stacked up, right? There was a school of thought that said the Blitzkrieg victory of the Germans in 1940 was the result of their technological industrial superiority, which expressed itself on the battlefield in Stukas and tanks. And, you know, so the logic was quite simple. But if you take this alternative view, then as”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reread the history of the third race. So, what you see is the significance of the agrarian sector, the profound inferiority complex which drives Nazi planning, their relentless focus on agricultural expansion in the east, the very severe problems of labour shortage in agriculture, and the relatively modest scale of their industrial capacity compared to Britain and the United States. more or less level pegging with the Brits and hugely inferior to the US.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Global Empire, which Germany never does to any substantial extent. So the wager intellectually of the wages of destruction is to see what happens when we revisit history on the basis of this very different understanding. Different, I mean, because if you grew up in 1970s Britain or between Britain and Germany, as I did, and you had the conventional industrial policy assumption, say, of 1980s America, you would assume that Germany was an industrial powerhouse that dominated the world and bestowed the world, Forschonde, Audi, Mercedes, BMW. Of course, they were an industrial powerhouse of the 1930s. It just isn't substantively true. That doesn't actually capture the reality of the interwar economy. What wages of destruction was doing was trying to unpick those anachronistic assumptions about the obvious dominance of the German economy and on the basis of that double comparison with the US and Great Britain to”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All sectors, which is a transatlantic difference, and then a huge sectoral difference between the German economy and that of Great Britain. And what wages of destruction was trying to do is to say, okay, let's write a history of the Third Reich against the backdrop of assuming that this makes a difference. What do we see if we assume that these structural differences are large? Let's not argue about the percentages of how large, but they're large by any measure. And furthermore, they are something that contemporaries know about. and factor into their thinking and what kind of a take what kind of a read do we get on nazi politics if we take these seriously and so and and i as i hope i demonstrate in wages in fact it's profoundly illuminating to think about this double problem on the one hand the magic if you like of the united states which is just more productive across the board and dramatically so and on the other hand the structural disadvantage you could add in of course the fact that the united kingdom commands a global”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher per capita productivity across all sectors. And we can go into that. There's a whole variety of obvious factors that you might cite. And then between Germany and France and Italy on the one hand and Great Britain on the other, there is also a huge gap in terms of output per person, but that isn't to do with productivity difference within sectors. So German manufacturing and British manufacturing, you might not believe this, but in the 1930s were very similar in terms of output per hour worked. But the structure of the British economy was far more advanced by 1911, less than 10% of the British workforces in agriculture and in agriculture, very little of it is in peasant farming and it's in big farms. By 1930s, it's extremely rare for any women to work in farms in Britain, whereas in Germany in the 1930s, four or five million women are registered as working full-time in farms. So you have two different types of productivity difference. One is across”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My interpretation of Nazi Germany really came out of confrontation or reading in the 1990s the work above all of Angus Madison and then Stephen Broadbury. What they point to is a structural gap between the economies not just of Germany, but of continental Europe in general and two points of comparison, one, the UK and the other the US. And the gap consists of two different elements. Relative to the United States, the productivity and manufacturing per person in agriculture and manufacturing, and for all I know in services too, there was a huge gap transatlantically between all of the European economies in the United States. And there's an elaborate debate going back really all the way to the 19th century, but in the form of Chandler and so on, about what constitutes the secret source that gives the United States this much.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are not across the board highly focused on rearmament because what they're doing is not just creating jobs, though they do create jobs as a side effect. What they're doing is restructuring the economy towards building the foundation for rearmament and a war economy. And so what they're actually trying to do is systematically repress the multiplier because they do not want people employed in armaments factories to go out and buy clothing and fancy food which requires imports. They want the money to be circled straight back into the armaments effort. So forced saving, various types of financial repression are the order of the day. So for me, that makes their macroeconomists, the Nazis, they're adventurous macroeconomists. They're doing massive intervention, but they're not Keynesian.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a liberal economic politics. And so it believes in a multiplier and it multipliers the be-all and end-all really of Keynesian economics because what it suggests is that small intermittent discretionary interventions by the state, relatively small, will generate outside reactions from the economy, which will enable the state to serve a very positive role in stabilizing the economy but doesn't require the state to permanently intrude and take over the economy. That's a post-1945 kind of vision of a mixed economy. Keynes himself, that's why he wants the multiplier to be three, because if the multiplier is three, then one dollar of spending generates by government spending generates $3 of private economic activity. And you can think of government intervention as sporadic. It's emergency medicine. It's not chronic care. And that, of course, is the antithesis of what the Nazis are doing because they are ramping up government spending.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, Hitler personally, absolutely not. Hitler's personal monetary ideas are very, very conservative. But he's an anti-inflation hawk. It has to be persuaded to engage in large-scale monetary financing. Somebody like Schaft is a contemporary of Keynes, and that's his Hitler central banker and an adventurous monetary thinker. And he'd learned to think outside the monetary box, if you like, in the efforts to stabilize the Byanar's currency in 1923-24. And he's certainly an expansionary. He's not afraid of monetary finance and of using off-balance sheet vehicles to provide liquidity and to provide credit for an underemployed economy. And quite reasonably, no one's worried about inflation. In 1933, because Germany has massive unemployment. So in that sense, they are adventurous macroeconomic, monetary economists. They're not Keynesians for the simple reasons that Keynesians classically, of course,”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making. And then, of course, it's up to local forces. And as you're stressing, of course, in Germany, there is a powerful militarist group, conservative group, which is willing to gamble on Hitler to provide them with a democratic base. And that turns out to be an epic historical miscalculation.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Choices to make and a large faction of them are obviously responsible for having made choices which turned out to be absolutely disastrous for their own country and for the rest of the world. But if you're asking me, as it were, to say what I would argue certainly what my own distinctive contribution to debate has been is to show the way in which the collapse of the structures, the financial structures of the 20s, which did indeed pivot on the United States in the early 30s, shifted the terms of the debate within Germany and several other potential challenger, if you like, insurgent countries. So we don't just see this in Germany. So there is a factor which goes beyond the particularities of German politics or Japanese politics or Italian politics or indeed even British politics or Soviet politics, which is this broader question about the viability really of a liberal order. And when that liberal order becomes less plausible, it changes the parameters of everyone's”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, but in 1928, in the last, as it were, pre Great Depression elections in the Weimar Republic, Hitler's party gains one and a half percent of the vote. The communists are doing badly and the centrist parties, the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, various shades of liberals had a solid, vast majority of the German vote and a center-left government is formed. After the Weimar Republic had survived, that initial shock that you're talking about, the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, exactly as you're suggesting. Germans can quite reasonably see that there is the prospect, if not for glory and national self-assertion, then at least for prosperity and a functioning politics in the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s. What we've got to explain is why that is broken apart. And I don't by any means want to say that this is all down to the United States. Of course, German political elites have”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best options available to us. And insofar as the United States is able to hold the ring, that is to moderate the aggression of, say, France within Europe and to provide a steady reign of dollars down onto the economies of Europe and Japan, then locally, if you like, the optimal strategy is in fact to adopt a position of cooperative subordination within that system. And so you see quite remarkable things happen in the Japanese coming to terms on naval rearmament, the British coming to terms on naval rearmament, because America looks like a hegemon. And it's really when that breaks in the early 1930s that to my mind, the survival of the Weimar Republic is, it's clear that something else is going to supersede the Weimar Republic. It's not obvious it'll be Nazi regime, but some alternative is likely to emerge. And not just in Germany, but we see in Japan the same sort of shift. We see a radicalization of Mussolini's regime.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question right rapid fire series of massive questions. Cultural decay. It's not. I say if you want a one line answer, it's the Weimar Republic's survival is dependent. Certainly the argument I would make in Deluge, the distinctive argument that I'm making is it does depend critically on the ability of the United States to hold the ring in European politics because on the ability of the United States to hold the ring depends the viability of the sort of centrist, moderate politics that anchored the Weimar Republic survival in the 20s, but also you could say the best hopes of Japanese moderates in the 1920s, in the Taisho democracy period. In each case, what you see, and indeed even the relatively moderate phase of Mussolini's regime in the 1920s, when he was the darling of Wall Street. In each case, what you see is people, key actors saying, you know, in this hierarchical global system that we're in, what are the”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which would have been basically adjustment of exchange rates. Keynes in the 20s is not advocating floating exchange rates. He's arguing for a better managed fixed exchange rate system.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is about undercutting the bargaining power of the British trade union movement, which had coalesced in the triple alliance, the fearsome alliance of railway workers, miners and dockers, which can paralyze in early 20th century economy. Breaking that alliance is key to what they're doing. And so when Keynes makes his criticism, it's not simply what would be optimal from the point of view of maximizing some sort of welfare function. He's basically offering an alternative program for Britain, which is the program that also, in his view, might stabilize the long-run possibilities for a liberal party somewhere between Labour and the Conservatives to actually have a voice in British politics. And to do that, you need class conflict not to escalate in the way that the Tories were willing to allow it, the Conservatives were willing to see it escalate. And you need Labour not to be the only voice of the progressive politics in Britain, which it threatens to become in this period. And those are the stakes which are involved in Keynes' alternative process.”
2020-05-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source