YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Chu

lines on the record: 35
first: 2025-07-10
most recent: 2025-07-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Negative reaction that actually the countries of the world, populations of the world, governments of the world start to recognize its benefits more and not take it for granted so much in the coming years. So it's possible there's that reaction. It's also possible that countries, as I've mentioned, go down the way of, let's address our vulnerabilities while also keeping open and keeping the benefits. So it's by no means of bleak prognosis in terms of where we're going who knows where we're going. But there is a way for, as I've described, for countries to keep an open posture to the world, but also address some of those threats and vulnerabilities and also can keep reaping the benefits and economic gains of globalization. So we'll see what happens, but there's a way for this to be done, I think, is one of the messages in the book.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More, that would be a way for them to build resilience and to be globalized without being vulnerable in a way that many feel they are. And then another policy is stockpiling. We saw effectively Europe's stockpile natural gas in 2022 to get through that winter after the supplies were cut off from Russia. And that enabled Europe to keep the lights on effectively. That was all done in a big Russian that had big economic effects on inflation, which we've seen. But this principle of stockpiling is actually a very good one because it enables it's a dangerous and world of a lot of potential vulnerabilities in supply chains, but stockpiling is a way for countries to feel more secure and also keep an open posture. So look, I think who knows what the future of globalization will be. It's possible that the shock of the Donald Trump tariff experiment produces such a”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once she see where those vulnerabilities are, you can diversify, you can take action on the basis of that knowledge. So for instance, if you're getting all, this is just, let's take an example from the food crisis that we saw in 2022, where countries were really reliant on wheat from Ukraine, countries like Egypt and certain countries in Africa. They were so reliant on that that it was a disaster when those wheat supplies were cut off by the Russian blockade of Ukrainian ports. But Ukraine is not the only Ukraine as a huge wheat supplier, but it's not the only country that grows wheat. So if those countries could diversify their sources of wheat from, say, France or the United States or Australia or other countries, then if there was a shock to an individual supplier, they wouldn't be so vulnerable. So diversification is a key way. And that's just one example, but you can apply it in many, many different areas. But if countries could diversify...”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I think as a layout in the book, there is an alternative path in the way that stress that this book does not say that everything is rosy or suggests that everything is rosy when it comes to the world in terms of those supply chains and the vulnerabilities of governments. There are clearly vulnerabilities and there are problems with those global supply chains. But what I point out is that there are ways to deal with those vulnerabilities that don't involve unraveling globalization. Three key policies which I mention as a way of doing that are for, first of all, countries to map those supply chains much more effectively than they have been to sort of get a real sense of where imports are coming from, which companies they're coming from, which countries they're coming from, how they're coming. And that would enable governments to see where the vulnerabilities really are.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come from and are refined, almost majority is in China at the moment. And you can go down the supply chain for batteries, for instance, and for solar panels, and you find a similar story, that it's just going to be impossible, really, for most countries to do all this at home. Again, it's the theme that comes through the book. And interdependence, if we want to defeat climate change and become decarbonize our economies in terms of the energy production, we're really going to have to rely on those global supply chains to do it at a reasonable cost and time frame that enables the net zero to be anything like a reality by the middle of the century. So there's a choice for politicians to make. Do they want the energy transition by 2050? Or do they want...”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go further and faster on the energy transition on the renewable energy and it will increase AR security and also it will make us less reliant on others. So that was the mentality at the time, which is actually reasonable in many ways. Most analysts think that it is actually a good thing to be more independent when it comes to energy production if you have the natural resources to do that and the country like the UK does because we have a lot of wind on our we're a windy island so we have a lot of wind on hand and also we have a lot of untapped potential in solar as well especially you know countries in Africa or countries which have a lot of sun can get a huge proportion of their meat a huge proportion of their energy needs through solar power but what I look at in the book is the idea if you've taken a step further”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, energy is interesting because obviously in the wake of the energy crisis that the world was plunged into really after in 2022 when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and sent up the wholesale price of gas in Europe to stratospheric levels and it pushed up the global oil price, there was a real boost to this idea that we can, not just the UK, but Europe and other countries can be energy independent because of renewables. So we've been relying on fossil fuels coming from Russia in terms of natural gas and obviously Russia was a big contributor to global oil supplies as well. And I think what the view that many politicians and populations took was look, why are we relying on imported fossil fuels when we can produce a lot of our energy from the sun and the wind, which are freely available? There was a view that, well, let's.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sufficiently that you should really, if you want to support the local industry, it's much better to use subsidies and other ways to encourage local production rather than tariffs to keep out foreign goods. But the tariff has a real appeal to people as a simple tool certainly has an appeal to politicians like Donald Trump as a simple tool to achieve his ends. So we'll see to what extent they stick around. I think they've got some staying power.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dangerously dependent on, for instance, Chinese solar panels, we are very vulnerable to Chinese electric vehicles because they can produce them so efficiently and they have a real head start in that technology. batteries as well. So these are sort of key elements of the energy transition, key technologies of the energy transition. And it feels like China is just so dominant in them that there's a problem for Europe as well. And there is protectionist sentiment in Europe with regard to that and tariffs, as you're saying, are a key lever. So look, what the economists view of the tariff is that it's a very, very blunt instrument, not to say that it should never be used or it has no place. But if you are concerned about your own industrial capacity and your ability to compete and produce.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think we're already seeing that, aren't we? I mean, it's interesting, obviously, Donald Trump has come back and imposed huge tariffs, albeit that they've slightly come down a lot. He's flip-flopped a bit. But look, I think it's important to recognize that the Biden administration inherited quite a few tariffs on China from Donald Trump's first term, and it didn't get rid of them. It kept them in place and actually augmented them. You mentioned electric vehicles. Joe Biden put 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. So in that sense, what we're seeing, these exile economic currents don't, it reinforces that they don't just start with Trump at all. They are a broader thing, certainly in America. And we are also seeing quite a few moves in the European Union in that direction. Now, which way it'll work out is to be determined. But there have been voices in Europe saying we are”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Production which do not go as far as severing trade. But yeah, I completely agree. And I think it's absolutely right that a lot of this is about China.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chinese overproduction is massive and a real problem for the rest of the world, and it does lead to a lot of the concerns we see about globalization and also China's role in the global economy. So I absolutely do think China is central to a lot of this story about the backlash against globalization and this desire for more protectionism and national self-sufficiency and a whole range of areas. I think how do you deal with that question is really front and center. How do you deal with a problem like China? What I suggest in the book is that there are ways to deal with it without actually trying to decouple from China. There are ways to deal with it, to deal with the vulnerabilities that people, the countries and populations feel in the face of China's increasing role in the global economy and its overall.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chains in the same way that America has, but they're also concerned about things like Chinese overproduction. China run, I think the evidence really shows that China runs its economy in a very unbalanced way. It has done quite some time in terms of not consuming enough from its own population's resources and producing so much more that it inevitably spills over into the rest of the world, whether that's things like steel or also green technology. And that makes countries concerned about their own productive capacity.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“America. Now, in some ways, that promise was fulfilled in economic terms, although people don't really like to acknowledge it. It did help make America richer overall. Now there were specific impacts of that on specific communities which were negative in America. But overall, I think the evidence shows that it did deliver on the economic promise. It didn't deliver on the political hopes that it would open up China. And China has taken a very starkly authoritarian and kind of threatening posture to parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia since 2013. So that is something which has deeply colored America's attitude towards China and world globalization more broadly. And then there is the rest of the world, Europe and other countries who will have also benefited from China coming into global supply.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's obviously playing a key role, isn't it? I mean, you just have to look at Donald Trump's attitude to China and his rhetorically at least his desire to decouple from it in many ways. And I think in America, that's really bound up with the great power rivalry between China and the US. You know, successive American presidents like George Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, they explicitly made the case that it was good for America to trade openly with China because it would enhance the ability of America to export to this giant market and get goods from China, which are cheaper and enable America to grow more rapidly as consumers to have low prices. And it was just generally, and it would also, they argued, help China open up and make it a more responsible player in the world. So that was the explicit argument in.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Least when it comes to living in the way that we've become accustomed to living and the quality and the range of goods we have available to us and just the whole modern way of life is so globalized that this is one of the themes of the book that trying to unpick that will be far more disruptive than I think many politicians and many people fully appreciate now I should add Connor that There's nothing to say that people shouldn't try to be more self-sufficient if that's what they want on a national or an individual basis that's a completely legitimate choice what I'm really trying to do in the book is say okay but there are consequences of that and let's let's go into this with our eyes open if that is the the route we want to go down”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go and have my breakfast and the grapes from Egypt, and I put on my clothes, and they've been manufactured and stitched together in Bangladesh. And that's how globalization really affects our lives. But that really doesn't go deep enough, in my view, into how it shapes our lives. Because if you look at the supply chains and the way that those goods are produced, those goods are produced with materials and machines which come from an even vaster array of countries around the world. It's almost impossible to trace every single one. And the idea that you can sort of just nationalize all those supply chains and just do it all in one country, once you go a few levels deep into the way the things in our lives are produced, the goods and also the services, increasingly software and things like that, the idea that you can, that there's any way to do it all in one country. It's just a non-starter, really, at least in the way.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Goes back to what we were talking about earlier about the virtues of self sufficiency and lack of independence and independence, which is very deeply ingrained in our nature. And obviously we live in national communities and it's natural for people to champion and trumpet the achievements of those communities. These are things I think we would all recognize in our own lives as just very inherent motivations and ways of thinking. But I think what came through to me in the book is actually just how unrealistic actually a lot of the discourse is in terms of supply chains. So if I was to talk to you about how globalization shapes our lives, a typical way to do it would say, well, I get up in the morning and I brush my teeth and the toothpaste is from Poland.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's certainly an element of it. I mean, I've quoted in the book about some of the German politicians championing Hugo Sahin. It's quite ironic, isn't it? Because it's like a German vaccine made by a German innovator. Well, of course, he is German, but he was a migrant to Germany. And that's something great and something to be celebrated, really, isn't it? Because these are products of countries, but they're also products of global communities as well, the scientific community created these things. And I think that's something which I think we should recognize, I think. Whereas there is this tendency to sort of nationalize not just things like vaccines, but electric vehicles or solar panels. We really care about where they're produced and people really want to produce them at home. I think it's kind of, well, it goes back to...”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a very different story from the one that was being told at the time when we look back in terms of how globalization played out in that pandemic, I think.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Element and then I talk about the efforts to stop it spreading, you know, to think the fact that people we need in masks, didn't we? We needed these masks to stop healthcare workers being infected or infecting patients. And they were so crucial and there was such a big shortage of them very early in the pandemic because we just needed far more than the global production system could supply. And then there were lots of struggles between governments for who was going to get the supply and whether they should stop them being exported. And I think what my research for the book really brought out, I think, was that actually the problem was not so much the fact that we have global supply chains. It's the fact that they, well, I think what”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ingredients which go into them and all the even down to things like the bottling that the vaccines are produced in have to come from very specific places and have very specific production techniques and the idea that individual countries can do all of this on their own which some people have been calling for. We should just produce vaccines at home that we would need to worry about importing them is a real It's very hard to see that being feasible for the vast majority of countries on the planet simply because it is such a complex procedure to produce these vaccines and source all the ingredients and get all the kit that you need to do it. So that's a fascinating element in which we are almost doomed to be interdependent if we want to have some level of resiliency in the face of these pandemics which are an inherent feature of life on this planet. So that's another”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During the pandemic, an incredibly rapid time. So that's one element in which globalization played a role in our response to the pandemic. Obviously, pandemics, by their nature, their viruses, which cross borders and it came, as far as we can tell from China pretty clearly from China, there's a debate about whether it was a lab leak or it came from a wet market, et cetera. But look, it just shows you how interconnected we are in this modern era of modern plane travel and the movement of people just in terms of travel that we are open to these transmissible pathogens in a way in which we have to recognize. So that's one clear element, another clear element which globalization played in the pandemic. And then what I go into in the book is the supply chain of producing the vaccines, for instance, and they are extraordinarily global, those supply chains of all the...”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a fundamental role in so many dimensions, and this is the pandemic and the experience of it was one of the reasons why I wanted to write a book about this, because so many of these themes were highlighted through it. Well, let's just start with who invented the vaccine following on from what we were just talking about, migration. It was in the mRNA vaccine, the BioNTech innovation, which was one of the key vaccines got out first, was invented by a migrant, someone called Ugo Sahin, who had moved to Germany as a child. His father was working, come over from Turkey to Germany to work in the Ford plant in Cologne. And he came and then obviously got his education in Germany, went on to become a biotechnology innovator. And he invented the mRNA vaccine, which was so crucial in unlocking life for all of us during”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Considerable, so the reality is that it's not something that rich countries would accept no matter what the hypothetical economic benefits would be. And that's a fundamental constraint on that element of globalization.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, look, you know, as a BBC journalist, I can't articulate what my own views are on them. What I can do is point to the evidence as I did in the Gov book about if there were free movement entirely across the globe. That's what some surveys suggest is the volume of people we are looking at who would be moving. And obviously I'd point to some of the studies which people have done saying what the hypothetical benefits of that and they are pretty large according to some very respected and credible economists. But, you know, again, you've got to look at what the populations of the countries to which the people would move would think about that. And it's, as we've seen, it's a complete political non-starter. We've had a fraction of those movements, the fraction of those people moving in recent years and the backlash has been.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Importing an iPhone is very different from importing a person. I think you can sum it up like that. And I think that's probably at the root of why there's just a fundamental difference in the way people feel about the free movement of people and the way they feel about the free movement of goods.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think obviously there's multiple types of globalization. There's the globalization in the free exchange of goods. There's globalization of ideas. There's globalization of people, free movement, travel, that's where immigration comes in. I think they are different things in people's mind, though, and they do impact people differently. In terms of the economic impact, as you say, there is a positive economic impact of migration, not always, but I think the study show that very often it is positive, obviously for the people traveling, but also for the host country which receives them as well. But I think people form communities and those out of those communities, institutions grow. And so it is important what the composition of those communities are and the way people feel about incomers is different. The reality is in...”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different from the way economists think about the world. It's something that's nevertheless always been there and seems to keep coming back. And this is a phase, I think, as I said, in recent years, where that sense, the idea has been coming back pretty strongly.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was caught at the founder of this school of cynicism, as it was called, and it's the core of cynicism was autarky and rejection of interdependence. Now, other Greeks took that on, like Aristotle, and he made it into a kind of economic autarky and said that the Athenian city-state shouldn't be reliant on others and should be autarchic. And again, there was a philosophical justification for that because it was more virtuous to not be dependent on others. So it goes back a long way. You've seen that again and again through history, through the Christian era, through the Enlightenment, through the 20th century with Hitler and Stalin were very big on Orataki. And it's something which I hadn't quite appreciated. It's so ingrained in what it means to be human, actually, this sense of independence. And as you said, strength and a moral virtuousness comes from it. Now, this is very, very...”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's really interesting doing the research for this book about this idea of autarky, which means self-sufficiency. And just what an ancient idea it is. And as you say, it goes back to the ancient Greeks, these sort of civic philosophers of ancient Greece had this concept of autarky. And it implied that to be reliant on others in any way is very extreme philosophy, to be reliant on others at all is to impede your ability to be wise, to reach philosophical enlightenment and therefore you should try and reduce those links on a very individual basis between you and other people. So the Diogenes, this Greek philosopher, he lived this life where he was supposedly went around in rags. He lived in the open, lived in a barrel. He bought like a dog just to show he wasn't bound by the conventions of society. So he was a very extreme figure.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the impacts of us, the impacts of the things going on in the world, let's try and be less interdependent and more independent. And finally, it was what you were describing. It's this desire from a lot of countries to produce more at home, to be more self-sufficient than they have been. Obviously, we had two really big shocks in recent years in most countries, the pandemic, which showed the vulnerability of some supply chains and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sets off an energy crisis and made countries want to be more independent in energy and underlying all this. We've got obviously climate change and the impacts of that. And I think what we would try to do is, as I say, try and sum up all those political policy currents and put a label on it and try and understand it as a package, both in terms of why it's appealing and some of the problems that it would throw up if countries did go down.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we were trying to think about a way to describe a lot of the policy movements, a lot of the popular attitudes, a lot of the political attitudes that have been coming through, not just in the UK or the US, but lots of different countries in the developing and the developed world in recent years, probably going back about 10 years now. And we thought exile economics was a decent way of summing all those up. So in specific terms, it was trying to refer to policies which are trying to sort of downgrade the need for multilateral collaboration between governments. You know, governments getting together doing things collectively. Instead, the desire to sort of go it alone in terms of solving some of the challenges facing countries. It was also about, it was tried to talk about the desire for people to shrug off interdependence economically, so in the sense that we are real rely on each other in terms.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we've seen is that there was a wake up call about just how powerful and pervasive globalization is and just how much it affects people's lives. And if you tamper with that system, you get very, very undesirable effects. So in that sense, I think what we've learned since Liberation Day is that perhaps that globalization is rather more resilient than it might have been and perhaps it will last longer than some people won or hope in terms of just how difficult it is to move away from that system.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think globalization is a bit like Mark Twain said, rumors of its death have been much exaggerated. And I think what you've seen in recent days with Donald Trump seeming to row back quite dramatically from those liberation day measures, which really were putting a fortress, a tariff fortress around America, rowing back from that because of the very clear economic disruption that that was going to cause in America in terms of the availability of goods from China and elsewhere and the impacts on the prices. And obviously he's styled it as I'm getting what I want. I'm doing deals. But I think you can read it's fairly easy to read between the lines and see what happened is that he miscalculated about just how reliant America was and how much disruption what he was proposing and what he was implementing would impose. So in that sense, I think.”
2025-07-10 · Intelligence Squared · What if Globalisation Fails? with Ben Chu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT