Wages of Destruction Is a Trash Test of the Ability of Economics to Explain History

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The aim of the game is to take those macro economic stylize facts and say, what can we understand and what can we not understand? And having backed out what we can't understand, how do we explain the stuff we can't understand? The decision by hitler to go to war against the kind of backot that i'm offering, doesn't make sense. That's where power ideology comes into the picture as an essential and irreducible element in any kind of meaningful history of the tirdrac. We have to explain why they went to war, even against odds which really didn't look favourable at all....

Adam Tooze is best known for his highly-regarded books on the economic history of Nazi Germany, the remaking of the global economic and political order starting in World War I, and his account of how the economic effects of the 2008 financial crisis rippled across the globe for a decade to follow. Recently, he’s become an influential voice on Twitter documenting the pandemic-induced strain on the world’s financial systems.

Adam joined Tyler to discuss the historically unusual decision to have a high-cost lockdown during a pandemic, why he believes in a swoosh-shaped recovery, portents of financial crises in China and the West, which emerging economies are currently most at risk, what Keynes got wrong about the Treaty of Versailles, why the Weimar Republic failed, whether Hitler was a Keynesian, the political and economic prospects of various EU members, his trick to writing a lot, how Twitter encourages him to read more, what he taught executives at BP, his advice for visiting Germany, and more.

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Recorded April 16th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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