Rich Countries Are the Most Likely to COLLAPSE | Aaron Bastani Meets John Rapley
What this covers
John Rapley, a political economist at Cambridge, sits with Aaron to argue a counterintuitive proposition: that developed Western nations, for all their wealth and technological sophistication, are more fragile than developing countries when confronted with major shocks—pandemics, climate disruption, economic stagnation. The conversation ranges across economics, history, and political psychology to support this claim, drawing on Rapley's recent book Icarus Economics. The core argument is structural: the very growth model that built Western prosperity has generated both external feedback loops (zoonotic disease, ecological collapse) and internal ones (atomized communities, state dependency, complacency) that erode a society's ability to withstand crisis. Meanwhile, poorer nations retain social resilience born of proximity to scarcity and risk.
The discussion traces this fragility to specific, irreversible conditions. The post-war growth boom of 1948–1973 rested on one-time factors—mass electrification, the transition to secondary education—that cannot be recreated; developed economies now face chronic near-stagnation disguised by inflated asset prices and debt-fuelled GDP figures. Rapley argues that Western liberalism, structured around an eternal present and individual choice, makes long-term thinking and collective sacrifice politically impossible, leaving governments unable to address unsustainable pension promises or unaffordable housing. Where formal state systems weaken, developing countries activate spontaneous community networks and behavioral practices (hygiene, mutual aid, disease awareness) that wealthy, state-dependent societies have allowed to atrophy. The conversation also addresses how China's experience of the Cultural Revolution shaped corporate resilience, why Western entrepreneurship claims mask high barriers to entry, and how the young have been locked out of housing and family formation by deliberate policy choices that preserve older generations' wealth.
Rapley argues that wealthy Western economies have become fragile rather than resilient because rapid economic growth creates environmental feedback loops, erodes social cohesion, and reduces societies' capacity to handle novel crises—making poorer, less developed societies paradoxically better positioned to survive climate change and pandemics.
- Wealthy nations generate more existential risks (zoonotic spillover, climate change) while simultaneously losing the social resilience that poorer countries maintain through necessity
- The 1948-1973 growth period was a unrepeatable confluence of electrification, mass education, and urbanization; its absence creates political fantasy and intergenerational injustice
- Liberal emancipation from nature through technology (AI, digitalization, cashlessness) creates systemic brittleness that manifests during infrastructure failures, disease outbreaks, and supply shocks
This asset isn't compiled yet
You're seeing its claims, ranked. Compile it to build the argument threads, weight them, and check each claim against your library — the full view.
AI investment and cryptocurrency-like promises of technological revolution are following a 30-year pattern of hype without productivity gains: Robert Solow noted in the 1980s that computers were everywhere except productivity statistics, and the pattern has repeated with dot-com, internet, and now AI.
“Robert Solo back in the early 1980s who talked about we see the computer computer revolution everywhere but in the productivity statistics. And even those who write about every day or every couple days you can read in the Financial Times another article by someone saying it's happening. Now we're seeing the breakout in AI. It's leading to all these gains in productivity. These are by and large people who've been saying this for the last 30 years. Before it was AI, it was dot com, it was the internet, it was new software.”
Resilience in developing countries operates through social rather than formal institutional channels—strong neighborhood self-help networks, religious organizations, family bonds, and practical knowledge of disease mitigation—whereas wealthy Western countries depend entirely on state capacity that becomes fragile under stress.
“when you have a weak state, you tend to have a strong society is the way I would put it... if you know the police aren't going to show up when you call them or you can't trust them unless you pay them a bribe what do you do? Do you just sort of fatalistically accept the crime that's happened to you? No, you tend to work through community groups.”
The presumption that high GDP affluent wealthy countries are best placed to address 21st century challenges like climate change is wrong; in fact, Western wealth is a source of fragility and vulnerability rather than resilience.
“The presumption is that high GDP affluent wealthy countries are those best placed to stand up to the challenges of the 21st century, whether it's climate change, pandemics, or even inequality if we wanted to deal with it anyway... But what if that view was wrong? What if in fact our wealth, comparatively anyway, in the West was in fact a source of fragility?”
People assess inflation not through official statistics but through their own purchasing patterns—items they buy regularly like groceries, energy, and transportation—making individual inflation experiences radically different from aggregate measures and often higher than reported.
“The notion that people judge, 'Oh, okay, that's the inflation rate for this month.' That's not how they do it. They look at it in the purchases they make on a daily basis and the items that matter to them. Being told that you can afford a hotel in Jakarta now, it's become very affordable... isn't going to do you any good if you're not even in that, you know, what you're concerned about is your gas bill, your heating bill, your uh electricity bill, and the grocery bill.”
Melting permafrost due to climate change will release pathogens not seen for extremely long periods, creating novel disease outbreak risks that societies are unprepared for.
“You didn't mention melting permafrost, right? This is again another source of potentially... archaic, you know, pathogens that we haven't seen for a very, very long time... Yeah, of methane release. Yeah, uh that could come back.”
Artificial intelligence race thinking (the idea that one nation will 'get there first') is incoherent; what differs between China and the U.S. is not speed but approach—China invests in human AI literacy and practical applications, while the U.S. chases superintelligence as a religious goal, creating different risks and dependencies.
“There are those who say there's no such thing. This idea that someone is going to get there first and win is just ludicrous. Once a technology is uncovered, it'll spread... Between the Chinese and the Americans, two different approaches... in China the Chinese government is investing a lot of its time and resources into preparing students for the AI era... whereas in the United States again, it's very much we're going to discover this technology, it'll transform everything. In fact, you'll be rendered useless.”
Welfare systems built with explicit assumptions of family stability (housing, childcare, pension) become impossible to provide through the state when families are fractured by labor mobility and housing insecurity, yet this fragmentation is treated as inevitable rather than reversible policy choice.
“I don't see how you can have a resilient society without families, and certainly without um housing security. I think it's it's impossible.”
Very rapid economic growth leads to environmental feedback loops that eventually limit further growth, as illustrated by increasing zoonotic disease outbreaks from habitat destruction and accelerated human-nature contact.
“when you push the economy to grow and grow and grow, you encounter you run up against these walls which limit the growth”
Politicians lack capacity to articulate honest long-term visions and instead rely on data-driven triangulation (polls, focus groups, algorithms) to identify what voters currently want and promise to deliver it; this approach destroyed genuine political imagination and replaced it with reactive symptom management.
“there is a generation after the war who made themselves promises. The state will be able to do this or or the system will be able to do this for me... And those promises can't be kept”
Rapid economic growth creates labor mobility that weakens family bonds and local communities; people must follow opportunities geographically, reducing stable relationships and community ties, which are essential to social resilience.
“one of the one of the effects on family life of very rapid growth is it does weaken family mainly because of increased labor mobility. People have to look, you know, people can and do go to where the opportunities are and that creates a lot of uh you know, a sort of social mobility. There is a trade-off to that. There is something lost.”
Zoonotic disease spillover—the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans—is the source of most major pandemics (diphtheria, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, Black Death) and has increased in frequency (three novel coronaviruses in 25 years), driven by capitalist expansion into wildlife habitats.
“all of these pathogens um are all a result of zoonotic spillover. So, diphtheria, as I understand it, comes out of South Asia in about the 17th, 18th century, right? Um Ebola, obviously, HIV, AIDS, um the Black Death. These are all the result of zoonotic spillover. And of course, we've had three novel coronaviruses in the last what, 25 years?”
Historical hygiene practices in developing countries—not touching wallets to eating surfaces, washing hands constantly, avoiding cross-contamination when cutting fruit—demonstrate intuitive disease prevention that becomes automatic through childhood socialization and proves effective without modern medical technology.
“simple illustration is just about anybody who goes shopping in a market in Africa or in any developing country in Jamaica, they come home, there's all sorts of even even for example, my daughter's godmother saying she would never think to put her purse on a table, on a surface in which she would eat, because the purse is might have been in contact with something. There's this fastidiousness. You wash everything, you wash your hands, you wash your food before you prepare it.”
The 'triple lock' pension guarantee in Britain is mathematically unsustainable given 1% growth rates, but politicians maintain it rather than reform it because telling pensioners the truth would cost them votes; younger generations bear the cost through debt, reduced hiring, and compressed life prospects.
“the triple lock will go one day. It will go because it will collapse under the weight. And everybody knows that. And generic if he has any modicum of intelligence knows it. So, essentially they're lying. And what they're doing is, of course, they're shifting the burden onto young people.”
Hygiene hypothesis explains that periodic exposure to minor illnesses and pathogens primes immune systems; excessive sanitization creates populations with weak immunity, similar to how societal immunity to economic and political stress is weakened by shielding from adversity.
“this is the hygiene hypothesis, right? That you know, we've all excessively sanitized our food. Occasional bout of, you know, stomach trouble isn't actually necessarily bad for the human body. We think it is. Any sign of an illness is a bad thing. But you know, you live in a developing country and you just it's one of those things your children are going to periodically have, you know, what in Jamaica we call running belly. They get over it and they're resilient”
Outsourcing of public services (street cleaning, maintenance) to private companies as part of neoliberal policy reduces resilience because it breaks the direct accountability between citizens and service provision, making systems fragile.
“if you're going to outsource, if you're going to have private companies tasked with literally cleaning your streets, you are building in whatever the opposite of resilience is into your economic model.”
South Sudan entered the COVID-19 pandemic with only three ventilators, yet managed the crisis reasonably well because people did not rely on hospital capacity; wealthy countries with abundant hospitals suffered worse outcomes due to complacency and lack of adaptive behavior.
“I think in I think it's in that book where I mentioned this statistic that South Sudan had entered the pandemic with three ventilators. And literally three, not not 300, not 3,000, but three ventilators.”
Book culture and independent bookstores (like Love Books in Johannesburg) thrive in developing countries because real estate costs are low enough for people to open businesses based on love rather than capital efficiency; high real estate costs in wealthy countries eliminate this possibility.
“there's a little bookshop in Johannesburg though called Love Books, and to me it's a testament to what is a kind of lost love here in Western countries, but you still find in developing countries. This book was founded by a journalist who in her 30s just decided, I love books. I'm going to open up a bookstore. And she opened up a bookstore. The kind of thing that you can still do in developing countries for the simple reason that real estate costs are so low. It's simply not possible to envision that. Setting something up because of a love of books. You have to have a business model, and you have to move an awful lot of copy”
The internet and digital technologies have radically transformed how people communicate and organize life but have not produced comparable economic productivity gains that justify their capital investment, suggesting transformative social impact does not necessarily correlate with productivity growth.
“AI will transform society in the same way the internet has but a lot of the transformation in society of the internet hasn't actually um led to an increase in economic productivity. It leads to a complete change in the way we communicate with each other, the way we you know, we're constantly online... But has it actually led to an increase in economic output that justifies the expense? That's questionable.”
Western countries (particularly Britain and Europe) have been experiencing stagnation or decline for approximately 15+ years; describing economies as 'in recession' using only aggregate statistics masks the reality that 'for a substantial part of the population, it is in recession.'
“when you look at public opinion surveys and how people feel about the state of the country and their own lives and where things are going, there's a great deal of gloom there... When we use aggregate figures, so the US is a good example of this. When you use aggregate figures, you could say the economy is in very good shape. But when you look at public opinion surveys... there's a great deal of gloom there. So, what's the disconnect?”
Populist political movements (Brexit, MAGA) are motivated by attempts to preserve community life and local economic stability, not merely by xenophobia or nostalgia, though the diagnosis often lacks viable solutions.
“In a sense, the vote for things like Brexit, the vote for MAGA, there was a motivation of just trying to preserve life within communities. I'm not suggesting that those were the right solutions at all, but I think the motive of many people supporting it was just can we still have our communities?”
The Great Acceleration—the period of exponential growth in consumption, population, resource use starting around 1950—has ended; most J-curves of growth have plateaued, particularly in Britain and Europe, yet Western political culture still operates as though exponential growth will continue forever.
“I think one of the best reflections of this period, which is called the, you know, the Great Acceleration, which, you know, arguably starts in 1950. I mean, obviously these trends go back a really long way, but basically every trend from plastic consumption to water consumption to population to just everything is this J-curve, right? And that's now over. Basically, for most of the world, not everywhere, most of the world, certainly in in Britain and Europe. And that's now over.”
Western societies have become less entrepreneurial despite pro-market rhetoric; high real estate costs and regulatory barriers prevent the kind of small business creation (bookshops, cafes) that remains common in middle-income countries like Poland, contradicting claims about market dynamism.
“so, these very high GDP countries, which talk about fostering entrepreneurship all the time... are the least entrepreneurial societies. By design, they don't allow it because every every business when you walk down the high street is owned by asset managers and their chains and their identikit.”
Real estate prices in wealthy countries are artificially high due to hedge fund and institutional investor speculation; these investors demand rising rents to satisfy pension fund clients seeking returns, creating a political economy where evictions serve intergenerational wealth transfer rather than market efficiency.
“the reason rents have become so expensive is in no small measure because that is a a significant part of the income that's generated to support through, you know, and of course, a lot of institutional investors, a lot of hedge funds own real estate. But the hedge funds themselves, the primary owners of hedge funds are pension funds... Their investors demand it. Their investors demand it because their clients demand it because they want to be kept in the style under which they've grown accustomed.”
Housing insecurity, zero-hour contracts, and labor market instability are policy choices made to preserve benefits for older generations rather than inevitable economic outcomes, deliberately shifting costs onto younger cohorts.
“a lot of that is not, you know, we hear it's attributed all technological change and economic change, but a lot of it is policy choices we've made in order to reserve those benefits to a certain share of the population at the expense of the others”
Patrick Deneen (Catholic conservative thinker) correctly identifies that liberalism has a unique temporal epistemology treating time as an eternal present with perpetual progress, making long-term thinking and intergenerational justice impossible; this requires retrieval of pre-liberal temporal concepts.
“Patrick Deneen, who's um a conservative thinker, I don't know if you're familiar with this guy. He's a conservative Catholic thinker... he says that liberalism has this unique understanding of time, which means it's impossible for us actually to think in the long term, to be good ancestors, uh and to think about what what kind of political and economic setups up I want for my kids, my kids' kids, my kids' kids' kids, you know, people going forward hundreds of years.”
Cashless digital systems (credit cards, mobile payments, Stripe, Apple Pay) create hidden fragility: if electricity, internet, or payment processors fail, transactions become impossible, whereas physical cash provides resilience that societies should maintain as a percentage of money supply.
“if the electricity goes down, if your internet goes down, if for whatever reason there is, you know, malware attack on the payment systems or whatever, if a company like Stripe or Apple Pay decides to withdraw from a country, then you can't do that anymore”
Western countries need to break with liberal political philosophy that consists purely of individual fulfillment and complete renunciation of obligation and duty; a renewed politics must emphasize collective good and reciprocal obligation.
“what it is going to require, particularly for people on the left, is just a break with liberalism. And I don't mean social liberalism. I don't mean, you know, letting people just live their lives and getting on with things. But a break with liberalism as a politics that consists purely on the fulfillment of the individual and a complete, you know, renunciation of obligation and duty unless they're voluntary, entirely voluntary.”
The Western Roman Empire's fall was driven partly by lower resilience to pandemics and military challenges compared to frontier peoples, due to population density, globalization effects (disease exposure), and military coddling under imperial order.
“The Western Roman Empire versus the Eastern Roman Empire... Um I think so. In part, that would have had to do with population density. I think would be less globalized. Um so, they were less exposed to the germs that are coming in from all over the empire, much more localized population... Um I think also just exposure to conflict, to warfare, you know, against the people that have been sort of sheltered by the legions for so long and they're not prepared to deal with, you know, what happens when order collapses and all these shaggy hordes come in. What do you actually do with them? Uh whereas they were accustomed to dealing constantly with the ravages of the legions.”
The pursuit of AI superintelligence in the US is causing electricity demand to rise 8% annually and natural gas prices to rise even faster, which may trigger a populist backlash in November elections with an anti-AI component focused on reining in oligarchs and limiting data center construction.
“The Americans are going headlong into the pursuit of the holy grail of this artificial superintelligence. And as a result, electricity bills are going up to 8%, you know, 8% a year because it is sucking up so much, and it's going to get even worse. Natural gas prices are going up by even more. And so much so that in the November elections, the odds are growing that there will be a sort of populist backlash against the Trump administration that is going to have a strong component of anti-AI, you know, sort of rein in the oligarchs, rein in um put a lot more controls on artificial intelligence, put the limits on how many of these data centers they can build.”
Pace layers, a framework from Stewart Brand, describe how societies organize across nested timescales: nature (slow, foundational), infrastructure (decades to millennia), culture (generations), and fashion/trivia (ephemeral); Western societies focus on the top layers while ignoring the foundational ones.
“Are you familiar with the concept of pace layers? Maybe I maybe I mentioned this the last time... It's an an idea put out there by Stewart Brand. And pace layers really are one um framework by which to understand human existence. The deepest pace layer is nature. Um, and of course that changes very slowly... On top of that you have things like infrastructure, water, roads... On top of that you have culture... And then on top of that you have fashions, which is of course very ephemeral.”
Diminishing returns exist in education: moving a population from illiteracy to primary literacy produces massive productivity gains; secondary education produces substantial but smaller gains; university education produces minimal additional productivity gains, suggesting advanced education is not economically justified by productivity returns.
“in education, there are diminishing returns, so that if you take somebody who's illiterate and you give them basic literacy, that brings about a very large leap in productivity. If you then add numerical skills, you know, you bring them up to a secondary diploma, that makes it possible for them to do... You apart from anything else, you can give them the manual to read how to operate this machine... As you get to university, you still get a productivity gain in the undergraduate degree, but it's not it's a much smaller return.”
Wealthy countries witnessed only one major government pandemic spending package (2020 COVID emergency spending) and are unlikely to be able to repeat that fiscal response; future pandemics will hit governments with reduced budgets due to defense spending and other obligations.
“if the thesis is correct in that chronic economic near stagnation is going to be the lot of developed countries, albeit at a very high level of prosperity, but if states are being forced to reduce their budgets on such things as health care in order to meet their growing defense obligations and the new commitments they're taking on, they're not going to be able to provide if we were to have another COVID-19, Western countries wouldn't be in a position to provide the kind of financial assistance they did last time. That was a one-off.”
Government stimulus spending and quantitative easing post-2008 inflated asset prices without producing commensurate economic growth, a strategy dependent on continuous monetary expansion that is reaching its limits as central banks face pressure from other priorities.
“Well, since the financial crisis, that's been done largely through increasing the money supply much faster than the growth in the economy, which means asset values have inflated. Which means that again, a young person trying to buy a house can't afford it anymore.”
Good politicians require intuition (sensitivity to popular sentiment and underlying social currents) as much as or more than education; Trump demonstrated this intuition by recognizing widespread economic anxiety that data-driven Democratic strategies missed entirely in 2016.
“The best politicians I've ever encountered are people who aren't necessarily I like actually think Mark Carney may be an exception because he may be the man for the moment, but by and large, I think politicians who are highly educated aren't always the best because they don't necessarily have that intuition. I think it's something, for example, that Donald Trump has. It's a tragedy he's using it the way he does, but his ability, the way in which he completely destroyed the model the the the sort of the data science triangulation approach that the Democrats were so convinced they were utterly convinced in 2016 they were going to win because all of the polling suggested it, all of the focus groups were saying it, and this guy's just going before big crowds and talking off the cuff and, you know, picking up what the vibe is.”
Investment in skills training and education for young people to adapt to AI should be state-funded and employer-incentivized, not left to market mechanisms, because private businesses lack incentive to fund transitions from which competitors benefit.
“Young people, it's a punishing job market here in Britain... The government should be actually smoothing their transition. They should be funding or incentivizing businesses to give them internships, during which they learn AI skills, so they can adapt and then, you know, carry whatever employer they're going to go work for, carry them into this new age, but we're not doing that. We're leaving it to the market to do it, and that's never a good way to manage these kind of transitions.”
The period from approximately 1948 to 1973 experienced the most rapid economic growth in human history—approximately 25 years of growth exceeding any comparable period—driven by the simultaneous availability of electrification, fossil fuels, mass secondary education, and widespread urbanization.
“That period that generation that lasts from really about 1948 until about 1973. We're really talking about a 25-year period in which more growth occurred than it ever occurred before in human history. I mean, in any comparable period by far.”
Young people in wealthy countries increasingly refuse to have children because housing costs, job insecurity, and family instability make starting households impossible; this drives declining fertility and forces reliance on immigration, which countries then politically reject—creating an unsustainable contradiction.
“young people, more and more young people aren't having children. That society can't sustain itself unless it's going to have recourse to immigration, which it doesn't want to do. It can't sustain itself if there aren't children. And one of the reasons they're not having children is just because of this, they can't start households. They can't start families. They can't give them that life, and they don't want to do it until they can.”
Long-term thinking and commitment to building for future generations has disappeared from Western culture, replaced by quarterly capitalism and eternal present; recovery requires reconnection to long-term multi-generational planning like cathedral-building.
“How did these people build um Durham Cathedral or Salisbury Cathedral? It was because they thought about eternity, not the next quarter. And I do feel like the West needs a dose of that, right? We need to start thinking about eternity, not the next, you know, the next quarter.”
Robert Gordon argues that three transformative technologies—electrification, internal combustion, and sanitation/medicine—were one-off innovations that produced exceptional 19th-to-mid-20th century productivity growth; no future technology (including AI) will produce comparable systemic effects.
“I am in the camp with Robert Gordon who argues that you know, this this dramatic growth in labor productivity which we had from about the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century is not we didn't move into new era. There were three technologies essentially which transformed productivity. Those are in the past. There's no reason to believe any of the future ones will do it.”
The exceptional growth of the post-war period (roughly 1948–1973) cannot be replicated because it rested on a one-off confluence of one-time technologies—especially the spread of electrification—and the diminishing-returns leap from a primary-educated to a mass secondary-educated workforce; further education yields only small productivity gains, so those incremental gains are exhausted.
“we went from essentially relying to a very considerable degree on what nature provides... to suddenly the discovery that you can release all this stored energy from within the planet”
Contemporary public health spending increases without proportional improvements in outcomes suggests that throwing money at health systems does not improve resilience; effective resilience requires cultural knowledge and community-based adaptive capacity that money cannot buy.
“after 2020, there is a really big increase in health care spending in this country... And the outcomes aren't very good... the argument that's been made by the left and center left for the for the entirety of the post-war period is just well, the more you spend on health care, the better. Well, yeah. I mean, to a point. But, ultimately there's more to it than just that.”
No major contemporary buildings will survive 800 years; historical monuments endured because they were built without attachment to individual names and represented transcendent values, whereas modern architecture embeds architect and corporate names, reflecting individualist rather than collective values.
“what architectural marvel today is going to be here in 800 years? Nothing being built today will be here in 800 years. One of the things I I often think of is we can attach a name to all the great buildings being built today. We know who the architect is... And very often, if it's a public building or a university building, it has a benefactor's name on it. None of those buildings in antiquity have names attached to them. I think that's the other thing. There was a sense that you were building something that was not only going to outlast you, but embodied something far greater than you, that you're submerged in that identity.”
The triple lock on pensions and private pension promises are unsustainable and politicians know it; they continue to lie about preserving them while shifting the burden onto the young through unrepayable student loans, budget cuts, and—crucially—an inflated money supply that pumps up asset values 6–7% a year to fund retirement promises, which in turn prices young people out of housing.
“the triple lock will go one day. It will go because it will collapse under the weight. And everybody knows that... So, essentially they're lying. And what they're doing is, of course, they're shifting the burden onto young people.”
Artificial superintelligence is inherently vulnerable to physical disruption—'what good is a superintelligence if you can completely destroy it by unplugging it?'—because it requires enormous energy production from the actual physical world, contradicting the liberal vision of intelligence divorced from nature.
“What good is a superintelligence if you can completely destroy it by unplugging it? I mean, it's incredibly energy intensive. That energy has to be produced in the actual world.”
Liberal political and economic philosophy's core goal is complete emancipation from nature—the belief that humans can rise above and transcend nature entirely—which is manifest in the pursuit of artificial superintelligence as a being 'totally divorced from the physical world.'
“this idea, which is very common in liberal thought, and certainly in neoclassical thought, that we can emancipate ourselves from nature. That's the whole, in a sense, the whole human quest is to do that, to transcend nature, so that we become its masters and in a sense, artificial intelligence is a manifest or not artificial intelligence, but the pursuit of artificial superintelligence or artificial general intelligence as it's sometimes called, this kind of superhuman intelligence, which will now completely um create this superintelligent being that is totally divorced from the physical world.”
Germany's recent economic growth is temporary ('sugar high') from defense spending and infrastructure investment, not a permanent raising of the growth rate; Germany's economy has been declining or stagnating for 3+ years in per capita terms.
“Some Western countries are going to experience a brief uptick in growth like Germany will because of the massive investment it is making in infrastructure and defense spending. But I'm not sure that's going to be a permanent raising of the growth rate. I think it'll be kind of you know what economists would call a sugar high.”
Solving the West's resilience and intergenerational problems requires the left to break with liberalism understood as a politics consisting purely of individual fulfillment and the renunciation of all non-voluntary obligation and duty—not a break with social liberalism, but with the atomized individualist epistemology underlying end-of-history triangulation politics.
“what it is going to require, particularly for people on the left, is just a break with liberalism. And I don't mean social liberalism... But a break with liberalism as a politics that consists purely on the fulfillment of the individual and a complete renunciation of obligation and duty unless they're voluntary”
High-GDP Western countries that loudly champion entrepreneurship are in practice among the least entrepreneurial societies because prohibitively high real estate and rent costs raise barriers to entry; in lower-cost developing or middle-income countries, low rents make it feasible to start small businesses, pay workers less while also charging less and serving more customers.
“these very high GDP countries, which talk about fostering entrepreneurship all the time... are the least entrepreneurial societies. By design, they don't allow it because every business when you walk down the high street is owned by asset managers”
Western wealth, rather than being purely a source of strength against 21st-century challenges, is itself a source of fragility: the wealthier a country becomes the more crises its rapacious growth model generates (e.g. zoonotic spillover) while simultaneously reducing society's aptitude to address those risks.
“What if in fact our wealth, comparatively anyway, in the West was in fact a source of fragility? What if being so wealthy was a vulnerability, an exposure, a problem?”
Where states are weak, societies tend to be strong: in the absence of reliable state services, spontaneous community and neighborhood self-help organizations (often religious) form to provide welfare and mutual aid, constituting a form of social resilience that wealthy, state-dependent Western societies lack.
“when you have a weak state, you tend to have a strong society is the way I would put it.”
Liberalism has a unique understanding of time as an eternal present in which the future and past are mere extensions of the present, which makes it structurally difficult for Western societies to think long-term, be 'good ancestors,' or build things meant to outlast a single generation—unlike the medieval builders of cathedrals who worked for eternity rather than the next quarter.
“liberalism has this unique understanding of time, which means it's impossible for us actually to think in the long term, to be good ancestors”
Nearly all major historical pandemics—diphtheria, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, the Black Death—are the result of zoonotic spillover, and the increasingly rapacious relationship of capitalist economies to nature is driving more frequent spillover events, as evidenced by three novel coronaviruses in roughly 25 years.
“all of these pathogens are all a result of zoonotic spillover. So, diphtheria... Ebola, obviously, HIV, AIDS, the Black Death... And of course, we've had three novel coronaviruses in the last what, 25 years?”
Western cities have experienced physical decay and deterioration over the past 15+ years despite or because of being wealthy, with littered streets, deteriorated public infrastructure, and abandoned buildings in major cities, presenting a contrast to developing countries and suggesting that wealth does not correlate with urban maintenance or quality.
“I was recently in Manchester where they had this by-election. And it feels like um I would I'm going to say something here, a third world country, only it's not because I've been to third world countries and they're not that dirty. Right? This is the thing, right? And something really strange is happening. I was in Levenshulme, which is part of this constituency... There was rubbish everywhere, fly-tipping everywhere... things just look clean and civilized [in North Korea]. Something strange is going on where that's a poor, low-income country and then I'm in somewhere like Levenshulme where I'm seeing just mattresses and nappies everywhere and just literally tons of rubbish in parks, the public realm is a a complete mess.”
Developing countries naturally maintain awareness of natural limits and respect for nature's power because constant exposure to nature's 'vagaries'—storms, diseases, unpredictable events—makes denying natural constraints impossible, whereas wealthy nations develop complacency about nature.
“it's just that respect for the power it has, which when you live in a developing country, you naturally form because you're exposed to nature's vagaries so often.”
Boris Johnson's statement in pandemic's early stages—'I think we can all agree there is now such a thing as society'—represented a moment where collective interdependence became politically visible, but was quickly abandoned for divisive politics.
“I do remember in the earlier stages when, you know, one of the few things that Boris Johnson said that I regarded highly at the time. It didn't last very long, but he said, 'I think we can all agree there is now such a thing as society.' I think that was a very powerful statement. The real pity is they didn't follow up with that.”
Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora depicts a multi-generational space voyage where colonists mysteriously begin dying from an unidentifiable organism, forcing return to Earth; this serves as corrective to techno-utopian narratives (like Elon Musk's) that ignore humanity's fundamental dependence on Earth's evolved ecosystems.
“Have you read Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson?... It's kind of um of a piece with this hypothesis. It's about a multi-generational um uh What would you call it? Space voyage to another planet like Earth... They get to this other planet. I'm going to ruin the plot, whatever. It's one of his lesser-knowns. And people just start mysteriously dying, and they realize it's because of a some kind of organism which they can't even see or comprehend... So, they have to they leave and they go back to Earth again over multiple generations. And it's just such a useful corrective to people like Elon Musk who say, 'Well, we just colonize Mars.'”
A Ghanaian journalist covering an international meeting in Brussels pre-pandemic was shocked to find Belgian airport staff in full protective gear testing passengers, while Brussels streets were crowded with unmasked people—illustrating wealthy countries' false confidence in institutional capacity despite absence of individual precautions.
“I remember at the very early stages of the pandemic, a journalist from Ghana who was going to a meeting, he was covering a meeting, it was some international meeting which happened to be taking place in Brussels. This is before the declaration of the pandemic had even begun and before there were any lockdowns in Europe. As soon as he got to the airport, all the airport staff were fully clothed and in um you know, in protective gear. And all the passengers were tested. He got to Brussels and they were just waved through and in crowded streets and everything and there he said the bars were full and he just was astonished. He said that people were taking no precautions. Well, Belgium didn't do particularly well in the pandemic.”
Just as periodic exposure to pathogens primes the immune system (the hygiene hypothesis), a society subjected to periodic, moderate adversity may stay 'primed' and resilient, whereas a 'shallow existence' that eradicates all forms of adversity may leave a society less dynamic and more vulnerable to shocks—though excessive repeated stress can cause collapse.
“A so-called shallower existence characterized by material abundance and large-scale eradication of all forms of adversity... may actually make society less dynamic and resilient and therefore more vulnerable to shocks coming from nature.”
Young people today face a worse inheritance than previous generations not primarily because of technological or economic change but because of deliberate policy choices that reserve benefits to older generations—heavy student debt, an unforgiving job market, and unaffordable housing—and one consequence is declining childbearing because the young cannot start households or families.
“a lot of it is policy choices we've made in order to reserve those benefits to a certain share of the population at the expense of the others”
Developing countries on average came through the COVID pandemic better than the official narrative predicted because of their social resilience: people in poorer countries with prior disease exposure spontaneously practice social distancing, hygiene, and masking, whereas Western complacency (and even resistance to masking) was a luxury enabled by the assumption that hospitals would save them.
“all of us had a strong sense that actually developing countries were on average going to pull through the pandemic better for a lot of reasons because of essentially their own social resilience. And that in fact turned out to be the case.”
The experience of the Cultural Revolution shaped the mindset of some of China's most successful companies, making them risk-averse, wary of overly complex supply chains, and focused on loyalty, leadership and collective identity—an antithesis to Western just-in-time supply chains and isolated individualism.
“if you read a book more recently called Mao and Markets, the experience of the Cultural Revolution massively shaped the business mindset of some of the most successful companies in China. They're risk-averse. They're terrified about overly complex supply chains”
Max Planck's observation that 'scientific revolutions happen one funeral at a time' applies to political economy: intergenerational wealth transfers will not be reversed until beneficiaries become a minority voting bloc, which will eventually happen through demographic change.
“there's that um line by Max Planck, or it's it's attributed to Max Planck, isn't it? You know, scientific revolutions happen one funeral at a time... the reality is that until the beneficiaries of this very broken status quo, until they become a minority, or at least a less strong voting block in the West, which will happen, I think. But in until that time, it does feel like political solutions simply won't um simply won't emerge.”
Lula da Silva's political message—'I just want workers in this country to enjoy picanha and a beer'—exemplifies humble, achievable post-growth politics focused on dignified living rather than perpetual expansion.
“If you look at Lula da Silva, one of the very few social democrat politicians these days, you know, who was in the election trial the last time and he said, 'I just want workers in this country to enjoy picanha and a beer.' Mhm. And I thought, well, that's it, right? You know, it's not it's not asking for the world, is it?”
No buildings being constructed today are designed to last 800 years; even maintenance of existing historic infrastructure requires constant state investment that is increasingly difficult to fund.
“what architectural marvel today is going to be here in 800 years? Nothing being built today will be here in 800 years.”
The best politicians possess intuition and the visceral ability to connect with and listen to people more than high educational attainment; Donald Trump's 2016 victory demonstrated how raw intuitive 'vibe-reading' destroyed the Democrats' data-science, polling, focus-group, triangulation model.
“the way in which he completely destroyed the model the sort of the data science triangulation approach that the Democrats were so convinced... and this guy's just going before big crowds and talking off the cuff and picking up what the vibe is.”
The information-technology and AI revolutions have not produced commensurate gains in economic productivity; instead they have radically changed how we communicate and live while concentrating the gains of growth into a shrinking number of very wealthy hands.
“AI will transform society in the same way the internet has but a lot of the transformation in society of the internet hasn't actually led to an increase in economic productivity.”
Aggregate economic figures mask a recession that is real for a large share of the population; because people judge inflation by the daily purchases that matter to them (gas, heating, groceries, taking children out) rather than by official monthly indices, the headline 'economy is fine' narrative fails to capture lived experience, and economists' 'vibe' explanations miss that ordinary lives genuinely aren't improving.
“for a substantial part of the population, it is in recession. When we use aggregate figures... you could say the economy is in very good shape. But when you look at public opinion surveys... there's a great deal of gloom there.”
Climate change and ecological disruption will return pathogens to the West—tropical diseases migrating to temperate zones, archaic pathogens released from melting permafrost, and antibiotic resistance—and these challenges will not be solvable simply by expanding the health care budget; cash-strapped Western states facing rising defence commitments will be unable to provide the kind of financial assistance they did during COVID-19.
“we will be continually exposed to new diseases, in particular tropical diseases migrating to temperate zones because of climate change”
Increased labor mobility driven by rapid economic growth weakens family and community bonds, and political movements like Brexit and MAGA were partly motivated by a desire to preserve community and local life rather than by their stated policy solutions.
“one of the effects on family life of very rapid growth is it does weaken family mainly because of increased labor mobility... the vote for things like Brexit, the vote for MAGA, there was a motivation of just trying to preserve life within communities.”
The British experience of urban destruction during the 20th century—demolishing beautiful buildings and replacing them with roads and car-centric infrastructure—was justified by growth-era assumptions that there would always be more growth to build new things, now proven wrong.
“I think one of the reasons why they were knocking down so many gorgeous buildings or just building roads through cities, like in Glasgow, was they thought, 'Well, we'll have this growth forever. You know what? If it doesn't work out, we'll just build something else.' But we now know it um it didn't work out that way.”
The more that politicians talk about community, the less actual community exists in societies experiencing housing insecurity, zero-hour contracts, weak family ties, and high labor mobility—suggesting a paradoxical inverse relationship between political rhetoric and social reality.
“How come the more that politicians talk about community the less there is actual community? Which is to say that where you have a housing insecurity, where you have people on zero hours contracts, where you have people not in jobs for very long, where you have very weak family connections and ties that's really the last 25, 30 years that's getting really strong now, really profoundly strong. At the same time particularly politicians on the center left, they love to talk about community.”
The US economy has grown nominally by $6 trillion between 2020 and 2024, but debt increased by $12 trillion—a 2:1 ratio that demonstrates growth is entirely debt-funded and cannot be justified unless future growth dramatically exceeds current rates through a technological revolution.
“the US economy grew by, I think, 6 trillion between 2020 and 2024, but its debt increased by 12 trillion... the only way you can justify a $12 trillion investment for $6 trillion of growth is to say that a chunk of that $12 trillion investment is going to lead to a takeoff in the growth rate, which in the future is going to supercharge the economy”
Rapley observes that Canadians, faced with Trump's annexation threat, show willingness to make national sacrifices, suggesting that genuine external crises can mobilize collective action; this contrasts with peacetime political unwillingness to address voluntary sacrifices.
“As you know, I was born and raised in Canada and I go back there each year to visit my family. And it is interesting observing what has been happening in Canada since Trump came back to office and said, 'I'm going to annex Canada.' And Canadians are saying, 'Well, you know, we have to go off in an entirely different direction. This will entail sacrifice.' And there seems to be a willingness from what I can tell.”
Mark Carney represents emerging political leadership articulating the need for collective action beyond individual interest; he is resonating with populations recognizing that survival requires shared sacrifice.
“a leader like Mark Carney is articulating and people are resonating with and we don't have strong leadership yet in Britain.”
Within even very low growth (half a percent to 1% per capita), an enormous amount can still be achieved; the political problem arises not from low growth itself but from having premised promises to one group on unrealistic growth rates (e.g. 5%), which then requires taking resources from others—principally the young.
“you can do an awful lot within this growth of even half a percent per year... The problem is if you promise one group, 'Well, your growth, your expectations will be premised on growth of 5%.' That means you have to take that from someone else.”
A cashless economy reduces resilience because digital payment systems are vulnerable to power and internet failures, malware, or the withdrawal of private providers; a resilient society therefore needs a certain percentage of the money supply held as physical cash, and there is a generational and class divide in cash dependence.
“if you want a resilient society that's actually capable of withstanding these kinds of shocks, a certain percentage of the cash supply is going to have to be something that people have in their hands.”
Mid-crisis, people become willing to recognize their mutual dependence and to accept sacrifice for the collective good, as evidenced by Canadians' response to Trump's annexation threat and the brief moment when Boris Johnson conceded 'there is now such a thing as society'—but Western leadership generally fails to seize and sustain this willingness.
“Canadians are saying, 'Well, you know, we have to go off in an entirely different direction. This will entail sacrifice.' And there seems to be a willingness”
US economic growth is largely illusory because it is debt-fuelled: the economy grew by roughly $6 trillion between 2020 and 2024 while its debt increased by about $12 trillion, a ratio only justifiable if a future technological takeoff supercharges productivity—which Rapley doubts.
“the US economy grew by, I think, 6 trillion between 2020 and 2024, but its debt increased by 12 trillion.”
Right-populist politics is internally inconsistent and cannot solve the structural problems it identifies: parties like Reform want to end immigration (which functions as a Ponzi-like mechanism to fund future pensions) while simultaneously promising to keep the triple lock, an unworkable combination.
“you want no migration, which even if you think that's a Ponzi scheme to pay off pensions in the future, which kind of is... but you're going to keep the triple lock. How?”
A 19th-century French doctor observed that his noble and bourgeois patients had more illnesses than peasants, who were more resilient because living closer to nature exposed them regularly to pathogens and built stronger immune systems.
“a French doctor who actually discovered that his patients who came from the nobility or from the urban bourgeoisie were coming in with a lot more illnesses than peasants who just seemed to be more resilient”
Bill Clinton (unlike Hillary Clinton) was an exceptionally skilled communicator who could connect with people emotionally, but squandered this gift on pursuits that did not serve the public good as much as they could have.
“This is this is the big difference between Bill and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton has a reputation as being a terrific listener, but she's not a very good communicator and her husband was... I think it's a bit of a tragedy that what he used his skills for cuz I think he could have done so much more than he did.”
China and the US are pursuing fundamentally different AI strategies: China invests in embodied, practical applications and in preparing students to use AI, whereas the US pursues the 'holy grail' of artificial superintelligence, driving electricity bills up around 8% a year and natural gas prices higher, which is likely to provoke a populist anti-AI backlash.
“the Chinese, which are going in for a different model of artificial intelligence, which is much more practical applications and embodied technology. The Americans are going headlong into the pursuit of the holy grail of this artificial superintelligence. And as a result, electricity bills are going up to 8% a year”
South Sudan entered the COVID pandemic with only three ventilators, illustrating the formal-resilience disadvantage of poor countries.
“South Sudan had entered the pandemic with three ventilators. And literally three, not 300, not 3,000, but three ventilators.”
Investors are beginning to call time on the AI investment boom, with a recent shakeout in leading AI-sector companies as investors demand to see the promised productivity gains, and Rapley predicts the US economy will slow over the next year or two to converge with other Western economies.
“there's been a sort of a shakeout in the AI sector... Investors are starting to back away and saying you keep promising this revolution... Show us the money.”
Rich economies have been slowing to near-stagnation since the financial crisis, with growth of barely 1%, and the dominant narrative that wealthy countries are best placed to handle climate change—and that the poor will suffer most—may be wrong.
“they have been slowing to the point that they're almost stagnant. growth of barely 1%.”
A highly developed, bureaucratized society emancipated from nature loses resilience: when its systems suddenly fail (e.g. the 2003 North American grid failure), social order can begin to collapse within 24 hours, whereas societies accustomed to power failures have backup plans and ordered improvisation.
“in a society that is highly developed and bureaucratized and highly in a sense emancipated from nature, when it suddenly finds itself thrust back in at its mercy, it was sort of like within 24 hours, you kind of felt social order was collapsing.”
Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora is a useful corrective to figures like Elon Musk who imagine colonizing Mars, because it dramatizes how humans cannot escape their biological dependence on Earth's specific ecology.
“it's just such a useful corrective to people like Elon Musk who say, 'Well, we just colonize Mars.'... no, our relationship to nature is nothing like that.”
Increased health care spending yields diminishing returns: after 2020 the UK substantially increased health care spending yet outcomes did not improve much, refuting the post-war left/center-left assumption that more health spending is always straightforwardly better.
“after 2020, there is a really big increase in health care spending in this country... And the outcomes aren't very good... the argument... is just well, the more you spend on health care, the better. Well, yeah. I mean, to a point.”
We are living in what will be seen as a kind of dark age, marked by pornography, gambling, children on phones, polarization and ugly buildings, partly because the assumption of perpetual growth made people willing to demolish beautiful buildings and run roads through cities on the belief that anything lost could simply be rebuilt.
“I think people are going to look at this period in the future as a period of really a dark age... all this pornography, all this gambling, all these kids on their phones all the time, all this polarization, all these ugly buildings.”
Historically, the peoples on the boundaries of the Western Roman Empire would have been more resilient to pandemics than the empire itself, because of lower population density, less globalization (and thus less exposure to imported germs), and constant exposure to conflict that primed them to cope when order collapsed—whereas the sheltered empire was unprepared.
“it would be the empire against the peoples on its boundaries... they would be more resilient to pandemics... In part, that would have had to do with population density... they were less exposed to the germs that are coming in from all over the empire”
We had a great conversation a couple of years ago that got around 600,000 views.
“I think that's got maybe 600,000 views.”
The book Why Empires Fall is about 150-160 pages while Icarus Economics is slightly longer in presentation but not in word count.
“This is 150, 160 pages... this one, Equator's Economics, is slightly longer. Actually, in words, it's not”