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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
This is Nick Taber. I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Speaker 2:And my name is Daniel Simons Jenkins. I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, and this is Of This World. Welcome to another episode of This World. Occasionally, we will deviate from our typical discussions involving religion and politics to discuss matters involving economics or international relations. And today is one such episode.
Speaker 2:We will be talking about economic inequality and the rise of China. And the person we will be interviewing about this to our great delight is Branko Milanoviich, one of the world's leading economists and an expert in the history of economic inequality. Also has written considerably about development and globalization. Branko spent over two decades as a lead economist in the World Bank's research department. A position that gave him unparalleled access to household income data from countries across the globe.
Speaker 2:Information that he used to write some of the most well received books on economic inequality over the last decade or so. He's held academic positions all around the world and is currently a research professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He's written numerous books, too many to mention, but we are here today to discuss his important new book, The Great Global Transformation, The United States, China and the Remaking of the World Economic Order, which was recently published by the University of Chicago Press. I very much enjoyed this book, and I think our audience will find it profitable. And maybe one way to set up the discussion is to zoom out a little bit and try to understand the intervention the book is making by placing it in a wider context.
Speaker 2:So the world as we know it right now is undergoing a great transition. The two thousand seven, two thousand eight financial crisis essentially has upended what economists and analysts describe as the neoliberal order. We've had a pandemic. We've had a series of authoritarian turns. The liberal international order as we know it is in decline and some speak of an American imperial decline, the rise of China.
Speaker 2:This country has been at war my entire life. And so it's it's hard to understand what's happening right now. And there's talk of the liberal international order, being replaced by a new civilizational order made up of great powers that have sovereignty over their respected hemispheres. And so I think this book should be seen in that larger context. And so just to begin the conversation, Branko, how how you know, given these background conditions that I just mentioned, in what way does your book try to make a unique intervention into this discussion?
Speaker 3:Well, first, Danny, thank you very much for having me on the show. It is, of course, a pleasure. I'm a big reader of your book, so maybe I should interview you about your book. But things being as they are now, I'm very, of course, happy to be talking about a great global transformation. You know, I think that what I can bring, and I will explain how I set it up in the book, but what I can bring to the discussion is my work of now several decades, three maybe more, on global income distribution, which means on individuals' incomes.
Speaker 3:And obviously, if you have such a major transformation of economic activity and the movement of economic activity towards Asia and the relative declines of the Western countries, be it in Europe or North America, you do have a huge, what I call the reshuffle of global incompositions, which basically has not happened in two hundred years. So let me then go over that. I will I will be relatively brief on that, but I just wanted to highlight the structure of the book, which actually has two levels essentially. On one level, I discuss this change in the distribution of economic activity where essentially you have Asian countries now playing much more overall just for sort of for the, you know, listeners to they know that, but just to remind them that China, if you calculate total incomes in purchasing power, has overtaken The United States as the largest economy in 2015. But, you know, China is producing about 22% of the global output.
Speaker 3:US is producing about 16 to 17. But even more striking is when you think that actually India and The UK produced both about 3% of the global output in the nineteen eighties, but now India is producing 9% and The UK, 2%. So this is a major change by any measurement, and it's kind of equivalent to the industrial revolution, which was the reverse where actually the Western countries share became much greater. Now at that level, I focus on the implications of that, which is the geopolitical implication of one hegemon, The US actually having now weaker position compared to perhaps it would be hegemon in Asia, which is China. So there we have really at that level, we have geopolitical competition and some conflict and hopefully not a war.
Speaker 3:But that level is translated at a personal level. You know, if China becomes a larger economy, obviously, people are better off. You know, the two things just go together. And if the western countries are actually growing more slowly than China, then the western population is growing more slowly than population in China. So then what happens is that over the last forty years, it has been a slow process and China started really very poor.
Speaker 3:But by now, significant parts of the Chinese income distribution have kind of entered into the area which used to be essentially the westerners, actually, were populated at higher part of the global income distribution. And that's what I call this reshuffling. And I will finish with that just giving a small, very nice example how it affects countries, for example, like Italy. Italy has not grown in twenty plus years. And while inequality in Italy has not increased very much, the position of the lower Italian DISAS, let's call it Italian lower middle class and working class, has gone down in the pecking order of the world.
Speaker 3:You know, they used to be at the seventieth percentile, and they are now at the fifty fifth. And finally, and I'm sure this will come later too, one can ask, like, why why does it really matter? An Italian who is a working class Italian, he has no idea whether he's a seventieth percentile or fifty fifth. But in reality, I think it does matter because certain goods, number of goods are internationally priced, and they would be increasingly out of his reach, be it vacations or, you know, going to the World Cup or buying the new iPhone and so forth. So, you know, this is a major, I mean, very big reshuffling of incomes.
Speaker 3:And if the gap in growth rates continues, the reshuffling now would affect also the top of the income distribution.
Speaker 2:Excellent. It's it's it's hard to kind of hold two things in tension when it comes to the rise of China in regards to this reshuffling notion because in a certain sense, right, The United States encouraged trade with China, not just in certain sense, it did. I think of the Nixon administration, some of the different policies. Of course, after the end of the Cold War, there were economic openings all around the world in terms of what The United States and the World Bank and the IMF were trying to do. So in some ways, can't we say that what we're seeing in China today is actually the fulfillment of of globalization?
Speaker 2:And if that's the case, why has it become so much of a threat? And and when did it become a threat? Because it seems as though this kind of reshuffling or maybe even what you could describe as leveling, isn't
Speaker 3:that
Speaker 2:maybe just what was supposed to happen?
Speaker 3:Yes. I mean, you're right. But, you know, I have, as you know, a section which kind of, well, actually, a chapter that looks at the relationship that different people starting from Montesquieu all the way to to Lenin have argued about between globalization or openness. Let's put it, you know, in a old maybe old fashioned way, trade openness and peace or war. Now if you look at The US China relationship, which is a very complex relationship, that relationship has gone through different stages.
Speaker 3:One should not forget that it was not through the benevolence of The United States that The US decided to reopen relations with China, but the the original impetus for that was geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union and the use of China as a sort of a how should I say? An ally in the global well, international, political arena where China was taking increasingly, of course, since 1956, Soviet stance and de facto became an American ally. So that was at the origin. On the other hand, for China, without normalization of relations with The United States, which, of course, as you know, happened in the early nineteen seventies and then established diplomatic relations and then finally rejoining or joining rather the United Nations, it was impossible to develop because it would neither have The US market to export to nor would it have access to US technology. So it was sine qua non for China, but it was extremely important for The United States for the reasons that I just mentioned, political reasons, but also for many companies to make money to actually access an enormous market that was a growing market.
Speaker 3:So it was both sides, and I think it's very clearly explained whenever you read memoirs of different actors, including Kissinger, for example. This was a marriage based on total interest of both sides, and it fitted really damn well. But nobody thought, actually, on The US side and possibly on the Chinese side that things would actually go so fast for China and that there will be a point where China might become sort of a I will not use the threat because, really, it's it's difficult to call it a threat, but it could be a a country that would not see eye to eye with The United States with certain issues and would be not sufficiently large to say that. And I think maybe people believe it would take fifty years, and maybe perhaps people didn't think about I I mean, I would not be surprised if people didn't think about this. They they they thought maybe globalization is going to be good for us.
Speaker 3:It will be good for China. There'll be reduction of poverty. But, you know, you know, I remember the times. Actually, China was very poor country. Nobody people thought, okay.
Speaker 3:There are lots of the Chinese, and then they had the nuclear weapon and all of that. But they didn't seem then likely to become the global power that they have now become after forty years of 8% growth, which really has never happened in history of the world with 1,400,000,000 people. So, you know, as I said, just I think that in many cases, people just didn't think about it.
Speaker 2:Yes. Fascinating. I you know, I'm interested in the section of your book called why are we afraid? I think it's something like why are we afraid of convergence? And I I have personal interest in this because this guy I'm writing a book about, Raymond Aaron, was considered one of the great convergence theorists of his time.
Speaker 2:Just this idea, it goes back to French technocrat names, Saint Simon, which is the the the idea that, you know, modernity marks the advent of a global industrial society. And, industrial society doesn't pertain to an ideology. It's rather a kind of, I guess you could say economy, techno economy. And Aron argued essentially that what we're seeing, and he wrote this in the late nineteen fifties, is a kind of convergence between the industrial societies of the East and the West, which he also said would expand globally. And because of that, he was accused by communists of essentially denying the ideological promises of communism because this world system that would converge would essentially probably be like a free market system.
Speaker 2:That was what he was suspected of. I could see back then why there's this fear of convergence given the promises of Marxism and the threat that something like convergence posed to it. And, of course, there were convergence theorists on the Marxist side that it would tend towards socialism, this convergence. What's the fear of this convergence idea between The United States and China today? What what are the fears about it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, that that's an excellent question. Let me just mention that, well, we'll talk about Iran. Actually, I would love to talk about Iran. But let me mention that I think that what you hear very often in the in the American publishing and even speaking, you fear the you you hear people essentially ex post kind of rationalizing what happened by saying, oh, really, we were expecting that as China develops, it would become, well, you know, western like democracy and all that.
Speaker 3:I I think I really don't believe in that at all. Actually, it is actually a rationalization after the fact that they they don't want to admit two obvious things, actually. Of course, politicians do admit this geopolitical reason to to essentially sort of make the Soviet Union weaker. And the second one is is to make money. And then you kind of start imagining this kind of things.
Speaker 3:People who are making money in China investing, they're saying, oh, we are really investing because we would like to have democracy in China. I honestly think, not to use stronger words, I think it's really basically total rationalization. It makes no sense. But now the theory, of course, as you know, the theory of modernization did exist. So the theory of modernization, you can say, okay.
Speaker 3:Well, as Chinese become richer, they actually would would be also more educated. They would demand greater, you know, political rights, and then you can point out to South Korea and Taiwan, which went through such evolution. But to go back now directly to your question about convergence, you know, we are really afraid of convergence in some sense for two reasons. The first one, if you have a convergence in size of the very large economies like China and The United States, it does lead to the problem that we face now is that the it was kind of a hegemonic conflict. It is simply that The US led system, even before Trump we are not talking about Trump.
Speaker 3:Actually, it was even clearer before Trump. The US led system, which is based on a hierarchical system where The US is at the top and then small I mean, big countries, but not as big as United States are a second layer and so forth, it cannot simply cannot absorb China. China is just too big. China is not going to play a subsidiary role in that system, and the system cannot absorb it. Okay.
Speaker 3:So that's the level of the nation state. But at the level of individual, this is what Diane was saying before about this great reshuffle. People also have hard time from the West. Actually, they got used to being at the top of the global income distribution for two hundred years, and they have trouble now seeing that some other people are actually taking their position. You know, I live in New York.
Speaker 3:You have quite a lot of people from many different countries, and it's not just only billionaires who have apartments. They have other people who have apartments, you know, upper middle class, relatively rich people. I'm saying to people always, just think actually, some people are younger, but think of the composition of people you would see at the airports now compared to twenty years later. You'll see many more people from Asia and from countries that really did not fly that much as they fly now. So the world has changed.
Speaker 3:You know? People oftentimes say the West is 12% of the population, and it becomes more obvious when income levels are relatively similar. The West is much richer, but they become less different. And that actually people how should I say? They notice.
Speaker 3:And I think that also combined with the high rate of growth of the top of the income distribution in those countries, particularly in The United States, an absence of growth along the large part of the domestic population is something which is fueling the resentment and malcontents. So that's let me just then conclude. At the first level, we have greater equality of economic power, which leads to political conflict. At the seven second level, we have greater convergence between incomes of individuals, which leads to the decline of the western middle classes in global ranking and combined with top of of their own countries that have done very well leads to political turbulence. So that is the main argument of the book.
Speaker 3:In other words, that you had desirable developments which are convergence and you have undesirable outcome of that.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Thank you. You know, one of the things I like about your work is your focus on elite theory. In your previous book, Visions of Inequality, you have a great section on the Italian economist Pareto. And in this book, have a excellent discussion of James Burnham's managerial elite, the idea of this new form of political economy that will replace capitalism.
Speaker 2:And it's kind of an idea that people use today to explain this notion of the professional managerial elite class. But one of your interventions is to say that it's absolutely necessary to understand what you describe as the new elite in China and the new elite in The United States to grasp the conflict of this convergence. Can you elaborate on this? What is distinct about this elite in China and in The United States? And maybe, you know, connected to the larger themes of the book?
Speaker 3:Well, thank you Danny for that question. You know, that was a whole chapter. It's based on empirical work on the elites both in China and The United States. They are different elites. They are structurally different.
Speaker 3:I start my discussion in that chapter with The US elite, and I start with James Burnham. You know, strange as it might seem, but, you know, I started economics and actually political economy and statistics. I was essentially a statistician when I did in a work in in Belgrade at university. But interestingly, James Burnham was actually studied there. And his early work he was a Trotskyist and all that, but his early work is extremely Marxist work and to some extent even very sort of dogmatic.
Speaker 3:However, the the managerial revolution was, I think, a great book, and the point there was that, of course, this double function of capital is being a manager and being the owner. And then gradually, he said, and it was very, very well argued from the point of view of 1941. It didn't happen like that, but the argument was, I think, very strong, saying, what what is going to happen is that the managers are generally taking over. And they would become the new ruling class because capitalists do nothing. Basically, they go and play golf in in Miami, and, actually, managers run the show.
Speaker 3:And then he says this would be a new rolling I mean, a rolling class, and and capital capitalism would not be replaced by socialism but by managerialism. Okay. What was interesting, when you look now, fast forward to The US ruling class, which I said, okay. Let's look at the 10% of the richest Americans and ask the following question, which actually nobody has asked before. It seems simple question, but nobody has done it.
Speaker 3:Saying how many of these people are also among the richest capitalists and the richest wage earners? It's not easy and it's not obvious. You know? In the classical capitalism, if you're a capitalist and you're in a top of income distribution, you're not going to double as a as a worker, hired worker. But now in The US, about one third of the top decile are in the top decile by by ownership, by income from property, and in a top decile by wages.
Speaker 3:So it is a dramatic change in capitalism. And then you find the same numbers, somewhat smaller, but you find it for other West European countries. And then you go to classical capitalist countries like Brazil and Peru, and these numbers are very small for obvious reasons. So clearly, we have a modern capitalism, but but what was different, and that's why I want to I like to link with with Burnham. Burnham believed that with the managerial evolution, the managers really would actually lose the the sort of capitalist desire for the protection of private property.
Speaker 3:Because for managers, it doesn't matter whether they're running a state owned company or private company. So they are not really beholden to this view of the sanctity of private property. But if you look at this real class, since they are such important capitalists and they're, of course, workers, they actually have to protect private property. So the the new class that has come in this new capitalism is very much capitalist class that is protecting private property the same way that in the past, people who are total capitalists that had 100% of their income from ownership of property were doing. So that was, I think, actually the interesting part because that has an ideological component, which is kind of obvious, I think.
Speaker 3:And you can actually argue, you have basically a class in America of about 3% of people, because it's one third of the decile, who are, in some sense, impregnable in their elite position, and that's where Pareto comes in. So they have last my last point, they have eliminated class conflict in their own persona because they are both capitalists and laborers, but they have created a class.
Speaker 2:Yes. I found that very rich. You know, I think people are really trying to figure out the nature of what's happening in The United States in terms of the Trump administration and tariffs and, you know, critique of globalism and yet, you know, totally, in some sense, much hardcore capitalists. And I found in this regard your notion of national market liberalism. I think that's what you referred to it as a very illuminating, a form of capitalism that remains committed to private property, remains committed to, I don't know, tax cuts or something like this.
Speaker 2:But is critical of other elements of what we would dissociate with with capitalism, free trade or things of this nature. I I thought this was very helpful. Can you can you elaborate on this idea and how it applies to The United States and elsewhere?
Speaker 3:You know, that idea comes I was from my thinking, like, okay. We know that we are at the end of neoliberal globalization. You know, everybody agrees for what what are reasons. We don't need to go into that because we all know. But the question then becomes, actually, can we say something meaningful about what is going to come?
Speaker 3:You know, we are not sure that this will come, but, you know, let's try to sort of think what could how it could look. And then I started with really with sort of basic points of liberal ideology, or then which was also taken by neoliberalism. And for for starters, let's divide it into two parts, domestic part and international part. The international part, as you said, actually includes things that have been included from 1944, more or less, you know, and then even more into nineteen eighties, freedom of circulation of capital that was more recent. But then also freedom of trade, flexible exchange rates, low tariffs, and all the things that we know, you know, these are basically the main points.
Speaker 3:Protection of investments abroad and, you know, obviously, open capital accounts and so forth. And then domestically, in the economic sphere, it includes the usual trilogy of, you know, triad of of privatization, deregulation, and flexibilization of labor and so forth. Now when you look at that currently, the international part is gone. And it's not only Trump today. It has been Trump number one.
Speaker 3:It was continuation with Biden. It was coercion economic coercion, imposition of tariffs, subsidization of domestic companies, bans to Chinese, for example, IPOs in The United States, number of things like that. You know, TikTok case and ridiculous things of that kind. Mhmm. So that is on, and I think Trump clearly and now others, including the Chinese who are now also using economic coercion, as we know with rare errors and so forth, that international part is really now different.
Speaker 3:It is a game of essentially neo American till list zero sum trade essentially. So it is really gone. So I said, okay. This international part is new. So we now have a neo I don't even want to call it neo, actually.
Speaker 3:We have mercantilist. Okay. But the domestic part really remains many of these elements, particularly in The US, with lower taxation on capital, reduction of taxation on capital, reduction of taxation on top incomes, deregulation of many things including, you know, oil exploration and other things, total disregard, climate change, all of this stuff really doesn't exist. That kind of deepens the neoliberal part in the economic sphere and sort of liberal values which were social in the social sphere, like, you know, positive or negative freedoms, that especially for positive freedoms, that becomes downplayed. And, you know, in the sort of a mega movement, that's really we don't really like that.
Speaker 3:We don't like foreigners and all that. And we don't like people who are different and so on. So that actually, when I looked at this four quadrants, the only one really which remains is that national, because it is really now within the nation, it's market, and it's liberalism. If for short, you can call it national liberalism, and then people will say, well, this is interesting. Liberalism was and is theoretically a cosmopolitan and internationalist ideology.
Speaker 3:So how can you have nationalism in one country, so to speak? Mhmm. Well, you can, you know, you take socialism. It's also internationalist ideology. But if you put nationalist prefix in front of that, it becomes something else.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I think in this case, you put nationalist prefix before, liberalism, and we really have a different system.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So that was the the my objective was actually to give a name, reasonable name to that system. I'm not saying that everything that we observe now, you can just simply, put it in that you know, peg it exactly there. But I do think that we have a liberalism domestically neoliberalism domestically combined with the American holistic policies outside or, you know, internationally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I thought it was a great heuristic and applies very well. And, you know, and there's this also this idea of a new national international, which you could maybe, you know, make an argument based on those grounds of these of these great powers that mark this current moment coming together for some kind of new new world order. But I guess one question I have is, is this a book inspired by Karl Polanyi? Just the notion of market nationalism or national liberalism seems like the double movement in in a way and not entirely because politics were different of Polanyi's great transformation.
Speaker 2:Of course, the book has that connotation, the title, the great global transformation. What in what ways did the thought of Karl Polanyi influence your thinking in in in this regard?
Speaker 3:Well, Polanyi influenced my thinking quite a lot because it so happened that I read Polanyi many years ago, but I don't think that I understood him very well. I understood pieces of it, but not all of it. But it still happened, you know, sometimes really fortunate, serendipity, if you can call it, happened. You know? Penguin, which was my publisher, published Polanyi as well.
Speaker 3:So I said, okay. That was really a very nice new edition. So I reread Polani. And now, actually, I really could understand, I think, like, let's say 80%. And actually and I was for example, the the parts where he's very critical of classical economists, including Marx and and Smith and all that, I could understand much better than than than before.
Speaker 3:So it did actually influence me as I was writing. And then I thought, well, you know, this is a different transformation. Obviously, he talked about rise of capitalism in England, so it's But in both cases, these are wrenching transformations. In this case, it is really global transformation. And that's what I took the title.
Speaker 3:And then interestingly, there was a, I think, a quote even in terminologically when he talks about it's an interesting situation. He talks about how in Europe before the World War I, liberal nationalism sort of became national liberalism. So the even the word, actually, the term national liberalism is there. It's not necessarily exactly the same what I have in mind, but sometimes when I want to abbreviate national market liberalism, which is really kind of clunky because there are three terms, I'm quite happy to say national liberalism. It's really basically neoliberalism in one country, if you will.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah. That's helpful. I just wanna ask two more questions. You know?
Speaker 2:And I and I know this is this is gonna be a question that you don't necessarily like because you already told me that you don't have much interest in religion. This is a this, you know, commonwealth's been around for over a hundred years. It's a liberal left Catholic magazine. And you're from former Eastern Bloc. And, you know, we are living in a time where there's an obvious connection between nationalism and religion today in terms of this this populace, you know, turn.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking of some of the things that happened in the late eighties in Poland, early nineties, and in in Russia, in the Balkans. How do you see this? Is this just all nationalism all the way down? Or you you worked for the World Bank. There was at some point I think in the late in the nineties an attempt by the World Bank to work with faith based initiatives, this kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And it turns out some of these groups are quite conservative, maybe even right wing. Do you have any random speculative thoughts on the religious elements of today's moment?
Speaker 3:Well, to be quite honest, I I was not influenced by religion. So let's start with that. And I didn't know about I knew vaguely there was this faith initiative, but, you know, it I think it will evolve, for instance, initiative, and most of his initiatives were really sort of what is called harebrained and, you know, I don't think it led to anything. But I do actually have a fairly negative view of the connection between religion region and nationalism in Eastern Europe. And I've been arguing, well, for a long time, there were several of my sub stocks quite popular that when actually essentially the revolutions with people called democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe were really revolutions of national self determination because they didn't like being sort of controlled in many ways, not all, but in some ways by the Soviet Union.
Speaker 3:And, of course, there was an implicit identification between Soviet Union and Russia, and, of course, East European people like Poland, for example, or the Baltics, of course, represented that. So I think it's much better to interpret them as nationalist revolutions, not in a negative sense, but just as a factually, that in some sense took seemingly democratic form because that was popular, and you don't want to say, well, we are really nationalists. We hate Russians. We want to have to be totally free. You say, well, look, actually, everybody agrees.
Speaker 3:80% of people, they want to vote. They are actually all democrats and all that. But there was always underlying in some of these countries. For example, the church in Poland was extremely influential. You know, I worked on Poland and actually knew Poland quite well.
Speaker 3:That was before the transition. That's when I met many people, including the begin opening of the book with Jeff Sachs and David Linton. We met in Poland in '19 before the regime changed, 1987. You know, Jeff Sachs came to Poland. He might not always say that, but he came during the Yorozelski regime, not Bolzaroich regime.
Speaker 3:So he stayed on, but the original contact was with Yorozelski. So then I saw the power of the church, a conservative side of the church, a nationalistic. And then the same is in the Balkans, but it's actually worse there Because you have three religions and de facto the same people because we all speak the same language, you have Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims. And they had, Muslims and the Orthodox had, of course, very conflictual history because of the Ottoman Empire. One group of people sort of adopted the religion, other group of people did not.
Speaker 3:And also during World War two between Catholics, because Catholics were actually Croatia was a pop state of the Nazi Germany and engaged in in in genocide. So that was that putting a country together that eventually first the the first Yugoslavia did and then Tito did again was very, very difficult. And so the the the basic sort of ideology there is nationalism. And it didn't please me, and actually it continues being so. And so we see that in Ukraine as well.
Speaker 3:You know, You see it in Russia now with the rise. It camouflages as religion, but if you look at whether Russians are are really sort of hampered in their behavior by religious requirements, they are not. You know? It's a country which talks about universal values, but it has the highest rates of suicide, domestic violence, abortion. You cannot you you know, I look at French and the Russian numbers.
Speaker 3:It's like we're talking about five times as much. Mhmm. And then you go to the Russian doom, and they talk the a sort of family values of the orthodoxy. Like, what kind of family values? I mean, your society is not growing, but population is stagnating.
Speaker 3:Men beat women. I mean, alcoholism is rife. Drug is is is huge. Suicide and murder. And then we are talking about the traditional values.
Speaker 3:So, you know, I was never convinced of that. I'm too empirical. I just say, okay, you have traditional values, show me them, and you don't.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Great. Great. Excellent. One one last question. I'm intrigued by your interest in Raymond Aaron.
Speaker 2:Why? Why do you read him? And why did you read did you read his writings when you were in university? And thank you so much, by the way, for reading this massive book I wrote. I think you might be one of the few people who've done that.
Speaker 2:But, I mean, it's not out yet, but, I mean, it's it's it's quite long, so I appreciate that. But what do you find of use in his writings? And what do you find to be you you just recently wrote a critical piece about his memoirs, which were published in 1983, and I recommend this review. It's on Branko Substack. Where it seemed my takeaway was that you became away from him less impressed than maybe you originally were.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, that's an excellent question. I really would like I'm going to write another maybe two reviews, not only of your book, but also the issues that you address. Now, what I find extraordinary about Aaron, first of all, I really was very much influenced by his work on on convergence. You mentioned in the book that he's mistakenly taken as an ideologue of convergence, but that's how I took him. And I really like this work about the industrial societies.
Speaker 3:I think there are, like, three booklets published. I read that in English. And then I read actually his excellent reviews of different sociologists. He has, as you know, Durkheim, Pareto, Marx, Max Weber, and they were really very well done. So I actually that was my that's where he was influenced me.
Speaker 3:That I mean, that's how he influenced me. But since I also lived in when I was in high school in a very formative period in Belgium and read lots of stuff, obviously, French papers and all that, I knew Aaron as a commentator. And I knew, of course, of his relationship with Sartre. So this is all familiar to me. And so I sort of kept track on our own, and then later learned about PEGA.
Speaker 3:So I knew that he was international relations, sort of work in the IR field, but I didn't, of course, know at that time that actually your book makes it more explicit. And of course, in the meantime, I learned, you know, more of this sort of divergence with realists and so on. But I knew, for example, Keysinger that he quotes in his books actually, Ramon, very highly. So I was how should I say? No.
Speaker 3:I was not Aronian, but I was aware very much of his work. But just to add, like, you know, your book to me brought areas that I didn't know and which are extraordinary interesting, not only because of our own, but because of intellectual history of Europe. And that was the period before World War II, where this is this really complex decision making between you have communist liberals and fascists. So it is kind of very difficult to actually navigate there. And also that part, which I really liked very much, is his position regarding the Vichy regime.
Speaker 3:And it's actually wrong to call it Vichy regime. It was a Vichy government because, of course, the argument was his continuous legally continuing France. And as you mentioned, actually, US recognized that government until, I think November 1942.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And what we also in a different book, was just reading something, Vichy government breaks off the relations with Stalin's Russia when Germany attacks the Soviet Union. So the Vichy government was recognized by both the Soviet Union and The US. And that part for me was very interesting and Aron's very sort of ambivalent position regarding the the the Vichy government. And then the part which I knew better, it it comes on then in the sixties and the seventies and the council for economic, what is called, for economic freedom and for cultural freedom. Yes.
Speaker 3:Anyway, this is a beautiful book. It has so many details because after all, he has been very active for more than fifty years. So I'm you know, it is going to be hugely, I think, important book. It's it's basically intellectual history of Western Europe through one man who was so much involved in it.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate your kind words there. And, you know, you work on something for a long time, and then you finish it. You don't know how it's gonna land.
Speaker 2:So I'm glad that it it landed well with you. We appreciate, Branko, you joining us on the show today and the Great Global Transformation. We highly recommend the book. Just came out at the end of last year with the University of Chicago Press. Thanks again, Branko.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you again. I mean, it was really a pleasure. I think I have a feeling we could discuss, I mean, these issues, like, for hours and hours because they're such such big issues. I I think that we can use understandable words to to discuss them. We don't need to obligate things in a in a sort of fumes of, jargon.
Speaker 3:Sure. And I think that your book has done exactly that, and I I hope actually that my book is relatively free from the from jargon. Absolutely. And maybe next time we should discuss China because it really plays, as you know, a big role in in in my book. So and, again, thank you so much.
Speaker 3:It was really a pleasure. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks, Nick. Thank thank you much.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:That's all the time we have for this episode. We wanna thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.