John Nye: belief

Transcript context

…Luck? What is the good luck? What’s the lucky event? Not being invaded or . . . ? I think, or not having the war turn out worse. Britain was at war for 50 percent of the 18th century, and that’s up to the early 1800s. I think, in many ways, one of the things we underestimate is the extent to which the wars in Europe did not lead to greater destruction. If something had led to a more cataclysmic event, if Napoleon had won the war but then there had been a fight back, you might have had a far greater upheaval. It sounds fancifully science fiction today, but I really think that Europe has benefited from an extreme degree of political and economic competition. But extreme political and economic competition is beneficial if you don’t destroy the underlying order that makes competition and innovation possible in the first place. Frank Fukuyama has suggested that, whether Britain or England — I’m not sure — had a more mature state early on, along with Denmark, and this is why they were not successfully invaded. They were fiscally strong, they could build a navy. They didn’t lose any of those wars in the sense of being conquered. Do you agree with his argument? Do you think that was luck?…

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