Episode Details

Adam Tooze joins PTO to talk about his new book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy. We talked about the problems and pitfalls of writing instant history, why 'shutdown' is a more useful way of thinking about how governments and ordinary people responded to the Covid19 crisis than 'lockdown'. And finally, we chatted about why China's radical efforts to suppress the virus in Wuhan, Hubei province and beyond was not as typical of the regime as is commonly supposed.