In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation.ĭrawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them.ĭoom is the lesson of history that this country–indeed the West as a whole–urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work–pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. and wars, are not normally distributed there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. Niall Ferguson, 'Doom' CSPAN 2:01am-3:03am EDT Author and Hoover Institution senior fellow Niall Ferguson argued that the U.S. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. It professes to be a ‘general history of catastrophe’.

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. The speed with which Ferguson’s models mere models, remember were transformed into a kind of Biblical writ, a revelation of doom, was extraordinary. Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe By Niall Ferguson Allen Lane 496pp 25 order from our bookshop Niall Ferguson (the historian, not to be confused with Neil Ferguson the epidemiologist) has written an interesting but peculiar book.

Neil ferguson doom