Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
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3.0 • 4 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'Magisterial ... Immensely readable' Douglas Alexander, Financial Times
'Insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant' New York Times
A compelling history of catastrophes and their consequences, from 'the most brilliant British historian of his generation' (The Times)
Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why?
While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.
Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline.
'Stimulating, thought-provoking ... Readers will find much to relish' Martin Bentham, Evening Standard
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Incompetence, illusions, and random chance characterize the ways humans cope with disaster, according to this scattershot historical study. Hoover Institution scholar Ferguson (The Square and the Tower) surveys many natural and man-made catastrophes, including volcanic eruptions, plagues, the 1840s Irish potato famine, WWI, the Hindenburg disaster, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident; he also mulls dystopian sci-fi novels and, provocatively, welcomes the "desirable"(because it would foster American innovation) prospect of a "new cold war" between the U.S. and China. The book's centerpiece is a discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic that faults Western governments for failing to contain the virus with massive testing and tracing, but also opposes lockdowns for their economic and mental health effects. Ferguson's sharp-eyed catastrophe postmortems debunk received wisdom (more lifeboats on the Titanic might not have made much difference) and spotlight delusional responses, from medieval flagellant rituals to the current "vague deference to ‘the science'... as if gimcrack computer simulations with made-up variables constitute science." Unfortunately, his own stabs at scientific analysis yield few new insights—he invokes "scale-free network topology" to say that Covid-19 spread quickly via airports—and he draws the obvious conclusion that catastrophes are unpredictable and individual leaders usually have little control over them. This colorful catalogue of misfortune and folly brings little clarity to the subject.
