Niall Ferguson: DOOM! (#273)

Niall Ferguson’s most recent book is Doom: The Politics of
Catastrophe. In this book he posits that disasters are inherently
hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, and
financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is
no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. 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.   Yet in 2020 the responses of
many developed countries, including the United States, to
a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist
leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19
pandemic, Professor Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies
were at work. Drawing 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. Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior
Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior
faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs at Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is the author of sixteen
books.  In 2003, Ferguson wrote and presented a six-part
history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK broadcaster.
The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British
World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, was a bestseller in
both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise
and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin,
and prompted Time magazine to name him one of the 100 most
influential people in the world. The international bestseller, The
Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, published
in 2008 was adapted into a PBS series, winning the International
Emmy award for Best Documentary, as well as the Handelszeitung
Economics Book Prize. In 2011 he published Civilization: The West
and the Rest, also a Channel 4/PBS documentary series. A year later
came the three-part television series “China: Triumph and Turmoil.”
The book based on his 2012 BBC Reith lectures, The Great
Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, was a New
York Times bestseller within a week of its publication. Ferguson
has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a
columnist for Newsweek. He began writing a twice-a-month column for
Bloomberg Opinion in June 2020. www.niallferguson.com
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