COVID-19 was a test failed by countries who must learn some serious lessons from history if they are to avoid the doom of irreversible decline. In this book Ferguson offers a global history of disaster. Drawing on preoccupations that have shaped his books for some twenty years, Niall Ferguson describes the pathologies that have done us so much damage- from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online schism. Niall Campbell Ferguson FRSE is a Scottish historian who serves as the Milbank Family Senior. Why were so many Cassandras for so long ignored? Why did only some countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? Why do appeals to 'the science' often turn out to be mere magical thinking?ĭrawing from multiple disciplines, including history, economics, public health and network science, Doom- The Politics of Catastrophe is a global post mortem for a plague year. Only when we understand the central challenge posed by disaster in history can we see that this was also a failure of an administrative state and of economic elites that had grown myopic over much longer than just a few years. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises and.

Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. While populist rulers have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profund problems have been exposed by COVID-19. Available in National Library (Singapore). He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of Doom: The Politics of. The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Yet the responses of a number of devloped countries to a new pathogen 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. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises and wars, are not normally distributed there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. A provocative, original and compelling history of catastrophes and their consequencesĭisasters are by their very nature hard to predict.

Niall ferguson catastrophe