Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post An informative, amusing and thought-provoking read that is full of steadying good sense for these troubled times. Niall Ferguson's Doom looks at each of these aspects, putting them into historical perspective in a book of dazzling range and rigour. This is not just about a virus but a collision of politics, panic, digital media, human behaviour and incompetence. The Economistĭoom covers an impressive sweep of history at a lively narrative clip and weaves a lot of disparate strands together into an engaging picture. New York TimesĪ superb history of the lost art of handling a crisis. Niall Ferguson's Doom is often insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant. It's a useful reminder that what may feel like having unprecedented restrictions imposed on our lives today is nothing new.

Each chapter of this thought-provoking book is worth reading for the ideas, perceptiveness and well-told stories of landmark events. Ferguson his prodigious intellect to placing the present pandemic on a wider historic canvas. 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. 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. 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. While populist rulers have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profund problems have been exposed by COVID-19. The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. 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.

Doom the politics of catastrophe