EAN: 9780241501764

DOOM THE POLITICS OF CATASTROPHE - NIALL FERGUS...

Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. 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. 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. We
have science on our side  after all. Yet the responses of a number of devloped countries to a
new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? The facile answer is to blame poor leadership.
While populist rulers have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic  more profund
problems have been exposed by COVID-19. 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. 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? Drawing
from multiple disciplines  including history  economics and network science  Doom: The Politics
of Catastrophe is a global post mortem for a plague year. 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. 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.

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