All disasters are in some sense man-made. Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical
perspective Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse not better at handling
disasters. Disasters are inherently 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 in 2020 the responses of many developed countries
including the United States to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a
few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders
certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic Niall Ferguson argues that
more profound pathologies were at work-pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier
disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years including Colossus The Great Degeneration
and The Square and the Tower Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America from imperial
hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. 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. Doom is the lesson of history that this country-indeed the West
as a whole-urgently needs to learn if we want to handle the next crisis better and to avoid
the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.
