Into The Impossible

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 F