As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline. Americans feel less safe, poorer and weaker at home and abroad than they did three years ago. While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.ĭrawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. Joe Biden’s presidency has been a catastrophe for the United States and the free world. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. 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. The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of whichKissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealistwas published in 2015 to critical acclaim. Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Drawing 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. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. In advance of the NAEC Group Conference 'Confronting Planetary Emergencies', Niall Ferguson discusses 'Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe'. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. 'Insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant' New York TimesĪ compelling history of catastrophes and their consequences, from 'the most brilliant British historian of his generation' (The Times)ĭisasters are inherently hard to predict. Immensely readable' Douglas Alexander, Financial Times

The politics of catastrophe