"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.
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