Doom : the politics of catastrophe / Niall Ferguson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ferguson, Niall, author.

Contributor:

ProQuest ebook central.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

COVID-19 (Disease)--History.

COVID-19 (Disease).

COVID-19 (Disease)--Political aspects.

Epidemics--Political aspects.

Epidemics.

Political leadership.

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xx, 472 pages) : illustrations, maps

Place of Publication:

New York : Penguin Press, 2021.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

"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.

Contents:

Chapter 1 The Meaning of Death p. 19

Chapter 2 Cycles and Tragedies p. 43

Chapter 3 Gray Rhinos, Black Swans, and Dragon Kings p. 69

Chapter 4 Networld p. 105

Chapter 5 The Science Delusion p. 141

Chapter 6 The Psychology of Political Incompetence p. 175

Chapter 7 From the Boogie Woogie Flu to Ebola in Town p. 213

Chapter 8 The Fractal Geometry of Disaster p. 251

Chapter 9 The Plagues p. 285

Chapter 10 The Economic Consequences of the Plague p. 319

Chapter 11 The Three-Body Problem p. 345

Conclusion Future Shocks p. 379.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI Available via World Wide Web.

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on May 17, 2021).

Other Format:

Print version: Ferguson, Niall. Doom

ISBN:

9780593297384

0593297385

Publisher Number:

40030538656

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.