Exploring Disaster Politics and Historical Perspectives

In a historical reflection on the disastrous events of 2020, Niall Ferguson delves into why our ability to handle disasters seems to be declining rather than improving.

Predicting disasters is a daunting task. Whether it's pandemics, earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises, or wars, these events are unpredictable and not evenly spread out. There is no historical pattern to guide us in anticipating the next catastrophic event. Nonetheless, it is crucial to be more prepared than civilizations like the Romans during the eruption of Vesuvius or medieval Italians facing the Black Death. Fortunately, we now have the advantage of science on our side.

In 2020, the handling of a new virus from China by many developed nations, including the USA, was widely criticized. While some Asian countries applied lessons from previous disasters like SARS and MERS, others faltered. Though populist leaders struggled during the COVID-19 crisis, Niall Ferguson suggests deeper underlying issues at play – issues that have plagued our responses to historical calamities.

In books going again practically twenty years, together with
Colossus ,
The Nice Degeneration , and
The Sq. and the Tower , Ferguson has studied the foibles of recent America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and on-line fragmentation.

Drawing from a number of disciplines, together with economics, cliodynamics, and community science,
Doom gives not only a historical past however a normal concept of disasters, displaying why our ever extra bureaucratic and sophisticated techniques are getting worse at handing them.

Doom is the lesson of historical past that this country–indeed the West as a whole–urgently must be taught, if we wish to deal with the following disaster higher, and to keep away from the final word doom of irreversible decline.