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Niall Ferguson

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe Paperback – May 6, 2021

by Niall Ferguson (Author)

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Disasters are by their very nature 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 the responses of a number of devloped countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why?

The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. While populist rulers have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profund problems have been exposed by COVID-19. Only when we understand the central challenge posed by disaster in history can we see that this was also a failure of an administrative state and of economic elites that had grown myopic over much longer than just a few years. Why were so many Cassandras for so long ignored? Why did only some countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? Why do appeals to 'the science' often turn out to be mere magical thinking?

Drawing from multiple disciplines, including history, economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe is a global post mortem for a plague year. 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 hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online schism. COVID-19 was a test failed by countries who must learn some serious lessons from history if they are to avoid the doom of irreversible decline.

Print length

496 pages
Language

English
Publisher

ALLEN LANE
Publication date

May 6, 2021
Dimensions

6.02 x 1.38 x 9.21 inches
ISBN-10

0241501768
ISBN-13

978-0241501764
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ ALLEN LANE (May 6, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0241501768
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241501764
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.32 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.02 x 1.38 x 9.21 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,560,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Niall Ferguson

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Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC. The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which—Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist—was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. Ferguson's six-part PBS television series, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," based on his best-seller, won an International Emmy for best documentary in 2009. Civilization was also made into a documentary series. Ferguson is a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service as well as other honors. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks on Power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).

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Autopsies of Disaster

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2021

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Niall Ferguson, the global jet-setter historian based at Stanford’s Hoover Institution has written a long and somewhat disjointed book on politics of disasters. It is really three books:
1) An analysis of prior disasters,
2) A history of the past 120 years,
3) His speculations about the future of U.S./China relations.

He starts his book discussing his travels to and from 2021 Davos meeting and points beyond. In essence he was a potential super-spreader of COVID 19. He ends up being holed up in Montana with his family where he wrote this book. He finished the book in August 2020, not knowing how bad the pandemic would get over the next six months. Hence he was way too complacent in comparing COVID-19 with the 1957 flu epidemic.

To make his points he uses network theory and fractal geometry to explain prior catastrophes. He is especially acute in discussing the 1918 Spanish Flu, the Challenger disaster, the Irish famine, Chernobyl, and the Battle of the Somme. In all he points to the fact that although many disasters appear to be natural, there are significant human causes associated with them. These could either be population concentrations in flood zones of massive bureaucratic failures to understand the nature of the challenges they faced. The latter was especially acute with respect to the Challenger and Chernobyl.

In his discussion of our future relations Ferguson believes we are now in Cold War 2.0. There was one very especially acute statement made by Chinese political theorist Jiang Shigong who noted “The Anglo-American Empire is unravelling internally beset by three unsolvable problems. The ever-increasing inequality created by the liberal economy…ineffective governance caused by political liberalism, and decadence and nihilism created by cultural liberalism." That pretty much says it all.

Although I was disappointed with Ferguson’s book, it remains a very thought provoking read.

18 people found this helpful

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Apocalypse with hope

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2021

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The general theme about this book appears to be about doom, as the title declares. But what about it? The greatest doom would surely be the ultimate and inevitable end of this planet, a fact accepted by Ferguson in his first chapter – ‘This is the default fate of life on our planet’. So, we are led back to the question, ‘what about it?’

We can search for clues in the subtitle of the book: ‘The Politics of Catastrophe’. Again, the exercise will yield few answers, and, instead, lead us into a maze of information. It is as if the reader has to construct a story out of an encyclopaedic dump. Some (many) bits are interesting. One of the which concerns the opposing faiths of Martin Rees and Steven Pinker. In 2002, Rees bet that ‘by 2020, bioterror and bioterror will lead to a million casualties in a single event’. Pinker, on the other hand, predicted that the world would never face another pandemic. We are too organised, he proclaimed; too technologically advanced. Germs are no match for us.

Pinker aside, Ferguson explores early plagues and other catastrophes – the sinking of the Titanic, the fiery end of the Hindenburg, and the explosion of the Challenger spacecraft. Ferguson draws us into the current Cold War II between America and China, and considers various possibilities of the growing tension.

Ferguson tries to connect the global response to Covid-19 with the current big power politics. He assesses the various areas in which America under Trump have pulled the US ahead of China. He lists four, but two are subsets of the other two, namely, financial and technological advances. By themselves, the illustrations are interesting – but we end where we began, asking, ‘What about it?’ although by the end of the book, the question can be rephrased to ‘What’s it all about?’

5 people found this helpful

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Chris Ziesler

The Perils of Writing History As It Happens

Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2021

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While this is a very timely and topical book it suffers from the simple problem that Ferguson is writing about one of his major themes - COVID-19 - as it is still unfolding. He makes some excellent points about the failure and confusion of the response in the US being far more widely spread than simply the occupant of the White House, but his arguments about the financial response are largely undermined by subsequent events and the second and third waves of infection.

It is particularly unfortunate, not to say tragic, that his comparison of the impact of COVID-19 being of a similar magnitude as the Asian Flu of 1957-58 seems far less relevant given the huge surge in infections and deaths in India and SE Asia that are happening as I write this review in May 2021.

Ferguson's examination and exploration of the impact of networks on catastrophes in general is enlightening and thought-provoking, and he makes a particularly strong case that the instinctive response of the Chinese authorities to cover up the early infections in December 2020 allowed the pandemic to gain access to the rest of the world at a moment when it might have been contained.

If you enjoy reading history that is provocatively written with well-informed arguments you will find a lot to enjoy in this latest book by one of the leading thinkers of our times.

23 people found this helpful

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Ricky

History in a time of propaganda

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 20, 2021

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Niall Ferguson is one of my favourite historians. He presents here a compelling and well-argued account of the many ‘doomsday’ scenarios that have visited humankind. He challenges the idea that some are purely natural catastrophes, such as volcanic eruptions, as some involve man-made disasters such as people building homes near these risky sites.
The incentive behind writing this book has doubtless been the Covid-19 epidemic and he sets out to put it into perspective, while mindful that it is not yet over…always a tricky task for an historian. Nevertheless, he uses the information we have to date to compare its likely trajectory to other pandemics as well as other ‘doom’ scenarios such as war and other atrocities.
The book is an intelligent take on a subject that usually requires a calmer consideration than is possible in current times. Whilst he does the historical account very well, the same cannot be said of him turning his considerable skills to the present. We live in very turbulent times, with propaganda masquerading as news, censorship instead of debate and moral proclamations producing hysterical and often non-rational judgements. It is simply impossible to produce a calm, measured and balanced conclusion about this pandemic, since there are many factual and counterfactual arguments and a dearth of agreed facts.
I recommend this book for its historical accuracy and attempt to present a measured perspective on the likely death toll. However, as he says himself, the breakdown of societal networks will have a much longer effect if and when the virus vanishes. We are living through anxious and dangerous times, since there are forces at work that seek to change the nature of Western society and possibly the world itself. This is where Niall Ferguson’s analysis breaks down in my opinion, since his bias starts to show through. He is clearly not a fan of the populist movement, nor President Trump. Yet, he fails to remain impartial and Fox News is mentioned several times as if propaganda is limited to their output. The elitists at Davos are shown as myopic in their quest for a Green economy, but the UN Agenda 21 and ‘The Great Reset’ project by the World Economic Forum escape similar scrutiny.
For his brave attempt to describe the historical Doom scenarios and compare them to the present day pandemic, I give this book 4 stars.

17 people found this helpful

Roger McEvilly (the guilty bystander)

The usual excellent historical touch from Ferguson

Reviewed in Australia on May 20, 2021

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It's articulate, detailed, and written in a typically English style of restraint and candour.

Lots of detail, it's quite dense and heavy going at times. I've read through much of this sort of thing before, volcanic disasters, tsunamis, Chernobyl, Fukushima, the worst Air crashes, Titanic, the black death, plagues of various descriptions, covid19, Easter Island, World War 1, World War 2, the Asian Flu of 1957-58, the Challenger disaster, The Spanish Flu, aids, smallpox, vaccines, wars, famines, natural disasters, climate change, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, communist purges, millennial cults, you name it, if its a major or nearly major disaster, it's probably in here.

From grey rhinos-big ugly and obvious before they arrived, to Black Swans-not easily predicted beforehand, to Dragon Kings-outsize events that don't fit on the scale, it's a very cool headed overview of disaster and doom, science, and history.

In fact it's better and more detailed than most catastrophe books, with a wider range than many specialist authors can achieve in their respective fields, something the historian sometimes has an advantage over, since they don't focus on just one specialised type of disaster, such as only volcanos or only pandemics alone.

Detailed analysis of covid19 of course, but some of this is already dated, with major second waves and variants yet to get underway when it was written in August -September last year 2020. But even the covid19 stuff is entertaining and enlightening, with details of origins and developments that haven't aged, only recent predictions, recent vaccines and variants are not up to date.

I've read most of Ferguson's books, all of them are excellent and worth reading, and this more topical than most. He is typically English and conservative, but with an original, slightly rebellious streak that is not typically English. He references things like styles of rock music, comic books, and other things a typical academic historian might miss, such as the publication of Mad magazine and Elvis songs in the 1950s at the time of the Asian flu, or the African Ebola dance of 2014-2015, which mimicked hugging and kissing from a distance. It's a nice cultural touch that is often part of the reason his books are so popular. Not every historian is in touch with such everyday 'smelling of the roses'. My favourite historian author for 'big picture' overviews.

2 people found this helpful

Alexandra

Cassandra and Moral Scars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 17, 2021

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Niall Ferguson’s new book exposes humanities obsession with calamity. Many believe that they are Cassandra, alone in their ability to predict the future while everyone else is too ignorant to listen to the plight. It is a cycle which never ceases to captivate the human mind. For some it boarders a fetish, “we were wrong today, but we’ll be right eventually”.

It is Ferguson’s triumph in this book that he does not fall in wholeheartedly with either the Covid Calamity Predictors or the Anti-Vaxx Loons.

Despite being released at the perfect time to be one, this is not a work exclusively about COVID-19 or pandemics (though they both unavoidably appear). Instead this is a work about catastrophes and the effects they have on our public/private spheres, and the scars they leave upon our mortal conscious.

We live in a time when the coronavirus pandemic is yet to pass. Thus any attempts to pen its course in a meaningful manner - which will stand the test of time - is futile, and (for now) a waste of effort. As Ferguson puts it: ‘To write a history of a disaster that is not yet over is, on the face of it, impossible’. It perhaps says something about our ‘next day delivery’ society that there is an immediate market for such a work. However she was bound to rear her head at some point and Corona struts onto the center stage as the star of this works finale. I comforted myself in the knowledge that at least someone of sense was cataloguing these events. I am thus reluctant to judge this book wholly, including its final chapters. On the surface it seems sensible and its verdicts sound. But there are many developments yet to come which none of us can foresee. Who am I to judge, for who am I to know?

One person found this helpful

Nora Abercrombie

Flippant and poorly executed

Reviewed in Canada on January 30, 2023

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I was hoping for an enlightening read. Instead, Ferguson is cavalier about COVID, justifying it by providing meaningless data about how many people used to die from disease: "say your prayers and take your chances." As if we don't realize that people used to have to accept death as it came. What we all want is to figure out how to renew our politics to survive our current situation. That is not this book.

For those of us who are upset about needless human suffering, and the current mass exctinction, this book is simply offensive. There is nothing in here that we couldn't find on wikipedia, and there is no coherent or useful argument about how politics need to change to deal with looming catastrophes.

Frankly, I suspect that Ferguson saw that he could make a quick buck, hired a few researchers and stitched it all together off of the end of his desk, in between brandies. It is an arrogant and inadequate effort.

One person found this helpful

D. Levesque

SATISFAITE

Reviewed in Canada on April 2, 2023

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Très intrigant comme histoire. Je recommande

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