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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. 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.

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. While populist rulers have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profound problems have been exposed by COVID-19. Why? The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. Yet the responses of a number of developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. 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. 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. Summary Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict.