Doom The Politics of Catastrophe

The book argues that "all disasters are in some sense man-made," placing the *annus horribilis* of 2020 in historical perspective. Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling catastrophes like pandemics, earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises, and wars. Using the badly bungled response of developed countries to the COVID-19 pandemic as a central case, he argues that the failures were due to profound pathologies, including bureaucratic sclerosis, imperial hubris, and online fragmentation, rather than just poor populist leadership. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, the book offers a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are failing and asserting that the West must learn from history to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.

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