Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

While the rest of us spent lockdown learning to bake sourdough, Niall Ferguson applied his intellect to the task of placing the pandemic in historical context. In Doom, the Scottish-born Harvard historian sets out to understand why humanity, time and again through the ages, has failed to prepare for catastrophe.

There's no doubt that Ferguson's inquiry is dazzlingly broad, covering a host of natural and man-made disasters. He mixes Vesuvius, wars, famine, Chernobyl with a variety of disciplines. These range from network science to epidemiology. However, I found the whole thing a massively confusing, rambling mishmash. An unconvincing blend of statements of the readily apparent and laborious theorising. Was the pandemic a black swan (an unexpected event that catches humanity unawares), a grey rhino (an obviously dangerous event that people nonetheless do nothing about), or a dragon king (an event that flattens civilisation)? Ferguson says it was a grey rhino. Ok, so? And when not playing with grand concepts, he indulges in tiresome liberal-baiting. For example, Black Lives Matter was a “contagion”.

Another problem with this book is that it is already outdated. Concluding his narrative last autumn, Ferguson predicts the Covid-19 pandemic will be remembered not in the same league as the 1918 Spanish influenza, but rather the (now largely forgotten) Asian flu of 1957. A lot, however, has happened since: the second wave, the emergence of scary new variants, and the roll-out of vaccines.

I'll save you the job of wading through this. Insofar as the book has an overall thesis, it is that disasters are usually less the product of poor leadership than of vulnerabilities of the system.

Complete And Well Documented Examination of Disaster. This is a book that looks not just at one disaster or one type of disaster, but at all of them. It doesn't look to one threat or another threat or a third threat, but moves between types of threats and shows how they, really, are all interrelated by a common element: the human, and in particular the governmental, response to them. From ancient plagues and volcanoes to hot-off-the-press (at the time of writing a few months prior to even my own seeming first public review level early read) details of the current global catastrophes. While docking a star for Ferguson's high praise of John Maynard Keynes (suffice it to say I tend to hold economists such as Hayak, Bastiat, and Von Mises to levels Ferguson holds Keynes), that isn't really my style since those are more a couple of aside level comments randomly in this near 500 page volume. But also, don't let the near 500 page count deter you - in my copy, 48% of that text (or nearly 200 pages) was bibliography, making this one of the more well documented books I've read in the last few years. Truly a book that needs to be considered by at minimum policy makers but really the public at large, at times it doesn't really go far enough to point out that voluntary community based disaster preparedness can often do more good than government top down approaches (even as he continually points out that the failures most often happen at middle management levels). Very much recommended.