Doom

The Politics of Catastrophe

Read by: Niall Ferguson

Author: Niall Ferguson

Write A Review

At a Glance

Format
Digital Audiobook

Duration
16:35.55

Published: 6th May 2021

Digital Audiobook

$33.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.50 with

Instant Digital Delivery to your Kobo Reader App

Brought to you by Penguin.

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe 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 many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why?

While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.

Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic and more "antifragile" if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline.