The End of the World Is Fascinating

We don't like how big the domain of uncertainty is. We really want much more to be calculable risk and much less to be incalculable uncertainty than is in fact the case. And power laws are helpful in this respect, especially if you live in California. Because you know there's going to be some bloody great earthquake at some point, but you don't know when and you don't knows how big. That's as far as we can really go.

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Niall Ferguson’s most recent book is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. In this book he posits that disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, and 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.

Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work.

Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them.

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is the author of sixteen books.

In 2003, Ferguson wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin, and prompted Time magazine to name him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The international bestseller, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, published in 2008 was adapted into a PBS series, winning the International Emmy award for Best Documentary, as well as the Handelszeitung Economics Book Prize. In 2011 he published Civilization: The West and the Rest, also a Channel 4/PBS documentary series. A year later came the three-part television series “China: Triumph and Turmoil.” The book based on his 2012 BBC Reith lectures, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, was a New York Times bestseller within a week of its publication. Ferguson has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek. He began writing a twice-a-month column for Bloomberg Opinion in June 2020.

www.niallferguson.com

twitter.com/nfergus