Bibliograph

Doom, the politics of catastrophe, Niall Ferguson

Type

Label

Doom, the politics of catastrophe, Niall Ferguson

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 398-456) and index

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Doom

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1197724463

Responsibility statement

Niall Ferguson

Sub title

the politics of catastrophe

Summary

Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Pandemics 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. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of a number of developed countries, including the United States, to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. While populist leaders have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profound problems have been exposed by COVID-19. 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 economic elites that had grown myopic over much longer than just a few years

Target audience

general

Classification