Doom

The Politics of Catastrophe

By: Niall Ferguson

Narrated by: Niall Ferguson

Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

"All disasters are in some sense man-made."

Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters.

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, 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. We have science on our side, after all.

Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.

In books going back nearly 20 years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation.

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.

Doom is the lesson of history that this country - indeed the West as a whole - urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.

This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF of images and tables from the book.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Niall Ferguson (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[Doom] hopscotches breezily across continents and centuries while also displaying an impressive command of the latest research in a large number of specialized fields, among them medical history, epidemiology, probability theory, cliodynamics and network theory.... Belongs on the shelf next to recent ambitious and eclectic books by authors like Jared Diamond, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Steven Pinker.... Promises to make a contribution to improving our management of future disasters.... Insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant.” (New York Times Book Review)

“Doom seeks to understand why humanity, time and again through the ages, has failed to prepare for catastrophes, whether natural or manmade.... Forecasting, network science, economics, epidemiology, together with the psychology of leadership are all considered in a dazzlingly broad examination of the ‘politics of catastrophe’.... Magisterial...[an] immensely readable book.” (The Financial Times)

“Doom covers an impressive sweep of history at a lively narrative clip and weaves a lot of disparate strands together into an engaging picture.” (The Guardian)

Great listen

I love most books by this author. He makes his arguments using reason and logic.

Superb, as usual.

Ferguson provides the history of pandemic and humanity's reaction to them. Then he examines our reamction to Covid, the impact of those reactions and more. A fascinating read.

Excellent and insightful

Excellent read, very informative, insightful and enjoyable.

This is a rare instance where the author, who is an outstanding speaker, is also the narrator of his own book. Thank you! Wh

Historical Context

Ferguson’s “Doom” effectively situates covid 19 amongst other disasters in human history but also shows how a political disaster often develops after a natural one has occurred.

I enjoyed Niall’s review of the events of late 2019-2020 as even though these events where recent, key details could’ve easily been missed in the chaos of living through the pandemic.

Yet sometimes it felt as though the book was too heavily focused on Covid-19. Certainly this event was central to current political discourse but I fear that too many people are likely burned out of the pandemic.

All in all the book is worth a listen especially if you enjoy Ferguson’s work as I do. His unique style weaves popular culture, economics and political analysis into the dissection of historical events providing rich and thought provoking insights.

Not a cheery subject but a book worth reading.

Obviously a book with a lot of dates and statistics can get dry, but overall it was very good. It was well researched and he avoided partisanship. He allowed the facts to speak for themselves.

Dozens of historical episodes and vocabulary words on every page!

I’m just now enjoying Niall Ferguson’s “Doom” a thick volume, chock full of historical analysis.

I can’t help but thinking you’d enjoy it.

In particular each page seems to have a dozen or more important historical references, only 20% or 30% of which I had previously heard of.

I therefore enjoy having the gaps in my recollection filled in, and hopefully through assimilation, benefit from learning the new ones that flash by.

Topics range from mathematics, to computer science, to biology, politics, war, statecraft etc.

Listening to it on Audible has the advantage of listening to Naill’s pleasant accent at 1.33x speed. Lots of foreign words properly pronounced!!

Though the book, as title suggests, has a pessimistic tone, it’s hard to argue with the factual accounts, presumably backed up by recorded contemporaneous historical documents. Interpretation on the otherhand of course is subject to some biases, if only to dramatize or to weave a coherent narrative.

One interesting example is history of plagues.

Ferguson the historian, no relation to the famous Epidemiologist of same name, suggests that each medical advance of the Renaissance was greeted in following decades by social adaptation, (basically more densely inhabited cities, and more intercity trade) that used the advantages created by the advances to not just improve health, but to increase the virulence of subsequent plagues…essentially leaving society no better off 50 years later regarding morbidity.

Kind of like economists description of technological advances that don’t result in profits, because all competitors use the same efficiency gains to lower equilibrium prices.

And similar to urban planners dilemma.

In Southern California, I have witnessed, when a traffic jammed freeway is widened, new traffic immediately bottlenecks up again within weeks as new commuters jump on the widened road. And adding insult to injury, new home builders build 100,000 homes in the newly productive ex-urbs enabled by the widened road. The result being urban sprawl.

Anyhow each page seems to have a dozen vocabulary words or historical incidents, 70% which are new to me. That, I think, is indicative of me “learning.” Not a bad thing!

Excellent Content Well Told !

Niall Ferguson has beautifully told a
Somewhat Disturbing Story of our declining Position
in the World of International Politics .
Authoritative and Well Read !

Meh

I started listening to this book because of Ferguson’s appearance on the Mindscape podcast and was intrigued due to the fact that he says some interesting but also controversial things. I liked listening to the book in general. Ferguson overall does a good job of narrating his own story. If I were to summarize, though, I realize that some of the proposed concepts in the book did not stick very well. I could especially relate to Cassandra’s curse and the feeling of powerlessness in averting foreseeable disaster when thinking about climate change. The cover of the book would suggest more discussion on that topic, but rather, the COVID-19 pandemic features more prominently. I think it would be worth a re-read as I am especially interested in the knowledge on networks in relation to the politics of catastrophe. Or perhaps read his other work; “the… something… and the tower”. Other things that stuck were about the way that we try to pin disaster on leaders while upon further analysis the faults lie in middle management. I think a few lines are dedicated to the prisoner’s dilemma, but all in all it has not been earth shattering new knowledge.

Outstanding, compelling read

This is a must listen. Writing is concise and clear. The analysis is wholly interesting, thought-provoking and eye opening. Range of topics, events, persons addressed wide and all compelling. Must listen.

Get through the first chapters

Get through the first three chapters. The rest is well worth your time. You will not regret the experience