Doom

The Politics of Catastrophe

By: Niall Ferguson

Narrated by: Niall Ferguson

"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 twenty 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.

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

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.

Great listen

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

Well researched

The book is a honest history about government run approaches to crisis. You learn how government officials always t get the handling of crises wrong every time.

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.