Deciphering doom in all its guises — and government’s role in them

“All disasters are at some level man-made political disasters, even if they originate with new pathogens.“ Discuss. In Doom, Niall Ferguson roams the world, history and even science fiction to examine disasters. There is no shortage holding him back. Too often, he finds midlevel managers at fault.

The disasters he investigates cover the spectrum from war to pathogens, floods, earthquakes and in the end, planetary invasions. It is an education, a peek behind the scenes, a rollercoaster and an argument rolled into one bubbling and appealing package. The conclusion is that government has and continues to fail us:

“Approaching disasters within this broader framework makes it clear that democratic institutions by themselves are far from a sufficient safeguard against disasters of all kinds — especially those that are not normally distributed but follow power-law distributions — regardless of whether we insist on classifying them as either natural or man-made.”

Ferguson examines various plagues through the ages, as knowledge of how they work gradually grew, and how such knowledge was usually ignored or abused by those in power. This of course is most evident right now, as the Trump administration bungled the COVID-19 pandemic so badly that the USA leads the world in all the worst…