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Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

par Niall Ferguson

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"Setting the great crisis of 2020 in broad historical perspective, Niall Ferguson challenges the conventional wisdom that our failure to cope better with disaster was solely a crisis of political leadership, as opposed to a more profound systemic problem. Disasters are by their very nature 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 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. Why were so many Cassandras for so long ignored? Why did only some countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? Why do appeals to "the science" often turn out to be magical thinking? Drawing from multiple disciplines, including history, economics, public health, and network science, Doom is a global postmortem for a plague year. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson has studied the pathologies that afflict modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online schism. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn--if we want to avoid the doom of irreversible decline"--… (plus d'informations)
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Many interesting examples of disasters that did and didn't happen. Epidemics were especially well covered. The differences in assessment and response between historical pandemics, the Spanish flu, the 1957 flu epidemic and the current covid crisis was informative. In 1957 a flu vaccine was developed in ~18 months, similar to the covid vaccine, but entirely unlike the HIV mobilization (or lack of mobilization). Another important theme was how human organization response often causes catastrophes or makes them worse -- Challenger, Chernobyl, US covid response, etc. Often it's middle management that is as fault. ( )
  Castinet | Dec 11, 2022 |
Ferguson is one of the most preeminent thinkers of the day who tackles the big questions of world history and this work provides a warning about the scamdemic in regards to COVID. Government officials, health care, and pharmaceutical companies seized control over their populations and threatened them unnecessarily. These are lessons for the West to learn quickly about how to realistically handle crises and avoid irreversible decline.

As a take-off of Keith Thomas' well-known volume Ferguson describes Science and the Rise of Magic. This is not a history of our perplexing postmodern plague, nor a general history of pandemics. This is a general history of catastrophe--of all kinds of disasters, from the geological to the geopolitical, from the biological to the technological. For how else are we to see our disaster--or any disaster--in a proper perspective?

Chapter 1
Though life expectancy has usually improved in the modern era, death remains inevitable and is, in absolute terms, more common than ever. Yet we have become estranged from death. Ultimately, not only are we as individuals doomed, but so is the human race itself. All the world religions and a number of secular ideologies have sought to make this eschaton seem more imminent (as well as immanent) than it really is. What we have to fear is a big disaster, not doomsday. Of the big disasters in human history, the biggest have been pandemics and wars.

Chapter 2
Catastrophe is innatelyly unpredictable because most disasters (from earthquakes to wars) are not normally distributed, but randomly or according to power laws. Cyclical theories of history cannot get around that. Disasters are more like tragedies: those who try to predict them are unlikely to be headed. In addition to predicting more disasters than actually happened, Cassandra‘s are up against a bewildering array of cognitive biases. In the end, faced with uncertainty, most people just decide to ignore the possibility that they as individuals will be victims of catastrophe. “The bells go ting-a-ling for you but not for me, a ditty sung by a British soldiers in World War I, is humanity’s signature tune.

Chapter 3
Disasters are often foreseen (gray rhinos), yet even some predicted disasters can appear completely unexpected when they strike (black swans). A few have consequences beyond excess mortality that set them apart (dragon kings).. Disasters not either “natural” or “man-made.” Decisions to locate settlements near potential disaster zones—by a volcano, on a fault line, next to a river subject to severe flooding—are what make most natural disasters in some respects man-made. In terms of loss of life, more big disasters happen in Asia than elsewhere. The great American disaster has been, by Asian standards, not all that disastrous.

Chapter 4 Networld
The decisive determinant of the scale of a disaster is whether or not there is contagion. Social network structure is therefore as important as the innate properties of a pathogen or anything else (such as an idea) that can be virally spread. People worked out the efficacy of quarantines, social distancing, and other measures now referred to as “nonpharmaceutical interventions” long before they properly understood the true nature of the diseases they sought to counter, from smallpox to bubonic plague. The essence of such measures is ti modify network structures to make it less of a small world. Such modifications can be spontaneous behavioral adaptations, but they usually need to be hierarchically mandated.

Chapter 5
The Science Delusion
The 19 century was a time of major advances, especially in bacteriology. But we should not succumb to a Whig interpretation of medical history. Empire forced the pace of research into infectious diseases, but it also forced the pace of the globalization of the world economy, creating new opportunities for diseases, not all of which submitted to vaccination or therapy. The 1918 influenza was a grim revelation of the limits of science. Breakthroughs in our understanding of risks can be offset by increased network integration and fragility.

Chapter 6
The psychology of political incompetence
We tend to attribute too much of the responsibility for political disasters, as well as military ones, to incompetent leaders. It was a pleasing argument of the Indian economist Amartya Sen that famine were caused by unaccountable governments and avoidable market failures, not food shortages per se, and that democracy was the best cure for famine. That theory may well explain some of the worst famine in the century and a half from the 1840s to the 1990s. But should Sen’s law apply to famines? Why not to the most man of disasters,wars? It is a paradox that the transition from empires to more or less democratic nation-states was attended by so much death and destruction.

Chapter 7
From the Boogie Woogie Flu to Ebola in Town
In 1957, the rational response to a new and deadly strain of the flu seemed to be a combination of pursuing natural herd immunity and selective vaccination. There were no lockdowns and no school closures, despite the fact that the Asian flu in 1957 was about as dangerous as Covid/19 in 2020. The success of Eisenhower’s response reflected not only the nimbleness of the federal government of those days but also the Cold War context of much -improved international cooperation on issues of public health. Yet the success of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s were deceptive. HIV/AIDS revealed the weaknesses of both national and international agencies. So, in their different ways, did SARS, MERS, and Ebola.

Chapter 8
The Fractal Geometry of Disaster
Accidents will happen, from the titanic to Challenger to Chernobyl. Small disasters are like microcosms of big ones, but because they are less complex, we can understand them more easily. The common feature of all disasters, weather sinking ships or exploding nuclear reactors, is the combination of operator error and managerial error. Often the point of failure in a disaster is not at the top (the “blunt end”) blunt or at the point of contact (the “sharp end”) but within middle-management—a favorite theme of the physicist Richard Feynman and an insight with general applicability.

Chapter 9
The plagues
Like so many past pandemics, cove 19 originated in China. But the varied impact of the disease on the rest of the world’s countries confounded expectations. Far from being well prepared for a pandemic, the United States and the United Kingdom faired badly. It was countries such as Taiwan and South Korea that had learned the right lessons from SARS and MERS. It was tempting to blame Anglo-American travails on the incompetence of populous leaders. However, something more profound had gone wrong. The public health bureaucracy in each case had failed. And the role of the Internet platforms in disseminating fake news about COVID-19 led to poor and sometimes downright harmful adaptations in public behavior.

Chapter 10
The economic consequences of the plague
The shift from complacency to panic in mid-March 2020 lead to economically crushing lockdowns in many countries. Were they the right solution to the problem posed by COVID-19? The answer is probably note, but that did not make it smart for the United States to attempt a return to normality that summer ( the dumb reopening) without adequate testing and tracing. The predictable result was a second, smaller wave and a “tortoise-shaped” recovery. Less predictable was the near-revolutionary political eruption over the issue of racism, which bore striking resemblances to mass movements precipitated by previous pandemics.

Chapter 11
The Three-Body Problem
The COVID-19 crisis is widely regarded as dooming the United States to decline relative to China. This is probably wrong. The empires of our time—the United States, China, and the European Union—all made a mess of a pandemic in their different ways. But it is hard to see why the countries that handled it well would be eager to join Xi Jinping’s imperial Panopticon. In a number of respects, the crisis has shown the persistence of American power: in financial terms, in the race for a vaccine, and in the technological competition. Rumors of American doom are once again exaggerated. Perhaps because of this exaggeration, the risk of not just cold but hot water is rising.

Conclusion
Future Shocks
We have no way of knowing what the next disaster will be. Our modest goal should be to make our societies and political systems more resilient—and ideally anti-fragile—than they currently are. That requires a better understanding of networks structure in a bureaucratic dysfunction than we currently possess. Those who would acquiesce in a new totalitarianism of ubiquitous surveillance in the name of public policy have failed to appreciate that some of the worst disasters described in this book were caused by totalitarian regimes.
  gmicksmith | Sep 4, 2022 |
This book was, for me, a disappointment. The writing style wasn't accessible, with lots of uncommon words were used unnecessarily. Some very detailed passages, like the explanation of hour nuclear reactors work, seemed to be little more than filler, as did the several times he told us what was coming up in later chapters. I wasn't able to discern any overarching theory. His message seemed to be that we can't predict the future but can nevertheless be better prepared for future disasters. I knew that.

I did like some sections. I was entertained by his discussion of dystopian fiction's similarities and dissimilarities with today. I thought the most insightful chapter book dealt with "Cold War II", which the author says China initiated years ago to tarnish the reputation and position of the USA. Very interesting, but hardly a disaster, or "doom".

There is no doubt that the author is very knowledgeable and can assimilate vast amount of information. I've enjoyed some of his other books. In this case, however, I got the impression he was capitalizing on the COVID pandemic. And his discussion of COVID was my least favourite part of the book. Much of the information is already outdated; it was simply to soon to have a perspective of the pandemic. ( )
  LynnB | May 3, 2022 |
Niall Ferguson's latest book Doom is better than his last book, on networks, but networks and network theory make a big showing here. Basically, Ferguson speaks of catastrophes and disasters, man-made and natural. Side note: he maintains that natural disasters are man-made too. Like, building a big city on an earthquake fault line or nest to a volcano. (Or, if a disaster happens and there's no humans there to hear, does it happen?) It's all good stuff. Writing in late 2020, he doesn'y know about the upswing in COVID cases in late 2020 and early 2021, Delta, nor omicron, but he is still right about the fact that COVID is not the Black Plague, nor is it the Spanish flu pandemic. How should we react to this pandemic and future pandemics? Ferguson offers some historical insights. Why did some countries do better and others did not? Ferguson offers some historical insights. It should be mandatory reading for our political class. It won't be, historians are always ignored. ( )
  tuckerresearch | Jan 14, 2022 |
Everything you wanted to know about catastrophes but were afraid to ask. This book covers a lot of history and contains a lot of data. Its scope is wide: history, politics, economics, science, medicine, technology etc. Covid 19 is the epicenter of the book. Ferguson points out the failures of governments, politicians, scientists and bureaucrats in minimizing the pandemic. Trump, for example, was more focused on getting re-elected than worrying about the lives of U.S. citizens.

Interesting stories about various disasters including Challenger, The Titanic, Hindenburg, The Spanish Flu, a variety of plagues, earthquakes etc.

This is a book that is intended to be read slowly. There are a lot of details, data and theories in every paragraph. The sheer panorama of the book is amazing. The research applied to the writing is very extensive. ( )
  writemoves | Oct 26, 2021 |
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Much of Doom is devoted to putting Covid-19 in context – to comparisons with other plagues, with other catastrophes such as economic collapses and famines, and with other responses at other times.

This is an investigation into the nature of contagion whether it is by bacilli or bad ideas, the importance of networks to their spread, and how good governance, or the lack of it, predicates the final death toll.

Ferguson rejects the ideas that history is driven by all-powerful individual leaders or that it is in any way cyclic, and considers any attempt to divide disasters into the natural and man-made as misleading – “all disasters are at some level man-made political disasters, even if they originate with new pathogens”.

He examines Indian economist Amartya Sen’s claim that the more a government is accountable to an electorate the smaller the likelihood of famine.

“An interesting question, however, is why Sen’s theory does not apply to all forms of disaster. If famines can be successfully avoided, or at least mitigated, when governments are more accountable, why is the same not true of earthquakes, floods, wildfires, or pandemics?”

Despite the apparent correlation between populist leaders and high numbers of Covid-19-related deaths, he denies that complete responsibility for disasters can be laid exclusively at the feet even of absolute dictators.

“The power of such individuals is a function of the complex network of eco­nomic, social, and political relations over which they preside,” he argues, thus giving Chinese President Xi Jinping a portion of the blame, but not the whole meal.

---

Although Doom’s references to everything from ancient Greek dramatists through Machiavelli’s uncle (given an experimental plague remedy made from rue and honey in 1479) to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 are entertaining, the book could benefit from a little paring down.

But overall Doom is an informative, amusing and thought-provoking read that puts the current pandemic in context, and is full of steadying good sense for these often hysterical times.
 
Nella lingua inglese Doom vuol dire sventura e rovina ma anche, ed è significativo, destino. Ma Doom è anche il nome del capostipite dei video giochi contemporanei: un eroe in lotta contro gli zombie.

Nessun titolo fu quindi più azzeccato per il nuovo, splendido, libro di Niall Ferguson, il cui sottotitolo è ancora più evocativo: la politica della catastrofe (Doom. The politics of Catastrophe, Penguin). Come tutti i lavori precedenti di Ferguson, è prima di tutto un libro di storia, che però cela una riflessione sul presente e anche sul futuro. La storia è quella delle catastrofi cosiddette naturali e soprattutto delle epidemie: per Ferguson la storia è sempre storia contemporanea, cioè nasce dagli stimoli del presente, in questo caso della pandemia prodotta da Covid.

Attraverso una comparazione delle numerose epidemie, fin dall'antichità, Ferguson ci mostra che esse non sono mai calamità naturali, che l'uomo ha sempre avuto un ruolo nella loro esplosione e che, in ogni caso, nel modo di gestirle, esse hanno determinato il destino, appunto, di una civiltà. E si comprende uno dei fili rossi del libro: l'attuale nostra civiltà ha affrontato il Covid nel più sbagliato dei modi, trasformando quella che era una epidemia non più feroce di altre, anche recenti, come l'asiatica del 1957-58, in un flagello che ha distrutto basi considerate solide e che rischia di accelerare il declino dell'Occidente, uno dei temi chiave della riflessione di Ferguson anche negli altri lavori.

Come scrive lo storico anglo americano, se una epidemia colpisce una società che è già in declino, questa malattia ne renderà più rapida la decadenze. Se invece la civiltà è forte, in crescita, anche la malattia più devastante non ne arresterà il progresso, anzi lo affretterà, come accaduto diverse volte nella storia. E non servono tanti paragoni con il lontano passato; le pagine in cui Ferguson mostra come l'Occidente affrontò l'asiatica una sessantina di anni fa, raffrontata con l'oggi, sono impietose; per l'oggi.

Allora non vi fu alcun lockdown, nessuna chiusura, nessuna brutale aggressione al capitale di ricchezze e al capitale sociale. Allora la civiltà era più solida, da un punto di vista morale: meno individualistica e più comunitaria, aveva meno paura della morte e sapeva che il rischio zero non esiste. Nessuno alla fine degli anni Cinquanta avrebbe accettato di farsi chiudere in casa, e nessun potere pubblico avrebbe osato, almeno nell'Occidente liberale e democratico, spingersi a una decisione del genere. Cosi ecco che la storia di Ferguson diventa una sferzante auto da fé delle élite occidentali attuali, soprattutto quelle politiche e della loro incompetenza.

Si badi bene, Ferguson non parla di incompetenza tecnica ma, quasi di nuovo crocianamente, proprio di incompetenza politica. Sono cinque i punti della incompetenza delle élite politiche occidentali, crollate di fronte al Covid: «1. Incapacità di imparare dalla storia 2. Incapacità di visione 3. Tendenza a ragionare sul brevissimo periodo 4. Sottovalutazione dei pericoli 5. Attesa di una certezza che non verrà mai».

Concretamente, secondo Ferguson , tutti i governi occidentali hanno atteso a intervenire, pensando che la pandemia si sarebbe limitata alla Cina, poi agli altri Paesi ma non al proprio. Intervenuti troppo tardi, lo hanno poi fatto male, a quel punto con la politica del lockdown e delle segregazione, sfruttando e alimentando le paure di una società disgregata, il cui unico valore è la mera «nuda vita», per dirla con Giorgio Agamben.

C'è poi un altro fattore: essendo in declino, le nostre società sono più statalizzate rispetto a quelle precedenti. Lo Stato amministrativo vi ha preso talmente il sopravvento, persino negli Usa, figuriamoci in Europa, che i politici non hanno potuto fare altro che sottostare agli ordini di una tecno-burocrazia (che noi chiamiamo sanitocrazia) composta da scienziati, tecnici, funzionari pubblici, imprenditori assistiti dalle commesse statali. Ora che il danno è fatto, cosa accadrà? E qui Ferguson, da storico, si avventura in alcune previsioni. La prima è che la pandemia accelererà la seconda guerra fredda, quella tra Stati Uniti e Cina: anzi, il Covid è già stato un episodio di questa guerra, fin dal modo in cui il virus è uscito, forse anche dai laboratori, di Wuhan.

La seconda è che vi saranno prossime catastrofi, che le classi politiche non riusciranno a prevedere e che affronteranno con lo stesso grado di incompetenza delle attuali, se non maggiore. La terza è che, già disgregate e deboli prima del Covid, le società occidentali vi escono ancora più periclitanti, come mostra il livello di polarizzazione e di scontro che le tormenta, superiore persino a quelli precedenti. La citazione ottimistica finale, dal Journal of the Plague Year di Daniel Defoe «dopotutto, io sono ancora vivo» cela a fatica le conclusioni del più pessimistico, cioè del più realista, dei libri di Ferguson.
 
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"Setting the great crisis of 2020 in broad historical perspective, Niall Ferguson challenges the conventional wisdom that our failure to cope better with disaster was solely a crisis of political leadership, as opposed to a more profound systemic problem. Disasters are by their very nature 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 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. Why were so many Cassandras for so long ignored? Why did only some countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? Why do appeals to "the science" often turn out to be magical thinking? Drawing from multiple disciplines, including history, economics, public health, and network science, Doom is a global postmortem for a plague year. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson has studied the pathologies that afflict modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online schism. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn--if we want to avoid the doom of irreversible decline"--

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