Over the course of some 15 books, Ferguson has produced several solid general histories ( Civilization, The Ascent of Money) and at least one arguable masterpiece. Bennett’s satire of a style he characterized as “a free-floating state of suspended cleverness” may be slightly too all-encompassing, but it’s recognizable to anybody who has seen Ferguson on camera or read him at any length. Bennett reportedly based that character in part on Niall Ferguson, though likely also on other historians well known in the United Kingdom for their attention-seeking TV-friendly style and willingness to lob out bracing but not always supported ideas to kick up a fuss. That is how Hector, the well-loved if problematic grammar schoolteacher in Alan Bennett’s 2004 play, The History Boys describes the methods of Irwin, a rising star of a teacher whose smooth and telegenic style he views as dangerously shallow.

* This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF of images and tables from the book.It’s … flip. 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.ĭrawing 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.ĭoom 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. 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. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. 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. and wars, are not normally distributed there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters.ĭisasters are inherently hard to predict.

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

Doom niall ferguson