After the death of Sir Roger Scruton, I see at least four public intellectuals in this sense steeped in the conservative-liberal political tradition: Two Americans, Judge Richard Posner and economist Thomas Sowell, the English biologist Matt Ridley and the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, born respectively in 1930, 1939, 19. Past examples include Voltaire, Bastiat, Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes, and the modern Left can of course rely on Paul Krugman. 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 handing 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.Scottish historian Niall Ferguson is one of the most interesting thinkers of our day.Ī public intellectual is somebody who is best-known for an ability to transmit ideas effectively to the general public. 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 ferguson