This is a welcome reminder, especially to our environmental friends worrying about future natural disasters, but not new or particularly noteworthy. It’s also not clear what it gets us: yes, we may not be the supreme masters of our own fate, but surely we always knew that outcomes were determined in part by how we respond to them-privately and politically? It’s both commonsensical and underappreciated that no event of the world becomes a disaster until it greatly affects human well-being-the tree in the forest-and no manmade disaster is inseparable from the natural world. We also get China and plenty of warnings about a Cold War II, a summary of dystopian science fiction literatures, Medieval quarantines, and a history of medical advances. In Doom, we get network science as it applies to infectious diseases nuclear meltdowns and crashes, from the Titantic and Hindenberg to the Tenerife airport disaster an excellent rebuttal of historical-cycle theories from Ray Dalio’s debt cycle to Strauss-Howe’s recently revived Fourth Turning and a very Nassim Taleb-esque description of pandemics that, like earthquakes, follow power-law distributions rather than the more intuitive normal distributions. Ferguson's earlier books have been everything from brilliant to controversial, though always clearly and systematically argued: the institutions that made us rich are decaying ( Great Degeneration) the British colonial reign had benefits in addition to its much-publicized horrors ( Empire) the “killer-apps” of the West ( Civilization) the history of finance and banking ( The Ascent of Money). The really bad news is that, well, it’s not clear what Doom’s message is supposed to be: on the last page I’m as confused as I was halfway through. Falling into precisely the trap outlined for historians prematurely writing the history of the present, he overwhelms his readers in mortality figures, infection rates, policy measures and central bank actions that were outdated when he wrote about them in the fall of 2020-and bordering on irrelevant for the reader in 2021. Still, the pandemic makes an appearance in almost every chapter, and a few chapters toward the end are fully devoted to it. The good news is that Ferguson’s latest isn’t a history of covid, at least not entirely (he freely admits that it’s much too early to write one).

“All disasters,” he writes toward the end of this four hundred–page odyssey of present and historical catastrophes, “are at some level man-made political disasters.”

In Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, the prolific author sets out to undermine the distinction between natural disasters and manmade catastrophes. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Niall Ferguson, the celebrated British historian now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution has spouted his own version of that age-old riddle.

Ferguson doom