“We need to get government to be less bureaucratic and nimbler, quicker, in its response,” he says. We did none of that,” notes Ferguson.Īs for the lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, Ferguson believes that while it is futile to predict the next catastrophe, governments must be prepared for all types of disastrous scenarios. “They very quickly made large-scale testing available as well as getting a contact tracing app and using digital means to enforce the isolation of infected or potentially infected. Taiwan is probably the shining example,” he says. “There are countries that got COVID so right that hardly anyone died. And at the same time, although we’re fascinated by this idea, when disaster strikes, we don’t handle them at all well.”įerguson says that it is better to blame the inadequate responses from bureaucracies than the elected leaders of nations. McConnell treads warily around debt limit fight as fears of default catastrophe grow. “We think a lot about the end of the world, the end of our species. “We love science fiction in which a terrible fate awaits us,” he says.

In his new book, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe,” he examines various disasters throughout history to put the COVID-19 pandemic into context.įerguson says he initially was going to write a book about how humans have a love for “doom” fiction. Drawing on preoccupations that have shaped his books for some twenty years, Niall Ferguson describes the pathologies that have done us so much damage: from imperial. But although The Politics of Catastrophe, as Niall Ferguson’s latest work is subtitled, takes off with the pacey prose, grand historical sweep and fine detail for which the author is. Niall Ferguson is a historian and Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including history, economics, public health and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe is a global post mortem for a plague year. Joe Biden’s presidency has been a catastrophe for the United States and the free world.

The politics of catastrophe