The eruption of Mount Vesuvius (AD79) and the Lisbon earthquake (1755) are natural disasters, whereas World War I and the Challenger space-shuttle disaster are man-made. Historically we tend to draw sharp distinctions between man-made and natural disasters. Some disasters are so great that they inspire cults of doom: movements that predict the end of the world unless some form of repentance and penance is made-lowering emissions, destroying nuclear arms, changing social behaviour to avoid contagion. Doom 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.Disasters-viral, economic, war-related, and natural-have a major impact on human history.

Drawing 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. 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. 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. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. All disasters are in some sense man-made.

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