Not only are disasters hard to predict, but even if they could predict them, democratic leaders would need to make sacrifices in the present in order to prepare for their future possibility. In the LSE discussion about his book (see opposite), he makes an interesting point about the dilemma faced by political leaders in democracies when preparing for disasters. And that focusing too much on individual failure will prevent us from learning valuable lessons as to how we can improve institutions to manage disasters better. That said, I think he’s right to argue that even if the buck stops at the top, the failure isn’t always at the top. This is perhaps to be expected given his conservative leanings, and my own view is that he underplays the responsibility of individual political leaders (a point made in this New York Times review).

Strikingly, he lays more blame for policy failure at the feet of bureaucracies than individual political leaders (although he does strongly critique Trump’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic). Given the complexity of disaster, this is not an easy task. Unifying disasters under this one conceptual roof allows him to investigate whether there are any patterns in policy-making that lead to failure. But, he argues, excess mortality is always the result of poor human decision-making, and this is where politics comes in. Sure, earthquakes are not manmade whereas world wars are. One of his key conceptual moves is to challenge the distinction between “natural” and “manmade” disasters. Spanning the ancient world to the present, it examines volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, famines, world wars, plagues and nuclear fallouts to try and tease out any common threads linking these disasters.įerguson draws on an impressive array of disciplines to improve our understanding, from traditional historical approaches to network theory and epidemiology. His latest book, Doom: The Politics Of Catastrophe (May 2021), is another impressive tour de force of macro history. Niall Ferguson is one of the most influential historians and political thinkers of our time.Ī professor at Stanford and Harvard, and visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, he’s known for producing books for the general reader that take a big-picture view of history and try to generate useful lessons for the present.

Doom ferguson