Niall Ferguson - Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
Niall Ferguson chaired by Alan Riach
Chaired by Magnus Linklater

8.30pm - 9.30pm BST*

Niall Ferguson is one of Britain's most renowned historians. He is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the bestselling author of The Pity of War, Empire, The War of the World and The Ascent of Money. He also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, his latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline. While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic.

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