Doom: The politics of catastrophe

Abstract

Niall Ferguson challenges the notion that the shortcomings in our response to the 2020 crisis were solely due to poor leadership. He argues that disasters, like pandemics, are unpredictable and often reveal deeper systemic issues. While populist leaders have indeed performed poorly, the pandemic exposed failings in administrative states and economic elites who have become myopic. Drawing from history, economics, public health, and network science, Ferguson explores why warnings were ignored, why some countries learned from previous outbreaks like SARS and MERS, and why appeals to “the science” often fall short. He concludes that this global postmortem of a plague year highlights crucial lessons that the West must learn to avoid irreversible decline.