Rahva Raamat logo
Kategooriad
triangle icon
Rahva Raamat logo
Kategooriad
Raamatud
triangle icon
E-raamatud
triangle icon
Kasutatud raamatud
triangle icon
Kingitused
triangle icon
Mängud ja mänguasjad
triangle icon
Kodukaubad
triangle icon
Ilu ja stiil
triangle icon
Muusika ja filmid
triangle icon
Kooli- ja kontoritarbed
triangle icon
Tehnika
triangle icon
delivery icon

Kohaletoimetamine on tasuta!

home icon

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
gallery icon
Galerii

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. 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. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of a number of developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why?

The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. While populist rulers have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profund problems have been exposed by Covid-19. Only when we understand the central challenge posed by disaster in history can we see that this was also a failure of an administrative state and of economic elites that had grown myopic over much longer than just a few years.

Why were so many Cassandras for so long ignored? Why did only some countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? Why do appeals to 'the science' often turn out to be mere magical thinking?

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. 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 hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online schism. Covid-19 was a test failed by countries who must learn some serious lessons from history if they are to avoid the doom of irreversible decline.

[object Object] icon

Detailid

basket icon

Toode on otsas