Financial historian Niall Ferguson was dismissed as a worrier in Davos, in early 2020, when he warned that a new virus from an obscure city in China would become a pandemic. But in Doom, he’s honest enough to admit that he was wrong on other points. In his weekly column he parroted the notion of zero COVID mortality for anyone under 40. He also confesses that he may have been a super spreader because of his jet-lagged schedule—and that early on he had COVID symptoms.
The pandemic turned his thoughts to history of catastrophes—war, nuclear meltdowns and tsunamis as well as disease—and their relationship with human society. “Even a catastrophic earthquake is only as catastrophic as the extent of urbanization along the fault line,” he writes. As for pandemics: “the virus will infect only as many people as social networks allow it too.”
One theme Ferguson takes up is the unpredictability of catastrophe, despite the freely given opinions of experts in many fields. “There is no average pandemic or earthquake” and “no reliable way of predicting when a very large one will come along,” he insists. Although the future will always be uncertain, the more networked the world becomes, the greater the ripple of effect of disaster. Fifty years ago, COVID-19 might never have gotten out of Wu Han. Forecasting? Don’t get Ferguson started on “gimcrack computer simulations with made up variables.” It’s not science, just technological magic tricks.
Ferguson doesn’t dismiss the threat of climate change but is skeptical about the doomsayers, given the failure of Cassandras in the past to predict the end of the world. He may be cavalier in that regard, but he makes a useful observation: “We rarely get the disaster we expect, but some other threat most of us are currently ignoring.”
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While no solutions are offered in his thought provoking, troubling book, Ferguson calls for more resilient social and political structures and warns against embracing totalitarian answers as well as believing everything you read online. 2020 saw two plagues: “One caused by a biological virus, the other by even more contagious viral misconceptions and falsehoods.”
