And dragon kings (a term coined by geophysicist Didier Sornette) are events whose catastrophic consequences unfold over the course of several generations. Ferguson cites the black-swan level of devastation that World War I and the Covid pandemic inflicted, and shows how our cognitive biases and mental heuristics hindered our ability to accurately predict them. Black swans (a term coined by Nassim Taleb) are events that may not even be considered possible until they actually occur. Ferguson cites the housing bubble and Great Recession as examples. Gray rhinos-threats that are “dangerous, obvious, and highly probable”-are the easiest to predict. That chapter’s title refers to three metaphors that Ferguson uses to describe his taxonomy of catastrophe.

The same is true of the preceding chapter, “Gray Rhinos, Black Swans, and Dragon Kings,” which makes brief forays into mathematics, geology and seismology. “Networld” in particular is a remarkable synthesis. While some may feel slightly overwhelmed by the amount of information Doom covers, and by some of the technical language in the “Networld” chapter, Ferguson generally has a remarkable ability to describe scholarly research results-across a range of disciplines-in clear language that is accessible to the general reader. For example, Ferguson’s exposition of network theory, in the book’s fourth chapter, “Networld,” explores the phenomenon of what goes viral from the point of view of social science, statistics and physics, and summarises cutting-edge thinking about social networks, such as Stanley Milgram’s small-world experiment (no man is an island), Miller McPherson’s work on homophily (birds of a feather flock together), and Mark Granovetter’s article, “The Strength of Weak Ties”-thus introducing these gems to a broader audience. Then, in the final three chapters, he addresses the challenges and lessons of the current global pandemic (as he saw them at the time of writing, in August 2020), and discusses our handling of the pandemic, its economic implications, and how it has changed the future of American–Chinese relations.ĭoom is a beautiful primer for the intellectually curious. His overarching theme is that “all disasters are at some level man-made political disasters,” and each of the first eight chapters examines a particular kind of influence on these disasters, such as human psychology, behavioural economics and what he sees as an overly optimistic view of the history of medicine. To address these questions, Ferguson takes readers on a whirlwind intellectual journey from antiquity to modernity. As Niall Ferguson acknowledges in his new book, Doom, “a general history of catastrophe” must address three main questions: Why do some societies outperform others? Why do some collapse while others thrive? And what role does politics play in precipitating catastrophe?

Niall ferguson doom review