The oceans are rising, the forests are burning, and new diseases can slow society to a crawl. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, right? Not at the moment, it would appear... humanity seems to have developed some bugs in the responding-to-disasters department.
Historian Niall Ferguson puts the (mis)handling of the COVID-19 pandemic at the center of his new book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.
The book covers the decades preceding the arrival of the new coronavirus, and shows how complexities in some of our systems produced a response that was often garbled, at best. The author returns to the JX to lay out his analysis.