And while he acknowledges Donald Trump’s flawed handling of Covid, he argues that it would be wrong to blame populist politics. It’s the role of epidemiologists to be Cassandras and err on the side of worst-case scenarios, because the costs of overestimating are much less devastating than those of underestimating.įerguson is doubtful about the effectiveness of lockdowns, which seems more like an ideological predisposition than an empirically based piece of reasoning. And that was with lockdowns, social distancing and masks – at least in most states – and, moreover, the arrival of effective vaccines, which was far from guaranteed earlier in the year.Īll of which is to say that pandemics are notoriously difficult to call, because so many variables exist across and within nations. In fact, closer to 350,000 Americans died by the end of December (the figure is now over 580,000). The Imperial College London epidemiologist said that, without lockdowns and other prophylactics, as many as 2.2 million American lives were at risk.įerguson (the historian) says his own estimate, made in May 2020, was a death toll of approximately 250,000 by the end of 2020 – a total that he still finds plausible when writing in August of last year.

His near namesake, Neil Ferguson, comes in for admonishment for overestimating the death rate from Covid if no preventive measures were taken. It’s no such thing, but instead an extended piece of opinion journalism that doesn’t really add much to our understanding of the pandemic, while showing that Ferguson is no better at prediction than the scientists he takes to task. He acknowledges the limitations of this endeavour, as a historian, but suggests the chapter should be read as a diary. As if to make that job even harder, two-thirds of the way through the book, Ferguson starts writing about contemporary events as they’re unfolding. In vain does the reader search through Ferguson’s impressive breadth of learning for a compelling structure or argument that might make sense of the information overload. Network theory, the “Cassandra Coefficient”, the psychology of political incompetence, the fractal geometry of disaster and cliodynamics all vie for headspace alongside Voltaire, Thomas Malthus, Amartya Sen, Aeschylus, Richard Feynman, Liu Cixin and an intellectual cast of hundreds.

Ferguson is no better at prediction than the scientists he takes to task Instead, like someone who doesn’t want to let a moment’s research go unused, he crams the book with a dizzying array of theories, characters and references that, while sometimes informative and occasionally amusing, combine to a deadening effect. And, indeed, no such clarity of picture emerges from Ferguson’s whistle-stop tour of major lethal events. Few would dispute this near-truism, although a study of these various fields won’t necessarily yield a working model or even rough image of the complex mechanics of catastrophe.

Ferguson doom