| Description |
472 pages ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Introduction -- The meaning of death -- Cycles and tragedies -- Gray rhinos, black swans, and dragon kings -- Networld -- The science delusion -- The psychology of political incompetence -- From the boogie woogie flu to Ebola in town -- The fractal geometry of disaster -- The plagues -- The economic consequences of the plague -- The three-body problem -- Future shocks. |
| Summary |
"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, including the United States, to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. While populist leaders have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profound problems have been exposed by the coronavirus. 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 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 magical thinking? Drawing from multiple disciplines, including history, economics, public health, and network science, Doom is a global postmortem for a plague year." -- Provided by publisher. |
| Subject(S) |
COVID-19 (Disease) -- History.
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COVID-19 (Disease) -- Political aspects.
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Epidemics -- Political aspects.
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Political leadership.
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| ISBN |
9780593297377 (hardcover) |
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0593297377 (hardcover) |
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