A "recasting of the turning points in world history, including the one we're living through, as a struggle between old power hierarchies and new social networks"--Dust jacket.

"V svoeĭ novoĭ knige znamenityĭ istorik Nial Fergi͡uson daet obzor samykh raznykh katastrof, sluchivshikhsi͡a v istorii chelovechestva: geologicheskikh, geopoliticheskikh, biologicheskikh, tekhnologicheskikh. On rassmatrivaet prichiny i posledstvii͡a konkretnykh bedstviĭ, v tom chisle pandemii COVID-19, a takzhe v t͡selom to, kakim obrazom li͡udi i obshchestva reagirui͡ut na katastrofy i pytai͡utsi͡a ikh predskazatʹ. Opirai͡asʹ na neskolʹko nauchnykh dist͡siplin, sredi kotorykh ėkonomika, kliodinamika i nauka o seti͡akh, Fergi͡uson pishet ne tolʹko istorii͡u, no i obshchui͡u teorii͡u katastrof, i pokazyvaet, pochemu nashi vse bolee bi͡urokratizirovannye i slozhnye sistemy upravlenii͡a vse khuzhe spravli͡ai͡utsi͡a s nimi."--

"Setting the great crisis of 2020 in broad historical perspective, Niall Ferguson challenges the conventional wisdom that our failure to cope better with disaster was solely a crisis of political leadership, as opposed to a more profound systemic problem. 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 COVID-19. Only whe