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.
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