Doom Quotes

“The difference between Victorian liberals and Soviet Communists should now be clear. Nature, in the form of a new pathogen, played a much larger role in the Irish Famine. The Ukrainian Holodomor, by contrast, was largely man-made and with malice aforethought.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“in Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, where 45 percent of all civilian deaths were people aged fifteen to thirty-five.97 Death was not caused by the influenza virus itself so much as by the body’s immunological reaction to the virus. Perversely, this meant that individuals with the strongest immune systems were more likely to die than those with weaker immune systems.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“1490 Ch’ing-yang event”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“To date, around 99.9 percent of all species ever to have inhabited Earth have become extinct.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“By August, the pandemic of 2020 seemed more likely to end up closer to the 1957–58 Asian flu in terms of excess mortality. (As we saw in chapter 7, the Asian flu killed up to 115,700 Americans, the equivalent of 215,000 in 2020, and between 700,000 and 1.5 million people worldwide, equivalent to 2 to 4 million dead today.) That meant that in August 2020, COVID-19 was still capable of killing many more people.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“In South Africa, successive presidents—Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1999, and Jacob Zuma, who took over from Mbeki ten years later—publicly denied the nature of the threat posed by the virus, the latter boasting that a postcoital shower offered protection enough. Matters were made worse by a Soviet disinformation campaign, which planted in a KGB-controlled Indian newspaper the story that AIDS had been deliberately engineered by the United States, and then amplified the lie with bogus research by a retired East German biophysicist, Jakob Segal, which was widely cited in newspapers around the world, including the Sunday Express.117”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“much longer-lasting adverse effect of the pandemic: the fact that Americans who were in utero during the pandemic had, over the course of their lives, reduced educational attainment, higher rates of physical disability, and lower income relative to those who went through fetal development immediately before or after.119 Those born at the crests of the three waves also had higher lifetime risk from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.120 Similar impacts on fetal development have also been found for other countries, including Brazil, Italy, Norway, Sweden,121 Switzerland, and Taiwan.122 There is also some evidence that the Spanish flu eroded social trust in the countries most adversely affected.123”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“absolute numbers were highest in India (18.5 million deaths) and China (between 4.0 and 9.5 million), but death rates varied widely from place to place. Close to half (44.5 percent) of the population of Cameroon was wiped out; in Western Samoa, nearly a quarter (23.6 percent). In Kenya and Fiji, more than 5 percent of the people died. The other sub-Saharan countries for which we have data suffered mortality of between 2.4 percent (Nigeria) and 4.4 percent (South Africa). In Central America, mortality was also high: 3.9 percent of the population of Guatemala, 2 percent of all Mexicans. Indonesia also had a high death rate (3 percent). The worst mortality rates in Europe were in Hungary and Spain (each around 1.2 percent), with Italy not far behind. By contrast, North America got off lightly: between 0.53 and 0.65 percent for the United States, 0.61 percent for Canada.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“United States failed to match its greatly enhanced economic importance with a commensurate geopolitical role.84 Power remained disproportionately in the hands of the victorious European empires, the British and the French, but both were so constrained fiscally and domestically that they could not preserve the fruits of their victory.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“There are waves in history, as we have seen, including some vast tsunamis. But the idea that those waves are like waves of light and sound is an illusion. In the 1920s, the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff sought to show that there were such patterns in capitalism, inferring from British, French, and German economic statistics the existence of fifty-year cycles of expansion followed by depression.114 For this contribution, which continues to be influential with many investors today, Stalin had Kondratieff arrested, imprisoned, and later shot. Unfortunately, modern research dispels the idea of such regularity in economic life. The economic historian Paul Schmelzing’s meticulous reconstruction of interest rates back to the thirteenth century points instead to a long-run, “supra-secular” decline in nominal rates, driven mostly by the process of capital accumulation, punctuated periodically but randomly by inflationary episodes nearly always associated with wars.115 Yet”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“The reality, as we shall see, is that history is a process too complex to be modeled, even in the informal ways favored by Turchin and Dalio. Moreover, the more systematic modeling is done of historical phenomena—notably pandemics, but also climate change or environmental degradation—the easier it becomes to go “from being roughly right towards being precisely wrong.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“We don’t need a ‘low carbon economy,’” she declared at the World Economic Forum in January 2020. “We don’t need to ‘lower emissions.’ Our emissions have to stop if we are to have a chance to stay below the 1.5-degree target …. Any plan or policy of yours that doesn’t include radical emission cuts at the source, starting today, is completely insufficient.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“The advent of the internet has greatly magnified the potential for misinformation and disinformation to spread, to the extent that we may speak of twin plagues in 2020: one caused by a biological virus, the other by even more contagious viral misconceptions and falsehoods. This problem might have been less serious in 2020 had meaningful reforms of the laws and regulations governing the big technology companies been implemented. Despite ample evidence after 2016 that the status quo was untenable, almost nothing was done.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“It was precisely the existence of trans-Eurasian trade routes that enabled the bacterium Yersinia pestis to kill so many fourteenth-century Europeans. Likewise, European expansion overseas, beginning roughly a century and a half later, led to the so-called Columbian Exchange: pathogens brought by Europeans devastated indigenous American populations; Europeans then brought back syphilis from the New World; and by shipping enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas, Europeans also brought malaria and yellow fever to those places.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“In 1383, the authorities in Marseille extended the isolation period to forty days, giving the quarantine its name. (The duration was a biblical touch, inspired by the forty days and forty nights of the flood in Genesis, the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness, and the forty days of Lent.)”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe