But the impact was also made in the other direction. In his survey of the history of pandemics, Plagues and Peoples (1976), the great world historian William H McNeill convincingly traced the impact of infectious disease on human history. Even natural phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, wildfires, hurricanes and floods generate a lot of their destructive power from human factors such as settlement patterns, misplaced location of dams, forest clearance, inadequate sea defences, delayed or bungled government responses and the like. Yet “all disasters are man-made”, or at least gain much of their impact from human activities. And they are usually too slow to react, hoping the crisis will simply go away.

They look to the last crisis for examples of how to deal with it, or allow magical thinking, religion and irrationality to dictate their responses. When a disaster does occur, governments initially tend to underestimate its severity, a consequence often of their lack of imagination and their failure to learn from history. They’re too diverse to prepare for, and “we rarely get the disasters we expect”. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.You can’t predict disasters, the historian Niall Ferguson rightly says.

You can access the premium episode, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Supercast Page.

In place of an overtime, Demetri recorded a premium-only episode with Grant Williams on endgame scenarios for the economy, including a conversation about the prospects for runaway inflation and how to manage that risk for your portfolio. This episode also includes a discussion about financial markets, digital assets, and the health of Western economies. At the top of this list is an emerging cold war between the United States and a coalition of authoritarian powers led by China and Russia, two nations that are increasingly cooperating on matters of national and economic security. While Doom is mainly a history of disaster, its lessons apply most urgently in our own time, which provided us an opportunity to explore some of the contemporary challenges that we face in western society with someone who thinks and writes about such risks and opportunities regularly. What all these catastrophes share in common is a striking combination of operator and managerial error resulting from systemic problems that became calamities in the face of predictable, though unimaginable crises. In Episode 189 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with historian Niall Ferguson about his latest book, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” The book is a historical tour de force of epic disasters ranging from pandemics to botched military responses, to nuclear accidents.

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