Mr Ferguson offers a wealth of deep research, some of it gripping-such as Thucydides’s account of the unravelling of ancient Athenian society after a plague, the reasons for the lifeboat shortage on the Titanic and the views of Richard Feynman, a renowned physicist, on the organisational causes of the Challenger disaster. When bad things happen to humanity, humanity is largely to blame. If the set takes in the Titanic, the Challenger space shuttle, the war in Syria and a possible conflict with China, and if “politics” includes the way people and organisations work together-which is how Mr Ferguson defines both concepts-his main contention becomes a statement of the obvious. Amartya Sen, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, made it in 1981 in “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation” his perception that famine is caused not by crop failure but by politics made his name. If it is drawn narrowly enough to include only those that seem natural, such as pandemics, Mr Ferguson’s observation is interesting but not original. But the set of disasters under consideration is key.
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