It’s no coincidence that small states such as Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand have done best in the battle against Covid.Īnother reality is that disasters are frequently caused by failures in the middle ranks or by “latent” causes such as reduced resources or staffing or organisational or technical changes that create vulnerabilities that eventually go wrong. Instead, governance in general, Ferguson argues, has got worse, even as state bureaucracies have become bigger with potentially greater capacity to do things. He supports this by asserting that it was only the lower potency of swine flu that allowed Barack Obama to escape a calamity when his administration was unable to stop the disease infecting many millions in the US in 2009 and nothing do with any superior competence in the White House. He contends that there were plenty of plans for coping with a pandemic in the US when Covid hit, but the failures of government bureaucracies including state administrations have been as responsible for the high death toll as the errors of the former president. The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power by Niall Ferguson - reviewīut there many new insights here, notably that for all the criticisms levelled at Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and others, it’s facile to blame the person at the top for all that goes wrong when usually the real culprit in a catastrophe is a system failure.The role and importance of networks in world societies was the theme of Ferguson’s most recent book, The Square and the Tower. It’s a useful reminder that what may feel like having unprecedented restrictions imposed on our lives today is nothing new. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.
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