Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers

John Kay

ISBN 10: 1324004770 / ISBN 13: 9781324004776

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2020

About this Item

First Edition, First Printing. Not price-clipped. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. Octavo. Hardcover. Book is like new. Dust jacket is like new.100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1324004770
• ISBN 13: 9781324004776
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Like New
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

Much economic advice is bogus quantification, warn two leading experts in this essential book. Invented numbers offer false security; we need instead robust narratives that yield the confidence to manage uncertainty.

Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one―not least Steve Jobs―knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package―what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?―demonstrate only that their advice is worthless.

The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.

About the Authors

John Kay is an economist and Fellow of St. John’s College, University of Oxford.

Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, teaches at New York University and the London School of Economics.