Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

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Description

A Business Week, New York Times Business, and USA Today Bestseller "Ambitious and readable . . . an engaging introduction to the oddsmakers, whom Bernstein regards as true humanists helping to release mankind from the choke holds of superstition and fatalism." —The New York Times ... read more

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Memorable Quotes

“In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in the tempestuous season they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean will be flat. John Meynard Keynes. But we are obliged to live in the short run. The business at hand is to stay afloat and we dare not wait for the day the ocean will be flat. Even the flatness may be only an interlude of unknown duration between tempests.”
“Early on, Arrow became convinced that most people overestimate the amount of information that is available to them. The failure of economists to comprehend the causes of the Great Depression at the time demonstrated to him that their knowledge of the economy was "very limited." "To me our knowledge of the way things work, in society or in nature, comes trailing clouds of vagueness. Vast ills have followed a belief in certainty, whether historical inevitability, grand diplomatic designs, or extreme views on economic policy. When developing policy with wide effects for an individual or society, caution is needed because we cannot predict the consequences."”
Kenneth Arrow
“Ideas came to Keynes in such a rush and in such volume that he often found himself at odds with something he had said or written earlier. That did not disturb him. "When somebody persuades me that I am wrong," he wrote, "I change my mind. What do you do?"”
John Meynard Keynes
“Although the solutions to much of the mystery that Leibniz perceived in nature were well in hand by the twentieth century, we are still trying to understand the even more tantalizing mystery of how human beings make choices and respond to risk. Echoing Leibniz, G.K. Chesterton, a novelist and essayist rather than a scientist, has described the modern view this way: The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”
“Finally, the science of risk management sometimes creates new risks even as it brings old risks under control. Our faith in risk management encourages us to take risks we would not otherwise take. On most accounts, that is beneficial, but we must be wary of adding to the amount of risk in the system.”
“The central theme of this whole story is that the quantitative achievement of the heroes we have met shaped the trajectory of progress over the past 450 years....Cardano the Renaissance gambler, followed by Pascal the geometer and Fermat the lawyer, the monks of Port-Royal and teh ministers of Newington, the notions man and teh man with the sprained brain, Daniel Bernoulli and his uncle Jacob, secretive Gauss and voluble Quetelet, von Neumann the playful and Morgenstern the ponderous, the religious de Moivre and teh agnostic Knjght, pithy Black and loquacious Scholes, Kenneth Arrow and Harry Markowitz--all of them have transformed the perception of risk from chance of loss into opportunity for gain, from FATE and ORIGINAL DESIGN to sophisticated, probability-based forecasts of the future, and from helplessness to choice.”