Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (edit title)

Stan W edited the quotations of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Saturday, October 10 2009.

• Added a quotation: “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.”
• Added a quotation: “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.”

Stan W edited the quotations of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Friday, October 9 2009.

• Added a quotation: “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.”
• Added a quotation: “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
• Added a quotation: “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
• Added a quotation: “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.”

Shelfari edited the description of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Tuesday, August 4 2009.

• 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 "An extraordinarily entertaining and informative book." —The Wall Street Journal "A lively panoramic book . . . Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it." —Business Week "Deserves to be, and surely will be, widely read." —The Economist "<A> challenging book, one that may change forever the way people think about the world." —Worth "No one else could have written a book of such central importance with so much charm and excitement." —Robert Heilbroner author, The Worldly Philosophers "With his wonderful knowledge of the history and current manifestations of risk, Peter Bernstein brings us Against the Gods. Nothing like it will come out of the financial world this year or ever. I speak carefully: no one should miss it." —John Kenneth Galbraith Professor of Economics Emeritus, Harvard University In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past. Against the Gods chronicles the remarkable intellectual adventure that liberated humanity from oracles and soothsayers by means of the powerful tools of risk management that are available to us today. "An extremely readable history of risk." —Barron's "Fascinating . . . this challenging volume will help you understand the uncertainties that every investor must face." —Money "A singular achievement." —Times Literary Supplement "There's a growing market for savants who can render the recondite intelligibly—witness Stephen Jay Gould (natural history), Oliver Sacks (disease), Richard Dawkins (heredity), James Gleick (physics), Paul Krugman (economics)—and Bernstein would mingle well in their company." —The Australian

Shelfari edited the contributors of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Tuesday, July 21 2009.

• reordered the contributors.
• 1 : Peter L. Bernstein:

SparkyTheWonderDog edited the characters of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Monday, July 20 2009.

• Added a character: Francis Galton

SparkyTheWonderDog edited the characters of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Monday, July 20 2009.

• Added a character: John Maynard Keynes

SparkyTheWonderDog edited the characters of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Monday, July 20 2009.

• Added a character: Girolamo Cardano

SparkyTheWonderDog edited the characters of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Monday, July 20 2009.

• Added a character: Harry Markowitz

SparkyTheWonderDog edited the characters of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Monday, July 20 2009.

• Added a character: Daniel Bernoulli

SparkyTheWonderDog edited the characters of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Monday, July 20 2009.

• Added a character: John Graunt