Radical uncertainty : decision-making beyond the numbers / John Kay, Mervyn King.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., [2020]Edition: First editionDescription: xvi, 528 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781324004776
- 1324004770
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | NonFiction | 658.403 K23 | Available | 33111009632056 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
"In a changing world, forecasts and numbers usually represent bogus quantification. Kay and King tell us how to think smarter. Radical uncertainty changes the way we should think about decision-making. For over half a century economics has assumed that people behave rationally by optimizing among well-defined choices. Behavioral economics questioned how far people are rational, pointing to the cognitive biases that seem to describe actual behavior. Radical Uncertainty is a bold, paradigm-shifting book that takes us past standard and behavioral economics, completely shifting our understanding of the role economics can play in decision-making. We can never have the information required to optimize. But the failure to come to terms with this reality has led us to build our largest financial organizations, develop major policy decisions, and create business structures on shifting sands-the false belief that the numbers provided by economic models give us the answer. They don't. The best managers in the public and private sectors rely on narratives, not numbers"-- Provided by publisher.