Peter L. Bernstein (1919–2009)

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk discusses the history of Risk Management. The book goes through the early years of Probability and comes full circle to the present day. It talks about the development of Statistical Sampling and other various techniques used to quantify events.

The book is really interesting in how it discusses its subject. Peter L Bernstein has done a great deal of work in researching the history of Probability and the history of Statistics. It also goes into how people understood annuities and other methods of insurance.

Bernstein has done a great deal of thought on how the Ancient Greeks didn’t develop this sort of idea as well. They knew of many things but never made that leap to think of Risk Assessment or Probabilities. With the Ancient Greeks, the main problem was not only their number system, but it was also their belief in a capricious pantheon of deities. The author argues that if you don’t believe yourself to be a free agent with some control over your own fate, you wouldn’t go and try to change your own position in society. Finally, the Ancient Greeks didn’t really have a mindset of making practical applications for things. They were more purists than anything with that. The theoretical was more important than the practical for them.

So this paradigm continued throughout the so-called Dark Ages. As I said, a great deal of the shift in thinking occurred due to the spread of Hindu-Arabic Numerals and other Arabic ideas. It covers the development of the Double-Entry Bookkeeping System, and how people didn’t trust the Hindu-Arabic Numerals at first. Basically, the argument was that it was too easy to commit fraud. Once Movable Type became more available the numerals were accepted easily. This was also prompted by the rise of Banking and other businesses that made dozens of transactions per day.

By following the development of Probability Theory, we look at the lives of many mathematical luminaries of the Seventeenth Century and beyond. We certainly know the lives of some of these men and women, but most of them started popping up in the Seventeenth Century as I mentioned. All of them were known to Marin Mersenne, the French Priest that made some advancements in Acoustics and ran correspondence with people all over Europe. The other thing of note was the rise of Lloyd’s, the famed Insurance Company that I never really knew much about. With Merchant Shipping came the rise of Underwriters and other different services.

Once we get into the Eighteenth Century we meet up with some of the Bernoulli Family and the Prince of Mathematicians Carl Friedrich Gauss. The book states that Daniel Bernoulli was the first to ascribe a value to something that could not be counted. Bernoulli argued that motivations count toward the end result as well. To illustrate this, Bernoulli presents the Petersburg Paradox. The Paradox goes like this; Peter and Paul play a coin flip game. If tails come up the winnings you get are doubled, but if heads come up, you get the amount that you won. What would you pay to enter such a game? Bernoulli tells us that although the game can enable you to earn an infinite amount of money, a reasonable person would only pay about 20 Ducats. We can’t have risk without uncertainty, and in that vein, we meet Thomas Bayes and the Bayes Theorem. It discusses the ideas behind that and how it benefited the field. Then we meet with Gauss. He developed a lot of different things, among them is the Normal Distribution or Bell Curve.

Finally, once we reach the modern era it talks about the theories and ideas of Keynes, von Neumann, Knight, and Morgenstern. It talks about when the United States Government auctioned off its Wireless Zone rights and how different companies had to use Game Theory to figure out what to do, and the best way to outbid the other companies.

All in all, this book was pretty good. It was very interesting and enjoyable. I did not realize that it was over twenty years old as of this review on May 23, 2019. That isn’t really all that important though.… (more)