
Radical Uncertainty
Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers
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Narrated by:
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Roger Davis
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By:
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John Kay
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Mervyn King
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.
©2020 John Kay; Mervyn King (P)2019 Hachette Audio UKListeners also enjoyed...




















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As for the narration, Roger Davis did an excellent job with both pronunciation and presentation. So often great books are marred by bad narrators, which happily is not the case here. Mr. Davis enhanced the material, which I had already read in print form. Too bad he didn't narrate Time of the Magicians, and Kindred; two excellent books that terrible narrators ruined in audio format.
Thorough Treatment of Essential Concepts
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Provoking much food for thought
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A great read
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Outstanding and broadly applicable
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Best resurrection since Lazarus
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Outstanding
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“What is really going on?” Excellent and something I will use many times many times a day
Excellent book
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It is about reckoning with uncertainty in all areas of life: measuring, modeling, guessing, betting, deciding, and committing.
This (well-timed) work is not as graceful, lyrical, or punchy as Nassim Taleb's best. But it is more disciplined and thorough. It is an education in one book, and takes pains to go over the major thinkers up to now, pretty systematically. Taleb by comparison wilfully flashes past things he assumes the reader knows, and goes whither he will. This book makes frequent reference to the "black swan" idea (and credits Taleb). But this book is more English and English school-like in tone and style, whereas Taleb is more Mediterranean, near-eastern, and ancient-epic. This one takes its time, colorfully enough, to see that you have a deep and wide background in its subject. It wanders around more capaciously, slipping into various stories of things unexpected. At moments it can seem a bit slack in the pacing. What it does for me is help me build my tool kit for (I'm already far down this path) a broad re-callibration of how I view and process and decide in my world. I see it as an antidote to the shared hallucination we (in USA) might now be awakening from -- the (relative) apparent certitudes of the mid- and later-20th century, and even (though it has been pretty well shaken lately) the 21st. I enjoy this one, alongside Taleb's works (which are maybe a more entertaining entry point to this probabilistic thinking, preferably in the order of their release), and also (if you are skewed toward an interest in finance as I am) this book's co-author Mervyn King's The End of Alchemy (also here on audible). End of Alchemy in a context of finance and banking gives a very elegant introduction to this same "radical uncertainty" idea, as explaining much of what finance does, whereas this one generalizes the idea to all our doings. This book certainly fits the unfolding era of COVID-19 like a glove, meanwhile giving me some degree of (relaxing?) intellectual distance from today's headlines, and more broad framework for considering it all, and making decisions (which are happening deeply and daily for me in real time as I write this, March 2020, and I see no end to this accelerated period of change). The narration here is sharp and effective.
Underneath, where's the beef? The authors are skeptical of a lot of quantitative modeling, and what they go for ("What is going on here?") might fit in risk management jargon as scenarios (though they stubbornly refuse to use the word). As a positive and novel view, it comes out a bit mushy. The concept of a "reference narrative" is useful, though how this departs from the (again essentially uncredited) concept of anchoring (in behavioral economics) is not clear. So, I didn't see anything strikingly new to me. I did benefit from its leisurely explorations around these themes.
At 1:23:50: "we must expect ... a virus"
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good but long
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Great start that becomes rambling and disjointed.
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