With the stock market breaking records almost daily, leaving longtime market analysts shaking their heads and revising their forecasts, a study of the concept of risk seems quite timely. Peter Bernstein has written a comprehensive history of man’s efforts to understand risk and probability, beginning with early gamblers in ancient Greece, continuing through the 17th-century French mathematicians Pascal and Fermat and up to modern chaos theory. Along the way he demonstrates that understanding risk underlies everything from game theory to bridge-building to winemaking.
Customer Reviews
Dry and Unfulfilling, Except Chapter 16:
This book was recommended to me because I’m interested in getting an MBA eventually. I don’t see what the fuss was about.
It’s a long dry series of history interjection separated by basic probabilities and a few simplified algorithms. I took math courses in college, and this book came off as simplistic.
It goes over the history of risk from approximately ancient Greece up to 1950. It isn’t going to help you in your own business dealings. The concept of punctuated equilibrium bursting artificial market bubbles and rewriting the rules of risk isn’t even mentioned. Chaos theory gets one paragraph at the end of the novel. This made the book largely useless.
The only good about the book (to me) was chapter 16, titled ‘The Failure of Invariance’ (inconsistent choices for the same problem framed in different ways) which explains Prospect Theory. Distilled it means emotions destroy rational decision making, and people often don’t understand what they are dealing with. Basically ‘we use shortcuts that lead us to erroneous perceptions, or we interpret small samples as representative of what larger samples would show’ (overgeneralization, p271). We interpret gains and losses (chance of losing means we gamble more) differently, and overvalue dramatic components, ignoring the data from other sources. It means we misjudge risk because we don’t understand the situation well enough. It is applied fuzzy thinking strained through ego. This chapter made me investigate the research of Kahneman and Tversky, and I found it the [only] worthwhile portion of this book.
Great Book on Risk:
Risk is a topic central to many facets of everyday life. Peter Bernstein offers a compelling and readable historical overview of the evolving role of risk in everyday life combined with thoughts on the future of risk in our changing world.
Well-documented and interesting, this is a key book for those who are interested in contextualizing risk. After reading this book, you may well see risk in a new and different way.
Well researched , but a bit dry:
As a statistics and economics teacher, I naturally jumped at this book. But while I found some parts to be interesting, I didn’t love it. All too often, I found it a bit boring — not nearly a page turner, like When Genius Failed, Fortune’s Formula, Fermat’s Enigma, or many other books that Amazon puts on the boat. It read to me more like a history textbook on a niche subject — not really what I was hoping for.
I did learn a lot from reading it, but I found that I could only read one short chapter at a time before nodding off.
Against The Gods, a highly recommended book for MBA:
The reason that I bought this book was because it was highly recommended by the teachers at my MBA class.
They were not kidding, from head to toe its very good and kept my attention till the end. It has been of great help to me. Aside the history content it helps you to think on how to mitigate risk and how improve the opportunities.
So Close to Wonderful:
Bernstein does an adequate job bringing the concepts together, but this is not a page-turner. I found myself reading on for the promise of insight, and he offers some, but the writing is a bit dull.
