Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

Chapter 13

The Radically Distinct Notion

Francis Galton died in 1911 and Henri Poincaré died the following year. Their passing marked the end of the grand age of measurement, an era that reached back five centuries to Paccioli’s game of balla. For it was his problem of the points (page 43) that had launched the long march to defining the future in terms of the laws of probability. None of the great mathematicians and philosophers of the past whom we have met so far doubted that they had the tools they needed to determine what the future held. It was only the facts that demanded attention.

I do not mean to imply that Galton and Poincaré finished the task: the principles of risk management are still evolving. But their deaths occurred—and their understanding of risk climaxed—on the eve of one of the great watersheds of history, the First World War.

The optimism of the Victorians was snuffed out by the senseless destruction of human life on the battlefields, the uneasy peace that followed, and the goblins let loose by the Russian revolution. Never again would people accept Robert Browning’s assurance that “God’s in his heaven:/All’s right with the world.” Never again would economists insist that fluctuations in the economy were a theoretical impossibility. Never again would science appear so unreservedly benign, nor would religion and family institutions be so unthinkingly accepted in the western world.

World War I put an end to all that. Radical transformations in art, literature, ...