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Introduction
Risk: What This Book Is About
Financial meltdown, oil spills, climate change: we live in a risky world.
Alan Greenspan (2007) has called it “the age of turbulence.”
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A search of
the Business Source Premier database for the subject terms “risk” and
“uncertainty” yields the following number of citations over each of the past
ve decades:
• 1960s: 520 citations
• 1970s: 1,979 citations
• 1980s: 4,824 citations
• 1990s: 11,552 citations
• 2000s: 50,489 citations
Further evidence of the increasing attention paid to risk is shown in
Figure0.1, which tracks the use of the word “risk” in published books over
the past ...