Radical Uncertainty: decision making for an unknowable future [Audio]

Speaker(s): John Kay, Professor Lord King | Two leading economists discuss decision making in conditions of radical uncertainty, where we can neither imagine all possible outcomes nor assign probabilities to future events. Uncertainty surrounds all the big decisions we make in our lives. How much should we pay into our pensions each month? Should we take regular exercise? Expand the business? Change our strategy? Enter a trade agreement? Take an expensive holiday? We do not know what the future will hold. But we must make decisions anyway. So we crave certainties which cannot exist and invent knowledge we cannot have. But humans are successful because they have adapted to an environment that they understand only imperfectly. Throughout history we have developed a variety of ways of coping with the radical uncertainty that defines our lives. Mervyn King and John Kay, authors of a new book on decision making in conditions of radical uncertainty, will draw on biography, history, mathemati