[lbo-talk] Risk and Keynesian Uncertainty

[Charles Brown]

Miles Jackson:

Whatever "buffering" role the state plays, I think Keynes' point is a good
one: what faces investors and workers in a free-market society is not risk
in the sense of outcomes with known probability distributions but rather
uncertainty.  --Contrast rolling a die with the chance that the job market
will improve in the U. S. in the next 10 years: on any one roll of a die, I
don't know for sure what I'll get, but I can be confident that I'll get a 3
one-sixth of the time.  In contrast, the job market could get better, worse,
or tread water, depending on a wide variety of unforeseeable events; the
probability of a specific outcome cannot be ascertained, even in "the long
run".  (As with most economic concepts, probabilistic "risk" is more or less
useless in making sense of actual human behavior.)

Miles

^^^^^
CB: Is this like Heisenberg uncertainty, in that we are _certain_ that we
_can't_ know it ?  :>)