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    Averting Catastrophe: Decision Theory for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Potential Disasters of All Kinds
    Averting Catastrophe: Decision Theory for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Potential Disasters of All Kinds
    Averting Catastrophe: Decision Theory for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Potential Disasters of All Kinds
    Audiobook3 hours

    Averting Catastrophe: Decision Theory for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Potential Disasters of All Kinds

    Written by Cass R. Sunstein

    Narrated by David Marantz

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    About this audiobook

    The world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money should be invested in the hopes of avoiding catastrophe. Lacking full information, should decision-makers focus on avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes? When should extreme measures be taken to prevent as much destruction as possible?

    Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the "maximin rule," which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information, and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of "Knightian uncertainty," found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes. At once an approachable introduction to decision-theory and a provocative argument for how governments ought to handle risk, Averting Catastrophe offers a definitive path forward in a world rife with uncertainty.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 15, 2021
    ISBN9781666132502
    Author

    Cass R. Sunstein

    Cass R. Sunstein is the nation’s most-cited legal scholar who, for the past fifteen years, has been at the forefront of behavioral economics. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since that time, he has served in the US government in multiple capacities and worked with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, where he chaired the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. His book Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler, was a national bestseller. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. He lives in Boston and Washington, DC, with his wife, children, and labrador retrievers.

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