Volume 29, Number 14 · September 23, 1982
Why Are You Scared?
By Ian Hacking
Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers
by Mary Douglas, by Aaron Wildavsky
University of California Press, 221 pp., $14.95
Acceptable Risk
by Baruch Fischhoff, by Sarah Lichtenstein, by Paul Slovic, by Steven L. Derby, by Ralph L. Keeney
Cambridge University Press, 185 pp., $19.95
What is risk? Not risk of this disease or that accident, but Pure Risk? It is a sign of the times. The Society for Risk Analysis was founded last year. There is a new magazine for the trade: Risk Analysis, an International Journal. Risk has become a profession. Social risks have long been familiar to surgeons, engineers, admirals, and entrepreneurs. Today everyone can go to a new kind of expert, the risk assessor, who offers an impartial evaluation of risks of any kind. The new expert uses lots of older lore, but history records an official beginning to 'modern risk-benefit thinking.' The year was 1969.[1]
Review, 3733 words
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