Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: In the context of contemporary science, we know that a particular domain of inquiry is coming of age once it is subject to brain imaging.Irony aside, in an article published in Neuroimage, Fukui and Murai [1] report on risk anticipation, making this observation: insensitivity to future consequences, after damage to the human prefrontal cortex, affects the anticipation of risk.Writing these introductory lines to the issue that our Journal dedicates to Anticipation and Risk Assessment, I cannot avoid making the connection to the current economic crisis in the USA (sub-prime mortgages, troubled financial institutions, excess energy consumption, inflation, etc.).The people's pre-fontal cortex -to use a bit of analogy -(or at least that of the people in power) seems to be damaged.If anything can be said with certainty, the risks involved in less than responsible mortgage lending or speculative futures trading, or hedging do not take anticipation into consideration.Interestingly enough, the year I was born, Willford Isbell King [2] published "The Causes of Economic Fluctuations: Possibilities of Anticipation and Control".In all fairness, King's book is only of documentary interest for a world that faces risk in ways that no one ever imagined -including risk management as a profitmaking machine.However, during King's time, there was no scientific focus on anticipation and anticipatory processes.It is only after Robert Rosen dedicated a number of years (starting in 1972), in affiliation with the (in the meanwhile defunct) Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Santa Barbara, CA) that the word Anticipation was elevated to what in science is called a concept.Institute members debated whether anticipation could be of any relevance to society.Parallel to Rosen's work, my own focus on the human being's cognitive condition eventually led to a book that sug-
Source: Risk and Decision Analysis
Author: Mihai Nadin
Institution: The University of Texas at Dallas
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2115125636