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How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
- mro_name 5y agowow, 'risk' has arab origin! Again. Like sifr (=0) became german "Ziffer" (=digit)
- nikprasad 5y agoOh and if risk is indeed your jam then look no further than Nassim Taleb's Real World risk institute. I've spoken to some alums of this course and they swear by it! Of course you could read his books too but I think he makes his books stupidly long for no reason.
- boppo1 5y agoThese kinds of articles always make me wish there were some sort of "financial history book" (or series) that tracked the flows of capital through history and endeavors. We see so much of how ideology and politics evolved, but history of capital flows in any specificity is (or, seems to me) so opaque. I expect someone to point out that opacity is natural given the sensitive nature of the subject. Consider how much commonly known history is made up of once dire secrets. Then again, perhaps it's all out there. I guess a good place to start would be US, UK and French treasury reports on actuals. Maybe with python that becomes a more manageable task.
- fitzn 5y agoIf you're into risk, then an awesome book is Against the Gods, by Peter Bernstein.
- starwind 5y agoThe painting they chose for the cover—Storm on the Sea of Galilee—was stolen in the Gardner Heist in 1990 and has yet to be recovered. It’s believed to be Rembrandt’s only seascape
- Animats 5y agoYes, and I was going to refer to that book, which is from 1998. The article misses the point. He's describing the beginnings of marine insurance. The goal was to make commerce routine and at fixed cost. Before this, shipping was a high-risk, high-return, low-volume enterprise. Marine insurance converted it, gradually, into a low-risk, low-return, high-volume enterprise. From silks and spices to bulk salted herring in casks. This is how shipping changed from "ventures" to "boring, but profitable".
- 4monthsaway 5y agoI had no idea the board game was this old
- jareklupinski 5y agoplay the Game of Life if you want a real classic ;P
- throaway46546 5y agoThat game sucks.
- 4monthsaway 5y agoI'm losing
- paxys 5y agoInterest, risk, insurance etc. are such intrinsic economic concepts that it is hard to believe they didn't naturally originate in some form in the earliest human societies. While I'm sure the word risk and formal methods of actuary can be traced to the era mentioned by the author, I'm more hesitant to believe that the "idea of risk" was invented there.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nikprasad 5y agoPerhaps we didn't have as much economic activity in the earlier human societies or perhaps those methods have been lost to time (just like those societies). As an ex actuary student what I can tell you is that at least from a mathematical tools perspective, we didn't have those available till around the 17th century.
- sushsjsuauahab 5y agoThere are Babylonian tablets where merchants are complaining about other merchants not delivering on their contractual obligations :)
- nikprasad 5y agoHaha I had forgotten about this meme! I wonder if they had insurance for merchants back then and if so how did they even figure out the premium on it...
- FranzFerdiNaN 5y agoOne of them even became a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir
- BoxOfRain 5y agoThere's something incredibly surreal about a dispute over trading standards between two people who have been dead for literal millennia and couldn't possibly have conceived of the internet and the technology that makes it possible becoming a meme. I wonder if there's any correspondence out there today which will amuse people 3500 years in the future?
- ncmncm 5y agoRe-invented, anyway. It was well-understood in India a thousand years before, and in Sumeria thousands of years before that. it got re-invented each place and time it was needed.
- dmos62 5y agoI guess that's how abstractions work in general. You start reasoning in them explicitly when the need (or benefit) to do so is sustained for some time. Then you discard them when they're not needed anymore.
- bobthechef 5y agoThere's a difference between "abstraction" as used in computer science and software development, and "abstraction" as an intellectual act or process. The former itself seems to have a few different but related uses, but generally it is often a matter of modeling. The latter is generally that act of the intellect that draws out something from a whole. So it's kind of an opposite process, in a very loose sense. The concept "greenness" is abstracted from images (or phantasms, in classical parlance) of particulars we encounter through the senses. We never encounter "greenness" in the world as a thing, only things which are green. Where risk is concerned, I would expect the intellect to seize on the concept through abstraction (2), but any modeling of risk would involve the use of (1).
- dmos62 5y agoI fail to see the difference between these two abstractions. Is modeling, as you put it, not drawing something out from a whole? I think if abstraction meant different things in different contexts, the definition would be to blame.
- faustlast 5y agoagree, the abstract idea of risk can be traced way before the label "risk". Written register of the idea can also be found in Hammurabi's code.
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