Mervyn King: How to handle radical uncertainty

What this episode covers

So much of our policy debates rely on predictions, projections, and probabilities. What will the results of the upcoming election be? How will this policy affect economic growth? How big of a threat is climate change in the long term? What do the epidemiological models say about handling the COVID pandemic? It’s important to answer these questions as best as we can, but we should also recognize that some uncertainty is inevitable. We can’t quantify our way through difficult, ambiguous problems. At least, that’s the argument made by today’s guest, Mervyn King. Mervyn is a professor of both economics and law at New York University, and he is a former governor of the Bank of England. He is also the co-author, along with John Kay, of “ Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making beyond the Numbers .”

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