Against the Gods, The Remarkable Story of Risk
by Peter L. Bernstein
1996, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York
ISBN: 0-471-29563

At first glance, this is would seem to be a rather dry book about economics and statistics. That is what I thought as well, but upon reading just the first few pages, I found myself thinking about the world around me in an entirely new mind-frame. For example, take this passage from the introduction:

The revolutionary idea that defines the boundry between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature. Until human beings discovered a way across that boundry, the future was a mirror of the past or the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers who held a monopoly over knowledge of anticipated events.

What an incredibly powerful statement this is! Our civilization did not enter the Rennaissance and these modern times merely because of the invention of moveable type or the start of the Reformation. No, it was because of changes in the way people viewed the universe around them. The mystic dogmas of the Church were no longer enough to satisfy their intellectual hunger. The need for a systematic way of explaining the world and predicting future events was what propelled us out of the Middle Ages. Moveable type was a means of spreading the word and fanning the flames of discontent. The Reformation was merely one of the consequences.

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