Radical Uncertainty

Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers

By: John Kay, Mervyn King

Narrated by: Roger Davis

In a changing world, forecasts and numbers usually represent bogus quantification. Kay and King tell us how to think smarter.

Radical uncertainty changes the way we should think about decision-making. For over half a century economics has assumed that people behave rationally by optimizing among well-defined choices. Behavioral economics questioned how far people are rational, pointing to the cognitive biases that seem to describe actual behavior.

Radical Uncertainty is a bold, paradigm-shifting book that takes us past standard and behavioral economics, completely shifting our understanding of the role economics can play in decision-making. We can never have the information required to optimize. But the failure to come to terms with this reality has led us to build our largest financial organizations, develop major policy decisions, and create business structures on shifting sands - the false belief that the numbers provided by economic models give us the answer. They don't. The best managers in the public and private sectors rely on narratives, not numbers.

©2020 John Kay; Mervyn King (P)2019 Hachette Audio UK

Thorough Treatment of Essential Concepts

A great addition and complement for those who enjoyed Peter Bernstein's Against the Gods, and Nassim Taleb's Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, The book covers key concepts in decision science, probability, and game theory by using interesting and easy to grasp examples. Even if you are familiar with some, most, or all of the content, much tends to be slippery and unintuitive; (e.g. The Monty Hall problem, which is given an excellent treatment here). The more I hear these concepts, the better I am reminded to avoid common and easy to make financial mistakes in the future.

As for the narration, Roger Davis did an excellent job with both pronunciation and presentation. So often great books are marred by bad narrators, which happily is not the case here. Mr. Davis enhanced the material, which I had already read in print form. Too bad he didn't narrate Time of the Magicians, and Kindred; two excellent books that terrible narrators ruined in audio format.

Provoking much food for thought

Great insight into oneself ... it certainly makes you think about what you think you know ... and what reality is .... my joke about the author is I don’t like him because he’s an economist ....I don’t like him because he speaks English ... if one were to lay all the economist head to toe a ring around the world would be former...but they would never reach a decision..... book gets very draggy at times and I did pick up the speed at which it was narrated

Excellent book

The narration is well done and you can listen at 1.5 times speed with no problem.
“What is really going on?” Excellent and something I will use many times many times a day

Outstanding and broadly applicable

Very well done and widely applicable to many disciplines and life in general. Well read, too, for those of you who focus too much on the speaker.

Best resurrection since Lazarus

Kudos to King and Kay for resurrecting the importance of radical uncertainty, especially in a fun and enjoyable manner that’s relatively simple (and also explains how more advanced models can often give false precision/comfort when knowledge is lacking)