Antoine de Saint Exupéry, 1929. Credit: Roger Viollet / Getty
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Why do we take risks? It’s a question that’s at the top of my mind, having spent most of August in Edinburgh performing my new show about risk. That in itself was something of a gamble – financially, emotionally, and for the long-term health of my liver.
It is, of course, impossible to avoid risk completely. You could stay indoors and reduce your risk of death from lightning, transport accidents or being attacked by strangers. But that would only increase your long-term risk of chronic health problems and early death, thanks to physical inactivity and social isolation.
So let me rephrase that: why do we take the risks we do?
I suppose we could make our life decisions based on mathematics. And before doing anything we could calculate the odds of success. Or, assess by how much a favourite vice would increase the chances of getting a horrible disease.
But we don’t do the maths. Not because we’re stupid – but because we’re human, and we live in a messy human world, most of which can’t be reduced to numbers.
A great illustration of this is The Norm Chronicles, by Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter. It’s the story of Norm (or Average Man) but also of Prudence (who tries to avoid all risks) and an expanding family of characters called Kevin or Kelvin, who take every risk going. Spiegelhalter is a statistician, so the book does a fine job of using numbers to get some perspective on risk and danger. But The Norm Chronicles is much more than a maths book.
It is also a highly entertaining read, as the characters’ varying attitudes to risk get them into comical or hair-raising scenarios. Whether through embracing risk, or excessive desperation to avoid it, Kelvin, Prudence and Norm allow us to laugh at exaggerated versions of ourselves, and then reflect on how we make decisions in the real world.
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