File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 727


Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 20:12:32 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: risks, again



Doug, you're not talking about "true" decision-theoretic uncertainty in
the cases of AIDs of ecological catastrophe. The decision-theoretical
classification is into decision under uncertainty, where we can at least
roughly calculate the probablity of the outcomes, and decision under risk,
where you can't. Decision theory has an elaborate discussion of each,
roughly the ide is that with uncertainty we maximize expected utility, but
we can calculate the expected utility, namely, the desirability of the
occurrence discounted by its improbablity. We can do this with AIDS. We
know that the odds of getting it through random unprotected heterosexual
sex are low, but increase with frequency of sexual contact, that the odds
rise sharply with unprotected anal sex or sex with a high risk group--gay
men, intravenous drug users, prostitutes, etc., and drop sharply with
protected sex. Given that, and since the consequences are horrendous, we
know what to do: use rubbers if there's any doubt.

If this were decision under risk, we'd have to choose among principles
such as: Maximize the minimum outcome, i.e., choosing the best of the
worst outcomes, without having any idea of how likely these were or what
we might do to affect their probability.

The ecological situation is somewhat closer to decision under risk than to
decision under uncertainty, because the probabilities are far harder to
calculate. But even where we do know at least some of the relevant factors
that play into the determination of the likely outcomes, and we know that
we can affect the outcomes. We have to balance any loss of wealth and
medium-term well-being that may be associated with environmental
protection, although to what expect these losses are real is unclear--it's
not obvious, for example, that environmental protection has beena  real
cost in absolute wealth terms or a distributional burden, even in the
advanced capitalist countries--with the threat of a disaster that may wipe
out industrial civilization. (It doesn't seem to me that it's a very hard
choice.)

--jks 

On Tue, 30 Dec 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> j laari wrote:
> 
> >Doug H wrote:
> >
> >" What drives these perceptions of risk? I'd say there are several
> >things. One is that there really are real risks out there, for real.
> >BSE is a danger. AIDS is a danger. Radiation is a danger. Toxic waste
> >in drinking water is a danger. People may exaggerate these dangers,
> >but that's in part understandable. (...) So while the fear seems out
> >of all proportion to the actual risk, the perception among the public
> >isn't of risk but of true, unquantifiable uncertainty (which is
> >irrational by definition). "
> >
> >Do you mean sort of 'scienticized urban legends'?
> 
> No. I mean that the things that people are afraid of - like AIDS and
> environmental catastrophe - can have consequences so dire that the normal
> calculus of quantifiable risk (in the statistical sense of deviation from
> an expected outcome) doesn't apply. With cigarettes, we pretty much know
> what your chance of heart disease or lung cancer is as a function of "pack
> years" of smoking experience. With ecological disaster, who knows what
> could happen and when? This is where things cross over into what Keynes
> famously called true uncertainty (in a passage written when 1970 was 33
> years in the future):
> 
> "By 'uncertain' knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to
> distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game
> of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty; nor is the
> prospect of a victory bond being drawn.... Even the weather is only
> moderately uncertain. The sense in which I am using the term is that in
> which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper
> and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new
> invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in
> 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any
> calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know."
> 
> Doug
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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