Download or read book The First Modern Risk written by Julia Moses and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the late nineteenth century, many countries across Europe adopted national legislation that required employers to compensate workers injured or killed in accidents at work. These laws suggested that the risk of accidents was inherent to work and not due to individual negligence. By focusing on Britain, Germany, and Italy during this time, Julia Moses demonstrates how these laws reflected a major transformation in thinking about the nature of individual responsibility and social risk. The First Modern Risk illuminates the implications of this conceptual revolution for the role of the state in managing problems of everyday life, transforming understandings about both the obligations and rights of individuals. Drawing on a wide array of disciplines including law, history, and politics, Moses offers a fascinating transnational view of a pivotal moment in the evolution of the welfare state.

Download or read book Risk written by Arwen P. Mohun and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have Americans confronted, managed, and even enjoyed the risks of daily life? Winner of the Ralph Gomory Prize of the Business History Conference “Risk” is a capacious term used to describe the uncertainties that arise from physical, financial, political, and social activities. Practically everything we do carries some level of risk—threats to our bodies, property, and animals. How do we determine when the risk is too high? In considering this question, Arwen P. Mohun offers a thought-provoking study of danger and how people have managed it from pre-industrial and industrial America up until today. Mohun outlines a vernacular risk culture in early America, one based on ordinary experience and common sense. The rise of factories and machinery eventually led to shocking accidents, which, she explains, risk-management experts and the “gospel of safety” sought to counter. Finally, she examines the simultaneous blossoming of risk-taking as fun and the aggressive regulations that follow from the consumer-products-safety movement. Risk and society, a rapidly growing area of historical research, interests sociologists, psychologists, and other social scientists. Americans have learned to tame risk in both the workplace and the home. Yet many of us still like amusement park rides that scare the devil out of us; they dare us to take risks.

Download or read book Risk Uncertainty and Profit written by Frank H. Knight and published by Cosimo, Inc.. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timeless classic of economic theory that remains fascinating and pertinent today, this is Frank Knight's famous explanation of why perfect competition cannot eliminate profits, the important differences between "risk" and "uncertainty," and the vital role of the entrepreneur in profitmaking. Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, is a distinct pleasure to read. FRANK H. KNIGHT (1885-1972) is considered by some the greatest American scholar of economics of the 20th century. An economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, he was one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, which influenced Milton Friedman and George Stigler.

Download or read book The Disaster Experts written by Scott Gabriel Knowles and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, many are asking what, if anything, can be done to prevent large-scale disasters. How is it that we know more about the hazards of modern American life than ever before, yet the nation faces ever-increasing losses from such events? History shows that disasters are not simply random acts. Where is the logic in creating an elaborate set of fire codes for buildings, and then allowing structures like the Twin Towers—tall, impressive, and risky—to go up as design experiments? Why prepare for terrorist attacks above all else when floods, fires, and earthquakes pose far more consistent threats to American life and prosperity? The Disaster Experts takes on these questions, offering historical context for understanding who the experts are that influence these decisions, how they became powerful, and why they are only slightly closer today than a decade ago to protecting the public from disasters. Tracing the intertwined development of disaster expertise, public policy, and urbanization over the past century, historian Scott Gabriel Knowles tells the fascinating story of how this diverse collection of professionals—insurance inspectors, engineers, scientists, journalists, public officials, civil defense planners, and emergency managers—emerged as the authorities on risk and disaster and, in the process, shaped modern America.

Download or read book Freaks of Fortune written by Jonathan Levy and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the early nineteenth century, "risk" was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future. Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions-insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets-while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk's rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one's own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name "financial services industry." Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system. Amid the nineteenth-century's waning faith in God's providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. Freaks of Fortuneis one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.

Download or read book Calculated Risk written by Michael Palumbo and published by . This book was released on 2016-03-30 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does an entrepreneur take any idea and turn it into a profitable venture? What do investors look for when evaluating start-ups? These two important questions are answered in a new book by one of America's top traders, Michael J. Palumbo, called Calculated Risk: The Modern Entrepreneur's Handbook. The book helps founders and executives navigate today's business climate from idea conception through funding, expansion, and exiting. Calculated Risk provides an insider's perspective from someone in the know. Palumbo started a prop trading group in Chicago that turned into a highly successful U.S. stock options business, a firm that was one of the largest equity options trading groups in the country in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Palumbo's book reveals the following: * How to launch an idea from concept to funding. * How to best hire and build a start-up - right until you exit. * What venture capitalists look for in a start-up -and why it is not always profitability. * What start-ups should look for from their investors - it is not always about the money. * Why the best entrepreneurs are the ones who can predict what people will need before they even know they in fact need it. * How some entrepreneurs can gain an edge over their competition. Palumbo has a tell-it-like-it-is approach to revealing insights in the marketplace on how things will shake out. Offering a voice of experience and vision, Palumbo not only explains why something is happening in the markets, but also reveals why something will happen.

Download or read book Megaprojects and Risk written by Bent Flyvbjerg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-13 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Megaprojects and Risk provides the first detailed examination of the phenomenon of megaprojects. It is a fascinating account of how the promoters of multi-billion dollar megaprojects systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media in order to get projects approved and built. It shows, in unusual depth, how the formula for approval is an unhealthy cocktail of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effects. This results in projects that are extremely risky, but where the risk is concealed from MPs, taxpayers and investors. The authors not only explore the problems but also suggest practical solutions drawing on theory, experience and hard, scientific evidence from the several hundred projects in twenty nations and five continents that illustrate the book. Accessibly written, it will be the standard reference for students, scholars, planners, economists, auditors, politicians and interested citizens for many years to come.

Download or read book Applied Asset and Risk Management written by Marcus Schulmerich and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a guide to asset and risk management from a practical point of view. It is centered around two questions triggered by the global events on the stock markets since the middle of the last decade: - Why do crashes happen when in theory they should not? - How do investors deal with such crises in terms of their risk measurement and management and as a consequence, what are the implications for the chosen investment strategies? The book presents and discusses two different approaches to finance and investing, i.e., modern portfolio theory and behavioral finance, and provides an overview of stock market anomalies and historical crashes. It is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to asset and risk management for bachelor’s and master’s students in this field as well as for young professionals in the asset management industry. A key part of this book is the exercises to further demonstrate the concepts presented with examples and a step-by-step business case. An Excel file with the calculations and solutions for all 17 examples as well as all business case calculations can be downloaded at extras.springer.com.

Download or read book Rights at Risk written by David K. Shipler and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enlightening, intensely researched examination of violations of the constitutional principles that preserve individual rights and civil liberties from courtrooms to classrooms. With telling anecdote and detail, Pulitzer Prize–winner David K. Shipler explores the territory where the Constitution meets everyday America, where legal compromises—before and since 9/11—have undermined the criminal justice system’s fairness, enhanced the executive branch’s power over citizens and immigrants, and impaired some of the freewheeling debate and protest essential in a constitutional democracy. Shipler demonstrates how the violations tamper with America’s safety in unexpected ways. While a free society takes risks to observe rights, denying rights creates other risks. A suspect’s right to silence may deprive police of a confession, but a forced confession is often false. Honoring the right to a jury trial may be cumbersome, but empowering prosecutors to coerce a guilty plea means evidence goes untested, the charge unproved. An investigation undisciplined by the Bill of Rights may jail the innocent and leave the guilty at large and dangerous. Weakened constitutional rules allow the police to waste precious resources on useless intelligence gathering and frivolous arrests. The criminal courts act less as impartial adjudicators than as conveyor belts from street to prison in a system that some disillusioned participants have nicknamed “McJustice.” There is, always, a human cost. Shipler shows us victims of torture and abuse—not only suspected terrorists at the hands of the CIA but also murder suspects interrogated by the Chicago police. We see a poverty-stricken woman forced to share an attorney with her drug dealer boyfriend and sentenced to six years in prison when the conflict of interest turns her lawyer against her. We meet high school students suspended for expressing unwelcome political opinions. And we see a pregnant immigrant deported, after years of living legally in the country, for allegedly stealing a lottery ticket. Often shocking, yet ultimately idealistic, Rights at Risk shows us the shadows of America where the civil liberties we rightly take for granted have been eroded—and summons us to reclaim them.

Download or read book When All Else Fails written by David A. Moss and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-25 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most important functions of government—risk management—is one of the least well understood. Moving beyond familiar public functions—spending, taxation, and regulation—Moss spotlights government's pivotal role as a risk manager, revealing the nature and extent of this function, which touches almost every aspect of economic life.

Download or read book How Our Days Became Numbered written by Dan Bouk and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classing -- Fatalizing -- Writing -- Smoothing -- A modern conception of death -- Valuing lives, in four movements -- Failing the future.

Download or read book Risk in the Modern Age written by NA NA and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental decision-making in recent decades has become increasingly dependent on scientific expertise. Grounded in universal principles of knowledge, these expert evaluations often depart from the assessments of ordinary members of the public. Whether the issue is nuclear power, genetic testing, food safety, or biodiversity, conservation lay people are increasingly charging experts with being ignorant of local contextual considerations. Scientists, as well as many policy-makers, in turn contend that the public is hopelessly irrational in gauging environmental risks. A growing group of social theorists has begun to take a keen interest in these disputes because risk captures central themes of late modernity. Increasing individualization, emerging new social movements, and declining public trust in key institutions are notions that loom large in these debates. Highlighting both theoretical and empirical perspectives, this volume brings together a distinguished group of environmental sociologists who critique and extend current thinking on what it means to live in a 'risk society'.

Download or read book At Your Own Risk written by Gary S. Lynch and published by Wiley. This book was released on 2008-05-02 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on over thirty years of experience, recognized industry leader Gary Lynch reveals in this essential guide a game plan to identify and manage a range of risks faced in this brave new globalized world of changing market dynamics and complex high-tech value networks. This groundbreaking book articulates an experienced-based and spot-on assessment of risk management realities that all corporations should make core to their corporate cultures.

Download or read book Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents written by James Reason and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major accidents are rare events due to the many barriers, safeguards and defences developed by modern technologies. But they continue to happen with saddening regularity and their human and financial consequences are all too often unacceptably catastrophic. One of the greatest challenges we face is to develop more effective ways of both understanding and limiting their occurrence. This lucid book presents a set of common principles to further our knowledge of the causes of major accidents in a wide variety of high-technology systems. It also describes tools and techniques for managing the risks of such organizational accidents that go beyond those currently available to system managers and safety professionals. James Reason deals comprehensively with the prevention of major accidents arising from human and organizational causes. He argues that the same general principles and management techniques are appropriate for many different domains. These include banks and insurance companies just as much as nuclear power plants, oil exploration and production companies, chemical process installations and air, sea and rail transport. Its unique combination of principles and practicalities make this seminal book essential reading for all whose daily business is to manage, audit and regulate hazardous technologies of all kinds. It is relevant to those concerned with understanding and controlling human and organizational factors and will also interest academic readers and those working in industrial and government agencies.

Download or read book Against the Gods written by Peter L. Bernstein and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Business Week, New York Times Business, and USA Today Bestseller "Ambitious and readable . . . an engaging introduction to the oddsmakers, whom Bernstein regards as true humanists helping to release mankind from the choke holds of superstition and fatalism." —The New York Times "An extraordinarily entertaining and informative book." —The Wall Street Journal "A lively panoramic book . . . Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it." —Business Week "Deserves to be, and surely will be, widely read." —The Economist "[A] challenging book, one that may change forever the way people think about the world." —Worth "No one else could have written a book of such central importance with so much charm and excitement." —Robert Heilbroner author, The Worldly Philosophers "With his wonderful knowledge of the history and current manifestations of risk, Peter Bernstein brings us Against the Gods. Nothing like it will come out of the financial world this year or ever. I speak carefully: no one should miss it." —John Kenneth Galbraith Professor of Economics Emeritus, Harvard University In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past. Against the Gods chronicles the remarkable intellectual adventure that liberated humanity from oracles and soothsayers by means of the powerful tools of risk management that are available to us today. "An extremely readable history of risk." —Barron's "Fascinating . . . this challenging volume will help you understand the uncertainties that every investor must face." —Money "A singular achievement." —Times Literary Supplement "There's a growing market for savants who can render the recondite intelligibly-witness Stephen Jay Gould (natural history), Oliver Sacks (disease), Richard Dawkins (heredity), James Gleick (physics), Paul Krugman (economics)-and Bernstein would mingle well in their company." —The Australian

Download or read book The Value of Risk written by Peter Borscheid and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains how today's insurance industry developed and highlights the role of the reinsurance industry in spreading risks globally. The book examines the development of insurance markets and of the reinsurance industry in particular, and the history of Swiss Re, one of the leading reinsurance companies in the world.

Download or read book Risk Society written by Ulrich Beck and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1992-09-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the condition of Western societies that will take its place as a core text of contemporary sociology alongside earlier typifications of society as postindustrial, and current debates about the social dimensions of the postmodern