At its core economics is about making decisions. In the history of economic thought great
intellectual prowess has been exerted toward devising exquisite theories of optimal decision
making in situations of constraint risk and scarcity. Yet not all of our choices are purely
logical and so there is a longstanding tension between those emphasizing the rational and
irrational sides of human behavior. One strand develops formal models of rational utility
maximizing while the other draws on what behavioral science has shown about our tendency to act
irrationally. In Risk Choice and Uncertainty George G. Szpiro offers a new narrative of the
three-century history of the study of decision making tracing how crucial ideas have evolved
and telling the stories of the thinkers who shaped the field. Szpiro examines economics from
the early days of theories spun from anecdotal evidence to the rise of a discipline built
around elegant mathematics through the past half century's interest in describing how people
actually behave. Considering the work of Locke Bentham Jevons Walras Friedman Tversky and
Kahneman Thaler and a range of other thinkers he sheds light on the vast scope of discovery
since Bernoulli first proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox. Presenting fundamental
mathematical theories in easy-to-understand language Risk Choice and Uncertainty is a
revelatory history for readers seeking to grasp the grand sweep of economic thought.
