Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [135]
Although the work of NSF-funded scientists has influenced policy decisions, the NSF itself is statutorily prohibited from taking positions on any issues. In short, the NSF funds research but leaves to others interpretation of the relevance of findings to policy. That the NSF takes no policy positions and has no regulatory role may help to explain the popularity of the Foundation among most members of Congress.
The future of disaster and risk management research at the NSF will entail not only a continuation of the current practice of small-team projects, typically lasting three years and costing between $300,000 and $450,000, but also the creation of some longer-term integrated research endeavors. These endeavors, in turn, will support interdisciplinary work involving social scientists and scholars in myriad other fields, including combinatory mathematics, atmospheric physics, ecology, computer science, engineering, and geo-informatics.
If the NSF is going to significantly increase its support for interdisciplinary decision sciences, risk management, and disaster research, integrated social/ economic/ecological/geo-science data are needed. Suppose we had these data? What do we do then? How do we aggregate? Traditional probabilistic risk assessment has obvious limitations for understanding extreme events, but what are the alternatives? Are new approaches such as complexity theory part of the answer? What can we learn from these data that will help us better understand individual and collective behaviors in the face of catastrophes?
The NSF itself will not answer these questions, but it is likely to fund leading scholars who will. Their work, informed by both disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning, will ultimately change the way many people think of the world and affect their daily decisions. Beyond influencing policy, academics are indeed making a great difference in the world.
RECOMMENDED READING
Baumgartner, Frank R., and Bryan D. Jones (2009). Agendas and Instability in American Politics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mileti, Dennis (1999). Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press.
National Research Council of the National Academies (2006). Facing Hazards and Disasters: Understanding Human Dimensions. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Sabatier, Paul A., ed. (1999). Theories of the Policy Process. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Zaller, John R. (1992). The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
30
Reflections and Guiding Principles for Dealing with Societal Risks
HOWARD KUNREUTHER
REFLECTIONS OF THINGS PAST
“The Irrational Economist” conference, which brought together friends and colleagues of many years, inevitably led me to focus on past encounters that have influenced my thinking.
I entered the Economics PhD program at MIT in the fall of 1959 with the impression that the field focused on how humans actually behave. It did not take me long to discover that so-called homo economicus (economic man) was expected to collect and process large amounts of information and then make optimal decisions as defined by a set of axioms and equations. My dissertation research did not fit into the standard model since I spent almost a year as an observer in a firm focusing on how production and marketing managers made their ordering and scheduling decisions. It became clear to me that everyone in the firm used simplified rules and made suboptimal decisions. In fact, I showed how one could improve decision making by reducing the variance in managers’ behavior.
Following graduate school I found myself interacting with psychologists, geographers, and sociologists who introduced me to views of the world that differed from the standard economists’ model of