Howard Kunreuther is the James G. Dinan Professor Emeritus of Decision Sciences and Public Policy and Co-Director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is coeditor of On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Robert J. Meyer is the Frederick H. Ecker/MetLife Insurance Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan is a partner at McKinsey and Company. He was formerly Executive Director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
The field of risk management has exploded in recent decades as natural disasters, financial meltdowns, pandemics, and other damaging events have wreaked havoc across borders. The Future of Risk Management brings together essays from leading thinkers on ways to reduce risk so that today's threats do not turn into tomorrow's catastrophes. Aimed at policy leaders seeking strategies to reduce future harm, this volume deserves a close read and a spot on the bookshelf of all forward-thinking decision-makers. -Alice Hill, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University This comprehensive, critical, and lucid survey demonstrates convincingly that effectively managing climate change and other major threats requires understanding how the average person reacts to risk. It's a story about lessons learned and lessons forgotten, about logic and bias, about positive incentives and perverse incentives-and serves as a warning that we have a long, long way to go before we manage risk effectively. -Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton University The Future of Risk Management engages in a critical discussion on how we as a nation and the world as a whole should better prepare for and reduce the costs of future disasters. The authors correctly recognize that our current disaster preparedness and response paradigm is fundamentally broken-plagued by inconsistencies, short-sightedness, and a lack of integration. Instead, we need to take a holistic, long-term approach to disaster response and risk management and allocate resources based on the best objective data available. -Jason M. Tuber, U.S. Congressional Staffer Extraordinarily thoughtful and insightful, the authors of The Future of Risk Management provide students and professionals in the field of risk management new pathways for approaches and solutions to our myriad areas of risk. Moreover, anyone interested in understanding the risks our societies face should study these essays. -Franklin W. Nutter, President, Reinsurance Association of America