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Technology and Culture 43.2 (2002) 453-455



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Book Review

Risk, Uncertainty, and Rational Action


Risk, Uncertainty, and Rational Action. By Carlo C. Jaeger et al. London: Earthscan, 2001. Pp. 320. £19.95.

"It has been suggested that risk is the quintessential characteristic of the modern world" (p. 7), states the foreword to this book. Accumulating technological and environmental disasters suggest this may be true, but, in any case, Risk, Uncertainty, and Rational Action is a good place to start one's investigation of risk and modern society. It provides a balanced but unremitting critique of a key concept underlying risk: the "rational actor" paradigm. Most tools of risk analysis reduce risk to a precise calculation of [End Page 453] probability and expected outcome. Epidemiological and actuarial models rely on this approach. So do risk assessment and risk communication. All assume that individuals will match their preferences with a cool assessment of likely outcomes in risky situations. The rational actor paradigm builds up social decisions about risk from these individual choices and preferences.

The authors challenge these assumptions as well as their application. Many theorists have plowed this same field, but few can claim to cover so broad a territory so painstakingly and at such depth. This book avoids easy dismissal of rational action as "unrealistic" and takes careful note of its usefulness. The authors also stalk the paradigm in its deepest lair, academic economics departments. Most critics give this hostile territory a wide berth, but this text does not rest content with easy targets. It strives for an alternative at least as compelling as rational action for explaining market behavior. A theory that can do that, the authors reason, should be able to reclaim the rest of social reality from the economists and their rational-choice allies.

This difficult task requires much digression into matters economic and psychological, and some repetition. Still, it is most impressive to read a critique of economic thought that can move smoothly from Bentham's utilitarianism to the social systematics of Walras and Pareto to the mathematics of Debreau and Nash. By book's end, the authors have posed compelling challenges to general equilibrium welfare economics and game theory, the prime tools of risk analysis from neoclassical economics. They show how risk (and human action generally) is so socially constructed, so contested and embedded, that it cannot be handled by any theory requiring foundational concepts such as universal rationality.

What then is the alternative to rational action? While the authors skillfully use postmodernism and other critical theory to shoot holes in the paradigm, in the end they are neither nihilists nor cultural relativists. They seek a rational answer, but one grounded in dialogical rather than monological rationality. Unfortunately, just when the reader is ready (even desperate) for a new approach, the book flags. The authors are only able to close with a brief outline of what might come next.

Using Habermas's ideas of communicative action, they recommend abandoning subject-based approaches that locate rationality in the individual. Instead, they offer the model of a community carrying out collective exercises in rational decision making. Imagine environmentalists, homeowners, businessmen and women, politicians and engineers deciding, like a jury, where to place a toxic waste dump that must go in someone's town. All possible outcomes are on the table. But under the right conditions, the authors maintain, participants will not act like self-interested stakeholders. Rather, their views and interests will be defined through discourse. This contention takes issue with what is perhaps the major premise of the [End Page 454] rational actor paradigm, that individuals' interests are both antecedent to and paramount in their decisions. The alternative view is that individuals form their preferences and values through social action. Self-interest and its manifestations ("not in my backyard") can be surmounted through a well-structured discourse that renders legitimate and rational decisions.

It is an appealing scenario, although one has to be suspicious when the best examples come from Switzerland, a small, homogenous nation. It remains unclear how the communities of participants are defined, what one does...

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