In The Gambling Animal: Humanity’s evolutionary winning streak – and how we risk it all, experimental economists Glenn Harrison and Don Ross look at this process from an even further remove. They study evolution in terms of risks to a species’ survival, and trace the ways animals evolve to mitigate those risks. From this distance, it makes more sense to talk about communities and societies than individuals.
But here’s the thing. Tracing how humans evolved to manage risk, from the savannah to Wall Street, they note that while individuals are mildly risk-averse, we innovate behavioural norms – institutions – that collectivise risk with astonishing effectiveness.
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But past performance is no guarantee of future returns, so the authors are far from optimistic: “The history of humans,” they write, “is not a record of safe bets.” We might do better to … weigh probabilities rather than dream up might-bes and nice-to-haves.
