Lorraine J. Daston, Ph.D.

Director emerita; Professor, Committee on Social Thought

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

University of Chicago

Born in 1951 in East Lansing, Mich., USA
Studied History, Philosophy, Mathematics, and History of Science at Harvard and at Cambridge

Project

Rethinking Risk in a Dangerous Age

Misfortune is the human lot, whether in the form of an ice age, a plague, or an earthquake, and cultures everywhere have found ways of cushioning themselves against the worst-case scenario. Pliable building materials in earthquake zones, dikes and levees in flood plains, quarantining the sick, and institutionalized solidarity are all forms of risk management. But the dominant method for taming risk in the contemporary world is insurance. Since the eighteenth century, insurance has grown from a canny bet on the success of long-distance mercantile ventures into an immense and immensely wealthy global system based on vast databases and complex mathematical modelling of both the probabilities of disaster and also the performance of the financial markets in which insurance companies invest their reserves.
Like their customers, insurance companies hedge their bets by taking out insurance in their turn, so-called reinsurance. The biggest reinsurance companies in the world sit at the top of a pyramid of primary and secondary insurers. In the last fifty years, the risks reinsurance firms are being asked to cover have climbed steeply. Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and mudslides, and the ever-denser concentration of populations in cities has also multiplied the damage claims when a catastrophe strikes an urban area.
These factors are forcing the reinsurance industry to rethink their own attitudes toward risk, including investment risks. We are in the midst of a quiet revolution in the way that those masters of disasters, the reinsurance firms, radically revise the business of risk in our dangerous age.

Recommended Reading

Coen, Deborah R. The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Daston, Lorraine. “What Is an Insurable Risk? Swiss Re and Atomic Reactor Insurance.” In Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming, edited by Niels Viggo Haueter and Geoffrey Jones, 230–247. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Colloquium, 07.03.2023

Diversity as a Value: A History

It is startling to realize how quickly and thoroughly the value of diversity, until a few decades ago a value largely confined to the aesthetic and organic realms, has acquired deep political and moral significance. Universities, corporations, and governments are now judged by the degree to which they achieve diversity among their leaders and recognize diversity among their publics. Older values of the liberal polity, for example that of honoring merit without regard to creed, race, sex, or ethnicity, have been increasingly eclipsed by values that closely attend to these and other differentiating traits (which traits matter is contentious). How did this sea change in value come about, and come about so swiftly? And what kind of value is diversity? The long history of diversity as an aesthetic and economic value helps explain the recent rapid rise of diversity as a moral and political value. More generally, the case of the wandering value of diversity reveals how fluid the boundaries between what we usually think of as distinct normative realms can be.