Graciela Chichilnisky's Top Book Recommendations

Graciela ChichilniskyYes, it doesn’t fit the sequence like my last books do but it is very interesting. Perhaps it is not as well known as it should be. It does something really simple and yet incredibly complicated. The book develops Savage’s idea in the context of gambling and says suppose that you need a certain amount of money by a certain date and you go to a casino to gamble. How should you play? Imagine... (Source)

Graciela ChichilniskyThis is a classic book. In both cases DeGroot and Arrow are rooted in the classic foundational work of John von Neumann. He was the first one who thought about weighing risk by the chances of occurrence. So you weigh a risk to be less important if it is less frequent. DeGroot is doing statistics. What Arrow is doing is a parallel theory. Arrow develops decisions theory in the sense of looking at... (Source)

Graciela ChichilniskyThis book is by a famous statistician who is now dead. Savage didn’t fall into the trap of DeGroot, who dismissed catastrophic risks. Instead he went to the other extreme. Savage’s approach can focus solely on rare events. So DeGroot underestimates rare events and Savage’s approach (which was very controversial at the time) can underestimate frequent events. That is no good either. (Source)

Graciela ChichilniskyYes, that book is essentially the mathematical foundation on which Posner’s book is based on. If you read this excellent book you can see why is it that we dismiss catastrophic risks, as Posner finds. DeGroot’s book lays out the whole mathematical foundations of Posner’s theory. And for me this was very interesting because I was able to trace directly the roots, the source of the problem. Why do... (Source)

Graciela ChichilniskyThis is a book by a Chicago judge where he tries to explain what catastrophes are, why they are important to us and what are the outstanding issues that we need to resolve about them. It is about tsunamis and super-volcanoes, major tornadoes and floods – rare events that have momentous consequences. It is pretty accessible, not really technical but analytical. What interests me about the book is... (Source)