Risk Management: A Personal View

Friday

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Should risk management consist of three steps?

I have never thought of myself as a person who takes risks. On the contrary, I view my actions as cautious and calculated, since I am not likely to engage in some activity until I judge it to be a sure thing. But others see things otherwise. Some years ago I was talking to a financial adviser and I was taken up short when he characterized me as a risk taker. I think this was primarily because of my attitude to insurance. I have a personal distaste for insurance, probably from a mixture of instinct and experience. This may sound odd, but it is accurate.

Should risk management consist of four steps?

As I see it, the attempt to manage risk is illusory. I act upon this view by minimizing my insurance coverage. (This is what struck my financial adviser as risky.) About the only regrets I have in life are when I paid for an insurance policy when I didn’t strictly have to do so under legal compulsion. It felt a lot like flushing money down a toilet, and this latter exercise would probably be more fun than sending a check to an insurance company. Buying insurance does not give me peace of mind, it only makes me angry.

Should risk management consist of five steps?

One of the reasons I view the attempt to manage risk as illusory is because of my personal experiences with insurance policies that do not pay when you most need them. There are countless stories in the news, some of them tragic, about people who thought they were covered for some eventuality but found out in their hour of need that they were not. Whether it is someone who lost their home to a flood and later found a waiver in the homeowner’s policy for flood damage, or someone who cannot convince their HMO to pay for some particular medical procedure and who is dying as a result, there is almost always something in the fine print that makes it possible for an insurance company to deny coverage. These episodes are not accidental. Insurance companies have many lawyers who write up policies precisely to minimize the losses of the insurance companies for whom they work, and insurance adjusters can be even more creative in their interpretation of events.

Should risk management consist of six steps?

The state of Oregon requires that Oregon residents maintain insurance on their motor vehicles. I always buy the legal minimum, which means that I get liability insurance, but no collision or comprehensive coverage. I have no life insurance policy, but I have no wife or children so the only beneficiaries could be my sisters or parents or a charity. Also, life insurance feels like blood money to me. I wouldn’t want to receive a payoff, and I wouldn’t want someone to profit from my demise. I think it is a good policy to be worth more alive than dead; it gives others an incentive to keep you around. The moorage where I live requires residents to have fire insurance, and this seems reasonable to me as a fire could easily spread, so again I get the minimum coverage required, which is to say that I have the structure covered but not the contents. How could one replace the contents of one’s home? If you have picked up irreplaceable items throughout your life, and received gifts from family and friends, your possessions are more than widgets that can be replaced. Being paid for their loss would, to me, feel like getting blood money for objects.

Should risk management consist of seven steps?

I also have no health insurance. That’s right, I’m one of those people who make up the statistic of 47 million Americans without health insurance. And I am fully prepared to accept the consequences of my actions (and inaction). I have emergency instructions in my mobile phone that state that I have no health insurance and that no special measures are to be taken to preserve my life, because I can’t afford them. I suppose if I were taken to an emergency room contrary to my wishes, and I died despite any efforts made to save my life, that a diligent collector for the hospital might come after my assets to pay the bill, so they might eventually get their pound of flesh.

Should risk management consist of eight steps?

What would I do if I were diagnosed with a serious condition that required major surgery or some expensive treatment like chemotherapy? One thing I can tell you is what I would not do, and what I would definitely not do is to seek treatment in the US. Policies and litigation have so distorted the market for health care that no ordinary working class person in the US can afford to be sick, but this is not the case everywhere in the world. Since I know people all over the world, if I required major medical treatment, I would send out e-mails to friends in other countries and ask them to find a doctor who speaks English and to get an estimate for the procedure needed. I would without hesitation seek treatment in Korea or Peru, Indonesia or Argentina, before I would seek treatment in the US.

Should risk management consist of nine steps?

Perhaps you think this is odd, and perhaps even odd enough to be pathological. I have had many disagreements with others over insurance. None of the arguments that have been advanced to try to convince me of the folly of my position have changed my mind; they certainly have not changed how I feel about insurance. Then could we at least, at the very minimum, agree that it is rational to minimize risk, and to not take any unnecessary risks? Alas, we cannot even agree on the rational minimization of risk. As I see it, risk (like pain) is a good thing that forces us to think through our course of action carefully, so that the minimization of risk by way of insurance is a moral hazard that lures people unnecessarily into braving risks they would otherwise avoid.

Should risk management consist of n or more steps?

Allow me to relate a little story about the philosophical dimensions of risk. Contemporary legal and political philosophy is dominated (utterly dominated) by the work of John Rawls. Rawls’ claim to fame is a thought experiment. According to Rawls, a just society is a society that would be chosen behind a “veil of ignorance,” that is to say, if we would choose a social system not knowing what place we would be born into it, then that is a just social system (by our lights). The assumption here is that, if you don’t know the position in which you will be born into in a society, you will choose a thoroughly egalitarian system so that the birth lottery does not relegate you to a irremediably marginal role. It has been observed that this thought experiment and its presumed outcome assumes that the individual choosing a society from behind a veil of ignorance is risk averse. Of course, not everyone is risk averse, and there may be individuals — perhaps many of them — who might prefer inequitable social arrangements and be willing to take the risk that they will either end up in a privileged position or that they can manipulate the social system in question sufficiently to their benefit that the initial inequity will not be a liability that they cannot overcome.

John Rawls formulated one of the most influential thought experiments of our time, such that a just social order would be chosen from behind a veil of ignorance.

I don’t take the Rawlsian thought experiment too seriously, partly because almost no one believes in their own impoverishment and immiserization before they have hit rock bottom, and partly because the Rawlsian emphasis upon fairness seems so vulgar that it might have been explicitly conceived in contradistinction to the Aristotelian conception of areté. How would Aristotle’s Great Souled Man judge a society from behind a veil of ignorance? He would value most highly that society in which the highest virtues would attain their highest development. This would not necessarily be an egalitarian society, and it would not be a society without risk.

Great accomplishments, great deeds, and great undertakings are all won in the face of adversity and risk. To eliminate risk from the world would be to eliminate the possibility of greatness and excellence (areté); to minimize risk would be to minimize the possibility of greatness and excellence (areté). There is a sense, then — an Aristotelian sense — in which virtue is predicated upon risk. Even the great works of art, literature, poetry, science, mathematics, and philosophy all enjoin risk and entail risk. It is a risk to entertain a radical new idea or to present a radically new vision to the world. One risks one’s career, one’s reputation, one’s ability to make a living, one’s friends — in a word, one risks everything in attempting any authentic innovation. And yet almost everything of value in the world comes from such efforts, and from such willingness to court risk, all in the pursuit of being true to oneself.

This is perhaps a somewhat grandiose if not histrionic characterization of risk, but even if we reduce our scope and scale to the most intimate and personal perspective, risk cannot be eradicated from life. To be alive is to be at risk of dying. Whether we choose to think in terms of our legacy we leave in the world or our immediate personal circumstances, in remains true that we cannot control the world, we cannot control our circumstances, we cannot control what others say, think, do, or feel, and sometimes we cannot even control ourselves. The world is an unpredictable place, and, as I have argued many times in several posts, we ought to expect to be blindsided by history. And if we are blindsided by history to our misfortune, we ought also expect that our insurance policy is not going to cover the loss or make us whole again.

Perhaps risk management need only consist of a single step, and that is the recognition of inescapable risk.

I hope that this personal view of risk management has managed to convince you of one thing. I do not expect to have convinced you that the attempt to manage risk is illusory, but I may have been able to successfully make the point that an individual’s attitude to risk management is deeply embedded in the way that a given individual sees the world. A conception of risk management is predicated upon a particular Weltanschauung. Two individuals with distinct outlooks on life are also likely to have distinct ideas on how to best manage risk — or, as the case may be, to live with risk and not attempt to wish it away. The point is that there is not a single rational and pragmatic way to manage risk, but that the management of risk will be relative to the criteria of reasonableness and pragmatism that follows from a given Weltanschauung.

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Note added 03 March 2011: There was a great article in Financial Times by John Kay, Don’t blame luck when your models misfire, which includes the following:

“Like practitioners of alchemy and quack medicine, these modellers thrive on our desire to believe impossible things. But the search for objective means of controlling risks that can reliably be monitored externally is as fruitless as the quest to turn base metal into gold. Like the alchemists and the quacks, the risk modellers have created an industry whose intense technical debates with each other lead gullible outsiders to believe that this is a profession with genuine expertise.”

What can I say other than that I agree? This isn’t quite as blunt as my contention that, “the attempt to manage risk is illusory,” but it is not far from it. If the technical debates of risk modellers constitute a profession without genuine expertise, as implied by Kay, it is high time that we declared our independence from technocrats who would presume to control us all for our own good.

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