Radical Uncertainty - Mervyn King
The Joe Walker Podcast
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The Benefits of Quantifying Costs
Sometimes relatively small pieces of analysis can actually help you understand what's going on in a way that the black box model doesn't. Bob May was asked by the World Health Organization to go out to Southern Africa when AIDS took off and he could see that the one of the parameters in the model that was absolutely crucial was the average number of sexual contacts per person per year in a country. He looked at them and said you know this number is fundamental and don't you realize when you think about it if the answer to the averageNumber of sexual contacts is for example 100 per year it makes a hell of a difference whether it's 100 contacts with the same person or 100 contacts with 100 different people.
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