Risk management strategies - before Hominization and after

Ulrich Muller-Herold

Journal of Risk Research, 2000, vol. 3, issue 1, 19-30

Abstract: Selected examples, ranging from birds to pastoralistic nomads and subsisting peasants, indicate that the higher animals adopt foraging strategies similar to individual decision makers in economies without market (subsistence economies): in contrast to actors in (ideal neoclassical) market economies, maximizing expected utility, they operate in such way as to optimize long-term survival of genetically related groups. This can be seen as a strategy of (maximum) ruin avoidance, played by 'selfish genes'. In the sense of conjectural history the parallelism between risk behaviour of animals and early men may be regarded as the continued existence of principles of natural evolution beyond hominization up to the historical emergence of complex societies where pursuit of surplus production replaced ruin avoidance as the primary orientation in the older subsistence economies.

Date: 2000
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DOI: 10.1080/136698700376680

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