Exchange with Tom Walker:
TW: "Are there uncertainties that are not risks?" was the question that Daniel Ellsberg asked in his 1961 article on "Risk, ambiguity and the Savage axioms" (Ellsberg's doctoral dissertation on which the 1961 article was based has recently been published). As you might have guessed his answer was affirmative. The implications of this are far reaching in the modeling of decision-making, especially so if we're talking about the relationship between state power and accumulation.
JN [new] You are correct. There is a fundamental difference between risk and uncertainty, which we are aware of. For this reason, we do not treat risk as an “objective” category (as Keynes put it in 1937, on these matters, we “simply don’t know”). The future is not drawn from an objective probability distribution of outcomes -- and even if it were, human beings are very far from knowing that distribution.
However, the capitalist nomos enforces many patterns of human behavior in a manner that makes them look predictable. This fact enables investors to behave as if the objective probability distribution of outcomes exists and is knowable. In the paper we write that “risk refers to the extent to which capitalists BELIEVE they can predict the course of earnings.” This belief may or may not be correct, but it is a convention embedded in the capitalization formula and applied with religious fervor and within relatively narrow boundaries by millions of investors. Can we possibly ignore it?
Jonathan Nitzan "New Imperialism or New Capitalism?" http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/archive/00000124/
