Thinking About Risk

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman says that people are generally risk averse. That we feel the pain of loss more intensely than we feel the joy of gain. Which causes us to protect what we have, rather than go after what we don’t have, even on the occasions when the odds are in our favor to go after them.

The evidence that he provides is compelling. More often than not, it’s true that we’re risk averse.

Being risk averse is generally a good thing though, and in some cases we aren’t risk averse enough. The problem is that we’re not very…