Risky business

Are “tough economic times” making us less willing to risk? And is that a bad thing? The LV Sun looks at it:

Risk and risk-takers have been celebrated, fetishized, apotheosized in the American economy and culture for two decades. George Gilder, bard of ’80s-era supply side economics, summed it up: “A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich, on creating a large class of risk-taking men who are willing to shun the easy channels of a comfortable life in order to create new enterprise, win huge profits, and invest them again.”

Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” was a fictional hero to a generation. Our real heroes include Everest climbers and strivers such as Bill Gates, who left Harvard and the promise of an easy corporate career to start a software company.

All of this benefited Las Vegas.

“Our whole history is about risk,” said Michael Green, a College of Southern Nevada historian.

Farewell to risk, for now – Las Vegas Sun.

Further down in the story, I’m quoted as saying that we need risk: “Indeed, investors took a chance on Apple and Google, and we’re all better off for it.” It is much more basic than that: if we didn’t take risks we’d still be in the trees, and maybe even sloshing around the oceans. Without risk there’s no progress, just stagnation.

Of course, as I say in the coda with my characteristic scholarly rigor, “There’s risk-taking, and there’s risky risk-taking.”

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