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Insurance: The Strange Origins of Probabilistic Thinking [F-14-31]

2 sessions, 1½ hours each (SUNY Potsdam: Maxcy 104) From advertisers hawking toothpaste to weather forecasters to our evaluation of the latest medical data, probabilistic arguments are so ubiquitous today that they have become part of the mental air we breathe. But 350 years ago this way of thinking was utterly alien, even for gamblers. These two sessions will cover the conceptual revolution that transformed our way of understanding the world, and then chart the weird ways that practices like insurance and vaccination began to make use of probability and statistics in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Geoffrey Clark is Professor of History at SUNY Potsdam. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University where he specialized in the economic, social and cultural history of early modern Europe. He is the author of Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695-1775 as well as numerous articles on the history of insurance and finance. More recently he was an editor of The Appeal of Insurance