It is a privilege to deliver this year’s Global Risk Memorial Lecture here in Bologna. It is also fitting to speak about risk in Italy, because it was here that the modern concept of risk was born. Not just the financial instruments, the insurance contracts, the double-entry bookkeeping, but something more fundamental: the idea that an opaque future could be made knowable through observation and reason. Before the Italian Renaissance, the unknown was largely understood as fate – forces beyond human comprehension. Galileo overturned that belief in the natural sciences, insisting that the universe could be tested and ... (full story)