I attended a lecture by Prof. Annemarie Mol of the University of Amsterdam, and she shared pictures of litter in parks and dead fish to represent the practice of valuing, in which valuing is an action-outcome pairing and the sum of action-outcomes represents an economy of worth. These action-outcome pairs take the question of a will or choice out of the equation. Observation and pattern-finding is the key to this type of listening, not diagnosis and intentionality. The observable cigarette butt discarding, professional & volunteer street cleaning, and municipally paternal tools for preventing uncleanliness add up to a symphony of various resonances, some of which are dissonant (the above are paraphrased from Dr. Mol’s lecture and this article).
So what about the notion of risk deserves a transliteration and analysis that goes far beyond the dictionary definition and insurance industry? Risk means different things to different contexts. If the subject of risk contexts is not the people (taking behavior, thought patterns, and fear out of the equation), what’s left? When a house fire happens, the structure is burned. The sky is filled with smoke. A neighborhood gains a structural corpse. When a person gets a biometric health screen to make their premiums lower, various things are counted on a per-unit basis: kilograms per body, pressure per circulatory system, lipoproteins per blood sample (by density of course). These measures might indicate a far higher probability of a health insurance claim within the next year, but nothing else happens. A few things are written about the likelihood of certain outcomes based on the counts, a few mitigation recommendations. And then back to automatic paycheck deductions for the employee’s share of the insurance and co-pays for prescriptions. Might be more interesting to examine each of the paper bills that arrive at a home.
Here though, an observer must ask, what do I do with this information? If the observer is a person seeing their burned house with burned bills for blood pressure medication, they might be wondering if their insurance company will pay for new blood pressure drugs and a new house (and if they need to pay those burned up bills still). A neighbor might be wondering how this risk (once realized, this loss) could have been prevented, particularly because their hand-built apple-wood fence burned in a collateral conflagration. The insurance adjuster is wondering what number is going to make the now homeless family happy enough while also making their bosses value them as an effective insurance adjuster (protecting that loss ratio from unreasonably high payouts and policyholder lawsuits at the same time). The underwriter is coming up with an inaccurate risk price for the house two doors down that had the same electrical contractor as the charred address. The relevant actuary doesn’t notice this zip code at all, unless it’s in the news for at least an F4 tornado.
Each subject, from the house to the fence to the burned up medicine to the humans involved heard different sounds resonating from the risks (and had different experiences of the losses). Each action-outcome is valid in its own right, without respect to the subjects. And everything described above is only representative of a specific, fictional context-set. Any given house fire, biometric screening, and blood pressure management pharmaceutical exists in a partially observable context set (unless it already happened and wasn’t observed, but we’re talking about risk + fear of the future and loss + devastation in the present).
So the music of risk and loss are unique to the musicians, instruments, and air through which the sound propagates. No wonder people hate insurance companies. They often come in like a lazy recorder player, interrupting the already atonal symphony of a loss to turn devastation into numbers. Perhaps if risks were better understood prior to a loss, there might be philosophical, psychological, and sentimental risk management in addition to blunt financial risk transfer. But predictions always seem to fail to represent reality. So perhaps what’s truly needed is loss transfer – a method for responding to losses once they’ve happened that leads to healing, reconstitution, and learning. Money’s probably still part of loss transfer, but so are conversations, gifts, and love (in addition to crying). I’d like to spend less time worrying about risk on my own behalf and for others and more time helping people with loss (and both experiencing and recovering from losses). Good thing tomorrow is my last day working full time for an insurance company.
Roman Ryan 