Against the Gods. Bernstein Peter L.

as India. Christians, with faith in the future, met Arabs who had achieved an intellectual sophistication far greater than that of the interlopers who had come to dislodge them from the holy sites.

      The Arabs, through their invasion of India, had become familiar with the Hindu numbering system, which enabled them to incorporate eastern intellectual advances into their own scholarship, scientific research, and experimentation. The results were momentous, first for the Arabs and then for the West.21

      In the hands of the Arabs, the Hindu numbers would transform mathematics and measurement in astronomy, navigation, and commerce. New methods of calculation gradually replaced the abacus, which for centuries had been the only tool for doing arithmetic everywhere from the Mayans in the western hemisphere, across Europe, to India and the Orient. The word abacus derives from the Greek word abax, which means sand-tray. Within the trays, columns of pebbles were laid out on the sand.22 The word calculate stems from calculus, the Latin word for pebble.

      Over the next five hundred years, as the new numbering system took the place of the simple abacus, writing replaced movable counters in making calculations. Written computation fostered abstract thinking, which opened the way to areas of mathematics never conceived of in the past. Now sea voyages could be longer, time-keeping more accurate, architecture more ambitious, and production methods more elaborate. The modern world would be quite different if we still measured and counted with I, V, X, L, C, D, and M – or with the Greek or Hebrew letters that stood for numbers.

      But Arabic numbers were not enough to induce Europeans to explore the radical concept of replacing randomness with systematic probability and its implicit suggestion that the future might be predictable and even controllable to some degree. That advance had to await the realization that human beings are not totally helpless in the hands of fate, nor is their worldly destiny always determined by God.

      The Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation would set the scene for the mastery of risk. As mysticism yielded to science and logic after 1300 AD, Greek and Roman architectural forms began to replace Gothic forms, church windows were opened to the light, and sculptures showed men and women standing firmly on the ground instead posing as stylized figures with neither muscle nor weight. The ideas that propelled changes in the arts also contributed to the Protestant Reformation and weakened the dominance of the Catholic Church.

      The Reformation meant more than just a change in humanity’s relationship with God. By eliminating the confessional, it warned people that henceforth they would have to walk on their own two feet and would have to take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions.

      But if men and women were not at the mercy of impersonal deities and random chance, they could no longer remain passive in the face of an unknown future. They had no choice but to begin making decisions over a far wider range of circumstances and over far longer periods of time than ever before. The concepts of thrift and abstinence that characterize the Protestant ethic evidenced the growing importance of the future relative to the present. With this opening up of choices and decisions, people gradually recognized that the future offered opportunity as well as danger, that it was open-ended and full of promise. The 1500s and 1600s were a time of geographical exploration, confrontation with new lands and new societies, and experimentation in art, poetic forms, science, architecture, and mathematics. The new sense of opportunity led to a dramatic acceleration in the growth of trade and commerce, which served as a powerful stimulus to change and exploration. Columbus was not conducting a Caribbean cruise: he was seeking a new trade route to the Indies. The prospect of getting rich is highly motivating, and few people get rich without taking a gamble.

      There is more to that blunt statement than meets the eye. Trade is a mutually beneficial process, a transaction in which both parties perceive themselves as wealthier than they were before. What a radical idea! Up to that point, people who got rich had done so largely by exploitation or by plundering another’s wealth. Although Europeans continued to plunder across the seas, at home the accumulation of wealth was open to the many rather than the few. The newly rich were now the smart, the adventuresome, the innovators – most of them businessmen – instead of just the hereditary princes and their minions.

      Trade is also a risky business. As the growth of trade transformed the principles of gambling into the creation of wealth, the inevitable result was capitalism, the epitome of risk-taking. But capitalism could not have flourished without two new activities that had been unnecessary so long as the future was a matter of chance or of God’s will. The first was bookkeeping, a humble activity but one that encouraged the dissemination of the new techniques of numbering and counting. The other was forecasting, a much less humble and far more challenging activity that links risk-taking with direct payoffs.

      You do not plan to ship goods across the ocean, or to assemble merchandise for sale, or to borrow money without first trying to determine what the future may hold in store. Ensuring that the materials you order are delivered on time, seeing to it that the items you plan to sell are produced on schedule, and getting your sales facilities in place all must be planned before that moment when the customers show up and lay their money on the counter. The successful business executive is a forecaster first; purchasing, producing, marketing, pricing, and organizing all follow.

      The men you will meet in the coming chapters recognized the discoveries of Pascal and Fermat as the beginning of wisdom, not just a solution to an intellectual conundrum involving a game of chance. They were bold enough to tackle the many facets of risk in the face of issues of growing complexity and practical importance and to recognize that these are issues involving the most fundamental philosophical aspects of human existence.

      But philosophy must stand aside for the moment, as the story should begin at the beginning. Modern methods of dealing with the unknown start with measurement, with odds and probabilities. The numbers come first. But where did the numbers come from?

      Chapter 2

      As Easy as I, II, III

      Without numbers, there are no odds and no probabilities; without odds and probabilities, the only way to deal with risk is to appeal to the gods and the fates. Without numbers, risk is wholly a matter of gut.

      We live in a world of numbers and calculations, from the clock we squint at when we wake up, to the television channel we switch off at bedtime. As the day proceeds, we count the measures of coffee we put into the coffeemaker, pay the housekeeper, consult yesterday’s stock prices, dial a friend’s telephone number, check the amount of gas in the car and the speed on the speedometer, press the elevator button in our office building, and open the office door with our number on it. And the day has hardly started!

      It is hard for us to imagine a time without numbers. Yet if we were able to spirit a well-educated man from the year 1000 to the present, he probably would not recognize the number zero and would surely flunk third-grade arithmetic; few people from the year 1500 would fare much better.

      The story of numbers in the West begins in 1202, when the cathedral of Chartres was nearing completion and King John was finishing his third year on the throne of England. In that year, a book titled Liber Abaci, or Book of the Abacus, appeared in Italy. The fifteen chapters of the book were entirely handwritten; almost three hundred years would pass before the invention of printing. The author, Leonardo Pisano, was only 27 years old but a very lucky man: his book would receive the endorsement of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II. No author could have done much better than that.23

      Leonardo Pisano was known for most of his life as Fibonacci, the name by which he is known today. His father’s first name was Bonacio, and Fibonacci is a contraction of son-of-Bonacio. Bonacio means “simpleton” and Fibonacci means “blockhead.” Bonacio must have been something less than-a simpleton, however, for he represented Pisa as consul in a number of different cities, and his son Leonardo was certainly no blockhead.

      Fibonacci was inspired to write Liber Abaci on a visit to Bugia, a thriving

21

Peter Kinder has pointed out to me a great historical irony in all this. The Vikings and other Norsemen who laid waste to Roman civilization and destroyed the repositories of learning in the ninth century reappear in history as the Normans who brought back to the West the achievements of Arabic learning in the twelfth century.

22

See Eves, 1983, p. 136.

23

Most of the background and biographical material on Fibonacci comes from the Encyclopedia Brittanica; Eves, 1983, p. 161; Hogben, 1968, p. 250; and Garland, 1987.