Over in his column at the Wall St. Journal, David Wessel is worrying about risk, and why people aren’t better at evaluating it. Myself, I think poor risk evaluation and management is one of the chief challenges we face in becoming more innovative.

Link: WSJ.com – Capital (paid subscription required)

"Human beings would not have survived in the dangerous circumstances of the ancestral environment had they been prone to let their attention wander from situations fraught with a high probability of immediate death, as when being attacked by a predator … to low-probability menaces — which anyway they couldn’t have done much about," federal appeals-court Judge Richard Posner writes in his new (and extraordinarily well-timed) book, Catastrophe.

"It is not surprising that evolution didn’t produce an ability to think clearly about such [small] risks as a standard part of our mental skill set," he suggests.