Calculating without Statistics:The Insurance Industry Confronts Catastrophe

Every fifty years or so, a natural disaster causes such cataclysmic damage in a wealthy, fully insured part of the world that even the world’s biggest insurance companies face enormous claims that threaten their very existence. This is what happened in 1906 after the San Francisco earthquake, when a score of insurance companies went bankrupt and many more teetered on the brink of ruin, and in 1965, when Hurricane Betsy, a Category 4 storm that ravaged Southern Florida, the Bahamas, and the Louisiana coast, became the first Atlantic storm to cause over $1 billion dollars in damages. At these moments, badly shaken insurance executives question the fundamentals of their business: what exactly is an insurable risk? How much risk is too much, even for those masters of disasters, the world’s leading reinsurance companies? Reinsurance companies were among the first to register the reality of world-wide climate change, and the growing awareness of the vast costs of insuring against steeply mounting damages precipitated a fundamental re-examination of the meaning of risks that could not be quantified.

Speaker: Lorraine Daston

Lorraine Daston has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence of the scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. Recent books include Gegen die Natur (2018; English edition Against Nature, 2019) as well as Science in the Archives (2017) and (with Paul Erikson et al.) How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (2014), the latter two both products of MPIWG Working Groups.

Since her retirement from the directorship of Department II in 2019, she has published Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022), which has been translated into eleven languages, and Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (2023), about international governance in science. Her current book project is based on her 2024 Terry Lectures at Yale University, Thinking with Natural Disasters.

She is the recipient of the Pfizer Prize and Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the Dan David Prize in the History of Science, the Gerda Henkel Prize in the Humanities, and the Heineken Prize in History of the Royal Netherlands Academy, and the Balzan Prize, and holds honorary degrees from Princeton University, the Hebrew University, and the Ecole Fédérale de Lausanne. She is a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and a regular visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Chair: S. M. Amadae

S. M. Amadae is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) and a tenured political scientist at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on nuclear war and security, climate change and collective action, and the impact of AI on humanity’s ability to govern catastrophic risks. She is completing a book on “computational tyranny,” examining how digital media shapes human communication and social relations. Amadae is the author of Prisoners of Reason and the award-winning Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, and has held academic posts at institutions including the Central European University, Ohio State University, Swansea University, and visiting positions at LSE, Harvard, and the New School. Her work has appeared in leading academic journals, and she has developed an online simulation showing how systemic discrimination can arise.

Amadae’s recent projects include co-leading the NATO-funded Dynamic Democratic Support of Finnish Defense Policy, analysing public opinion on security and defense amid heightened nuclear tensions following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. She has contributed to debates on Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession and co-authored research on AI, nuclear weapons, and strategic stability. As Co-PI of the EU Horizon 2020 ATARCA project, she led the Food Futures initiative, developing blockchain-based tools to incentivise sustainable consumption and address global climate challenges. Since 2021, she has also directed the Global Political and Communication MA programme at Helsinki, hosting high-profile events with political leaders and fostering international academic exchange on preparedness for catastrophic risks and democratic resilience.

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