Michele Wucker explains “Gray Rhinos”

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In this week’s episode, Matt Klein talked with Michele Wucker about her work on “gray rhinos”: risks that can be anticipated and avoided, but often aren’t. They discussed the biases in human nature and institutions that encourage the proliferation of gray rhinos, how the concept caught on in China, and the differences between gray rhinos, “elephants in the room”, and “black swans”.

Matt’s longform recommendation was “The Dark Bounty of Texas Oil” in The New Yorker. Michele recommended The Undoing Project, which is Michael Lewis’s account of how Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky created the field of behavioural economics.