What would have happened if the policy maker had relied on a more realistic fat-tailed distribution of war casualties? He still would have seen the forecast as improbable, but it would now be thousands of times more probable than before.14 The impact would be analogous to your learning that your personal chances of winning the Powerball lottery on any ticket purchase have risen from one in five million to one in five hundred. Wouldn’t you rush to buy tickets? A policy maker in 1914 who knew the true fat-tail risks of a mega-casualty war might well have tried a lot harder to avert the looming
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