Robert Rubin is a probabilistic thinker. As a student at Harvard, he heard a lecture in which a philosophy professor argued there is no provable certainty and “it just clicked with everything I’d sort of thought,” he told me. It became the axiom that guided his thinking through twenty-six years at Goldman Sachs, as an adviser to President Bill Clinton, and as secretary of the Treasury. It’s in the title of his autobiography: In an Uncertain World. By rejecting certainty, everything became a matter of probability for Rubin, and he wanted as much precision as possible. “One of the first times I
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