UncertaintyBlog – Amar Bhidé

Ants, Poet, and the Romance of Progress

Amar Bhidé — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:41:33 +0000

I turned the talks I gave at IMD, Lausanne and the Nova Medical School, Lisbon into a you-tube video. It narrates how I came to teach a course on transformative medical innovations and why I am now trying to start a center on progress. So, it’s kind of a nearly 70-year-old’s memoir squeezed into a half hour clip.
I squeeze in a brief commercial for an initiative on progress that I’m trying to start.
The video, cobbled together in my unprofessional home studio won’t have Hollywood knocking down my door, but it gets the job done I hope..
Plus it has pictures of Federer/Djokovich, my benefactors, my mother even..

Uncertainty book: Synopsis and Further thoughts

Amar Bhidé — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 23:06:20 +0000

My “response” to most of the other essays in Critical Review’s special issue on my book is now published and can be downloaded here. It really isn’t a response — I could not think of a good one! Rather I took the opportunity to provide a synopsis of my book — and to double up on my argument for a more humanistic perspective on human conduct!

Bhide Uncertainty and Enterprise for uploading

Delighted to be on Martin Wolf’s summer recommendations

Amar Bhidé — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:41:03 +0000

Dust Jacket for Uncertainty and Enterprise

Amar Bhidé — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 11:26:31 +0000

Now (Aug 1 2024) Finalized

First book blurb (from one of my heroes)

Amar Bhidé — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 12:42:55 +0000

Just received this email from one of my heroes. A good man and true. (America missed out on his service, unfortunately). I will leave it to you to guess who…

“Amar,
I love the cover and the title. I’m glad you kept “uncertainty” in it. To me understanding uncertainty is the key to understanding our emerging world.

Here is my quote:
“Amar Bhide has written an important book. It provides a wide-ranging and wonderful guide for flourishing in an uncertain world that is rapidly changing on economic, technological, political and social levels..He shows that our destiny doesn’t have to be controlled by authoritarian government or impersonal scientific forces. It can be a world we shape. All we have to do is make the effort as citizens to understand our time, hold true to our democratic traditions, and honor our best selves.”

Feel free to use any portion of the quote or the whole thing for your purposes. I look forward to giving the book to all my friends interested in uncertainty.

I never will forget your comment after hearing my reading of Rolling Along in Jim’s living room at the very beginning of the effort. I think you compared it to “Our Town” which was the ultimate compliment for me. Thanks again. It’s now on MAX.

Book Cover and Title Done.

Amar Bhidé — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 13:20:17 +0000

After driving myself and many friends crazy, I’ve finally converged on a book title and cover.
OK, so it’s not War and Peace or In Search of Excellence, but it’s not intended to be a pop, mass book.
The “Venturing Beyond the Known” is a multi-sided (if too subtle) pun plus a bow to the Knightian uncertainty that’s my point of departure. (I go very far from the original)
And Hokusai waves, I’m told are now hip..

Draft of Uncertainty, Judgment, and Enterprise complete!

Amar Bhidé — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 15:37:46 +0000

And here’s the link for anyone who wants to look. Comments welcome! Please email amar AT Bhide dot Net

Part One of forthcoming book Posted on SSRN

Amar Bhidé — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 22:58:48 +0000

Ive been hacking away — for way too long — on a new book, Uncertainty, Justification, and Enterprise: Renewing Knights Abandoned Construct. Im at least half a year behind schedule, but Part One is now finally posted on SSRN.

To celebrate I tried to get Dall-E-2 to generate a book cover. I asked for “cover for a book on Uncertainty and Enterprise, possibly with a sketch of Frank Knight in the background. I got this rubbish

Source DALL E@ “cover for a book on Uncertainty and Enterprise, possibly with a sketch of Frank Knight in the background.”

I then asked for an image for Part One (Formidable Barriers, Forgotten Pathways). This was a little more plausible. Still very much a work in progress Id say. And I dont believe ChatGPT could write my book for me..

The Birth of Behavioral Finance.

Amar Bhidé — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 23:18:22 +0000

Jottings for my forthcoming book on Knightian uncertainty.

Finance had not interested Herbert Simon and the other “old” behavioral economists. It also did not feature prominently in the work of Kahneman and Tversky’s who pioneered the new, and more successful behavioral economics. But other new behavioral stars, such as Andrei Shleifer who won the John Bates Clark medal in 1999, focused on finance.
In July 1991, Yale’s Robert Shiller and Cornell’s Richard Thaler[i]) (who would win economics Nobels in 2013 and 2017 respectively), organized the first NEBR-sponsored Workshop in Behavioral Finance. The workshops held twice a year attracted a few but highly engaged participants. Some like Shleifer were rising stars in mainstream finance and economics and the papers they presented at the workshops were often then published in top-tier journals.
A wide-eyed outsider to this community I attended regularly; Shiller even asked me to discuss a paper in the July 1994 workshop.[ii])

[i] In 1995, Thaler moved to the University of Chicago’s business school.

[ii] The list of workshops is posted (as of December 4, 2022 at http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/behfin/. Frustratingly the only workshop not detailed at the link is the one held on July 1994. But I did find Shiller’s letter to me and which I have posted above.

Entrepreneurial Specialization: How Subjective (“Knightian”) Uncertainty Matters

Amar Bhidé — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 18:05:41 +0000

Hayek Seminar Talk at LSE 2 Dec ’21

Tim Besley, John Kay, and Mervyn King organize a Hayek Seminar at the London School of Economics that’s been meeting for about a year and a half. Ive had the great good fortune to participate, and yesterday I got the chance to present a recently completed paper, which is on its way to becoming a short book.

Here’s the edited video recording. For privacy reasons I have only included “my” presentation, since its not a public seminar. I don’t think anyone would mind, but still…

UncertaintyBlog – ​Amar Bhidé