Fifteen years ago, Peter Bernstein, the late New York economist and historian, wrote a thoughtful book on probability theory, Against the Gods. It argues that one of the key issues that distinguishes modern societies from pre-modern societies is how people conceive risk.

Pre-modern cultures, he argued, cannot model risk in a systematic way because they lack clocks or complex maths; thus they fatalistically view life as something shaped by capricious gods or natural elements. Modern societies, however, measure risks methodically and develop proactive strategies in response. “The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk,” he wrote.

It is a fascinating distinction to ponder on, given recent disasters in Japan. Until quite recently, I suspect that most people living in the US and Europe assumed that the world around them was so stable that it made sense to believe that risk could always be measured and contained. After all, it has been a long time since a serious war or revolution occurred in the western world. And in the late twentieth and early 21st centuries, the economy seemed so benign that economists sometimes dubbed it the “era of the great moderation”.