My reflections celebrating the life of Howard Kunreuther are personal as well as academic. Along with Paul Kleindorfer, Howard was a stalwart, energetic, intellectual force at Wharton and Penn for fifty years. Both were intellectual mentors to me, even though they both were primarily economists, and I am primarily a lawyer. “Primarily” is key because our intellectual connection did not depend on a commitment to a single academic discipline, as characterizes many academic friendships. For Howard and Paul, as for me, what matters is the problem presented and the method used to think about the problem should follow its contours—not the other way around. There is perhaps too much method looking for problems these days.
Together, Howard and Paul led, as academic co-directors, the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, which had been preeminent for decades in examining the general phenomenon of how we human beings are rational in making decisions about risks in the world, and yet we are often irrational too. The problem is that people’s actions do not always fit the models of rational individual behavior. Unlike many economists, Howard and Paul did not mind deviating from the standard models when a particular problem demanded it. If a traditional approach was not adequate to address the problem, then one should change the method or the model, and not just pretend there is no problem.
