What are your chances of living through the next 24 hours? This week?
This month? This decade? Will your job kill you? Your car kill you? Your
spouse kill you? Will your own bad habits kill you? Or will a rogue
asteroid just kill us all?
Each time you lay your head on the pillow at night or set your feet on
the floor come morning, you bet your life. Exactly what odds do you face
24/7?
You Bet Your Life applies to you, the individual, the analytical
approach insurance companies use to calculate risk: actuarial science.
The result is a comprehensive, encyclopedic, real world assessment of
more than 1,000 of the risks we take every day of our all-too-finite
lives, from boarding an airplane to tempting a shark attack by dipping a
toe in the ocean.
You Bet Your Life is introduced by an authoritative essay explaining
how professional actuaries calculate risk and how less objective
entities--in government, finance, science, technology, and
religion--apply their own competing calculi of risk and reward.