By Jerome Rothenberg. Contributions by Steven Clay, Rodney Phillips.

By Jerome Rothenberg. Contributions by Steven Clay.

I first heard about renshi from Hiromi Itō, a remarkable and justifiably celebrated Japanese poet and writer, who has also been our neighbor in Encinitas, California, for most of the last two decades. Her presence among us goes back to 1991 and to my first visit to Japan, a contact I hadn’t had before but have been able to repeat six times since then.

In The Search for Safety, Aaron Wildavsky argues that the pervasiveness of uncertainty, the complexity of economy and society, and the trial‐and‐error strengths of a competitive market system make alleviating damages through market processes superior to a preventive strategy of regulatory anticipation. Close examination of a number of issues that are central to his argument— anticipation vs. resiliency, the effects of wealth on health, the competitive market as an engine for social trial and error, and equity in aggregating benefits and (...) costs across individuals and different probabilistic states—leads to considerable skepticism as to whether Wildavsky's strategy of less government regulation and a more unfettered market would indeed produce greater safety. (shrink)