ALLISON SCHRAGER

Allison Schrager is an economist, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, and co-founder of LifeCycle Finance Partners, LLC, a risk advisory firm.

Allison diversified her career by working in finance, policy, and media. She led retirement product innovation at Dimensional Fund Advisors and consulted to international organizations, including the OECD and IMF.

She has been a regular contributor to the Economist, Reuters, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Her writing has also appeared in Playboy, Wired, National Review and Foreign Affairs. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in economics from Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

ABOUT AN ECONOMIST WALKS INTO A BROTHEL

Is it worth swimming in shark-infested waters to surf a 50-foot, career-record wave?

Is it riskier to make an action movie or a horror movie?

Should sex workers forfeit 50 percent of their income for added security or take a chance and keep the extra money?

Most people wouldn’t expect an economist to have an answer to these questions–or to other questions of daily life, such as who to date or how early to leave for the airport. But those people haven’t met Allison Schrager, an economist and award-winning journalist who has spent her career examining how people manage risk in their lives and careers.

Whether we realize it or not, we all take risks large and small every day. Even the most cautious among us cannot opt out–the question is always which risks to take, not whether to take them at all. What most of us don’t know is how to measure those risks and maximize the chances of getting what we want out of life.

In An Economist Walks into a Brothel, Schrager equips readers with five principles for dealing with risk, principles used by some of the world’s most interesting risk takers. For instance, she interviews a professional poker player about how to stay rational when the stakes are high, a paparazzo in Manhattan about how to spot different kinds of risk, horse breeders in Kentucky about how to diversify risk and minimize losses, and a war general who led troops in Iraq about how to prepare for what we don’t see coming.

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