“Despite their strong handshakes and leadership training,” you wax poetic about the economic effects of many recent disasters, “businessmen are skittish creatures, easily demoralized and deterred” (”From Tsunamis to Typhoons,” March 26, 2011). Oh, dear. “Everyone knows that the disaster in Japan, the violence in the Middle East and the euro zone’s fiscal strains are bad for the global economy,” you argue, “but no-one knows quite how bad. The lack of clarity can be as harmful as the disruption itself.” Indeed. But the trouble runs deeper. Businessmen have become creatures of risk, which puts outcomes and probabilities into easy calculations. They shy uncertainty like the plague. And this has not always been so. As John Maynard Keynes pointed out less than a century ago, skyscrapers and ocean liners would not be built by calculation alone. Poor businessmen in the so-called west forget this at their peril. Uncertainty cannot be reduced to risk. More important, it must be relished, too. As witnessed by so much built in the east, risk-craving is a disease of old age.