Aaron Wildavsky

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Aaron Wildavsky (born 1930, died 1993) was a political scientist most noted for his work on risk. From 1962 until his death, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley.

Wildavsky's work focused on reintroducing the importance of culture to political science, which he saw as dominated by rational choice theory. He was generally libertarian in his political views and cornucopian in outlook, skeptical of the dangers that environmentalists worried about. Wildavsky is also noted for his Dual Presidency Theory.

He was also a noted scholar on budgeting and budget theory later working with Naomi Caiden in this area. He is associated with the idea of incrementalism in budgeting, meaning that the most important predictor of a future political budget is the prior one — not a rational economic or decision process undertaken by the state.

In Searching for Safety, published in 1988, Wildavsky argued that trial and error, rather than the precautionary principle, is the best way to manage risks. He noted that rich, technologically advanced societies were the safest, as measured by life expectancy and quality of life. Precautionary approaches to approving new technology are irrational, he said, because they demand that we know whether something is safe before we can do the very tests that would demonstrate its safety or dangerousness. Furthermore, precaution eliminates the benefits of new technology along with the harms. He advocated enhancing society's capacity to cope with and adapt to the unexpected, rather than trying to prevent all catastrophes in advance.

Wildavsky is perhaps most famous for his role in developing the Cultural Theory of risk. In 1982, he and anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote Risk and Culture. This book was both a critique of environmentalists, which they argued shared a worldview with sectarian groups like the Amish, as well as an initial statement of Cultural Theory. Later, he co-authored Cultural Theory with Richard Ellis and Michael Thompson, expanding the Cultural Theory concept and showing how it related to earlier theories in political science and anthropology.

Richard Lindzen attributes these words on global warming to Wildavsky:

• "Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist's dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population's eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally." [1]