Towards A Relentless Quest For Soul And (Ergodic) Precision In (Insurance) Economics

Orio Giarini spent a life working on insurance, growth, wealth and technology. His work was deeply influenced by a famous Austrian novel, namely The Man without Qualities authored by Robert Musil. In this novel, a so-called Secretariat of Soul and Precision plays an important role. Musil's Secretariat turns out to be a remarkable prism through which Orio Giarini's many contributions can be deciphered. In the following text, I submit the hypothesis, among other ideas, that Orio Giarini had a very early intuition on two important and related notions, namely ergodicity and path dependence, whose consequences are still not fully understood in economics. Ergodicity and path dependence are indeed critical when one aims at bringing more precision to soul and more soul to precision.