Blaise Pascal was the founder of modern probability theory and statistics, and understood probability better than any business actuary of his time. He knew he was cheating when he proposed his famous wager, since the probabilistic calculation of betting odds compares quantities, and cannot handle the infinity of eternal life and the nothingness of absence. Worldly quantitative calculation could never capture the kind of qualitative difference in life he valued. What he might not have known was something that has only recently become clear: that a quantitative difference, if close enough to some great natural threshold or inherent and constitutive instability in the world, can trigger a qualitative difference. Today’s market risk analysts, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb has pointed out in his book The Black Swan, are no better at detecting and evaluating the importance of such threshold-crossings, such inherent instability, than they were in Pascal’s time. The recent banking crisis was the result. Mark Twain’s famous aphorism, quoted by Churchill—”There are lies, damn lies, and statistics”—has been proven true yet again.