Insurance Era
Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America
9780226833293
9780226784380
9780226784410
Insurance Era
Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America
Charts the social and cultural life of private insurance in postwar America, showing how insurance institutions and actuarial practices played crucial roles in bringing social, political, and economic neoliberalism into everyday life.
Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. Caley Horan’s remarkable book charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life.
Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. Insurance Era is a sharply researched and fiercely written account of how and why private insurance and its actuarial market logic came to be so deeply lodged in American visions of social welfare.
Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. Caley Horan’s remarkable book charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life.
Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. Insurance Era is a sharply researched and fiercely written account of how and why private insurance and its actuarial market logic came to be so deeply lodged in American visions of social welfare.
264 pages | 13 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2021
Economics and Business: Economics--History
History: American History
Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Selling “Self-Made” Security
Chapter 1: Insurance Marketing in the Wake of the New Deal
Chapter 2: “Facing the Future’s Risks”: Governing through Education and Public Service
Part II: Investing in Privatization
Chapter 3: “Public Enterprises in Private Hands”: Investing in Urban Renewal
Chapter 4: “A Mighty Pump”: Financing Suburbanization
Part III: Defending Discrimination
Chapter 5: “Communities without Hope”: Urban Crisis and Insurance Redlining
Chapter 6: The Unisex Insurance Debate and the Triumph of Actuarial Fairness
Epilogue: Imagining Insurance Futures
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Part I: Selling “Self-Made” Security
Chapter 1: Insurance Marketing in the Wake of the New Deal
Chapter 2: “Facing the Future’s Risks”: Governing through Education and Public Service
Part II: Investing in Privatization
Chapter 3: “Public Enterprises in Private Hands”: Investing in Urban Renewal
Chapter 4: “A Mighty Pump”: Financing Suburbanization
Part III: Defending Discrimination
Chapter 5: “Communities without Hope”: Urban Crisis and Insurance Redlining
Chapter 6: The Unisex Insurance Debate and the Triumph of Actuarial Fairness
Epilogue: Imagining Insurance Futures
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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