Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America - Hardcover

Horan, Caley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022678438X ISBN 13: 9780226784380

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2021

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Caley Horan is associate professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022678438X
• ISBN 13: 9780226784380
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264