Insurance Era

"Caley Horan charts the social and cultural life of private insurance in the United States after 1945. Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan argues that insurance institutions and actuarial practices played crucial roles in introducing neoliberalism to American life. Today, actuarial thinking is everywhere--calculations of risk and chance influence how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, and finance. Horan avers that midcentury America--obsessed with security, safety, and risk-fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in countless fields. Horan moreover shows that insurance institutions have been central to establishing many of the social, political, and economic frameworks essential for neoliberalism. At its broadest, actuarial thinking, which presumes that all rational action is economic action, encourages individuals to conduct their lives in market terms, taking charge of their own risks and welfare. The rise and administration of neoliberal values did not just happen; it was the product of a project to unsocialize risk, reducing costs to the state and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. The reason "There Is No Alternative" to neoliberal logics is that all the alternatives get defined away by forces, like insurance companies, that profit handsomely from doing so"--

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