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ISBN: HB: 9780226784380

University of Chicago Press

April 2021

264 pp.

22.8x15.2 cm

13 halftones

HB:
£32,00
QTY:

Insurance Era

Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America

Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an oft-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, persuasively arguing that these institutions' actuarial practices played a crucial – and crucially 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 countless fields. At its broadest, actuarial thinking presumes that all rational action is economic action, encouraging individuals to conduct their lives in market terms, taking charge of their own risks and welfare. The rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own, Horan shows: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state's commitment to providing social welfare, 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 the Author

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