Financialized insurance shifted from collective risk spreading to encouraging individual risk endorsement

Evidence

It is no surprise then that, at our current juncture, insurance continues to play a key role in the economy and politics alike. As a significant technology in the financialization and marketization of uncertainty, it transforms the latter into risk that can be estimated and evaluated, for both the insurers and the insured of speculative communities. In their authoritative work, sociologists Baker and Simon (2002) trace a momentous transition in financialized capitalism, from the postwar insurance model of risk spreading (established by protectionist counter-movements such as the New Deal or Clement Atlee’s social security reforms in Britain) to one of risk endorsing, with the explicit intention of reducing individual claims on collective social resources. This shift corresponds to our timeline of modern neoliberal subjectivity underpinning persistent ideas of the rationalizing homo economicus. Strengthened individual responsibility and self-insurance undergird this model, borne out in the dramatic reforms of pensions and late-life risks for large segments of society during recent waves of financialization, most notably in sweeping transitions from defined benefit to defined contribution schemes. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 274

Categorization

• XREF: The risk-spreading-to-risk-endorsing shift traces the same transition to homo economicus subjectivity the reader is mapping from trading into politics and dating. — connects to: Cheap flood insurance creates moral hazard by encouraging settlement in flood-prone areas — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1786; Entrepreneurial labor shifts financial risk onto individual workers — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 143
• DEFINE: Core definitional context: insurance as the technology that converts uncertainty into calculable risk, foundational to the homo speculans argument.