Marriage functions as private insurance when public and market insurance recede

Evidence

Richard Posner refers to the “insurance function of marriage,” pointing to the fact that marriage is expected to serve as a form of risk protection in those social contexts “where kinship has receded but market and social insurance is not yet common” (or, we might add, has significantly diminished). The “insurance function” of marriage, he writes, “arises from the fact that the correlation of spouses’ health and other welfare factors is less than one, so given a mutual obligation of support and assistance, marriage serves as a form of health, hunger, and life insurance.” — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 888

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘insurance function of marriage’ as a specific neoliberal concept — a privatized substitute for social insurance.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s overall fracturing of the austerity caricature: shows how neoliberal family policy substituted private risk-pooling for the welfare state. — connects to: Life insurance gained legitimacy by framing itself as family care rather than death gambling — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 355; Mutual aid functions as informal insurance among individuals. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 160; Modern commerce protects agency relationships through layered insurance and bonding — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 106

Broader Connections

• Mutual aid functions as informal insurance among individuals. #corroborates (0.85) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 160
• Modern commerce protects agency relationships through layered insurance and bonding #complicates (0.70) — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 106