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Actuarial Age: Insurance and the Emergence of Neoliberalism in the Postwar United States

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Actuarial Age: Insurance and the Emergence of Neoliberalism in the Postwar United States ACTUARIAL AGE: INSURANCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF NEOLIBERALISM IN THE POSTWAR UNITED STATES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Caley Dawn Horan IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advised by Elaine Tyler May and Lary May August 2011 © Caley Horan 2011 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In many of the acknowledgments sections in scholarly works on the history of insurance authors note the bewilderment of friends and loved ones upon learning that they have undertaken a long and grueling research project on so “boring” a topic. These “patient” people are then thanked for their perseverance and for enduring long conversations about the dense intricacies of insurance history. This was not the case for me. This dissertation was developed through hundreds of conversations with mentors and advisors, colleagues, students, close friends, acquaintances, family, and strangers. During these conversations, I never encountered indifference or boredom. The thoughtfulness and excitement with which people responded to my research encouraged and sustained me, and most importantly for a dissertation writer, it allowed me to believe that my project matters. I am grateful for the impatience of my many interlocutors – for their probing curiosity and sustained interest in responding to my questions and claims about a topic they continuously reminded me is anything but “boring.” While writing this dissertation I received crucial assistance form the University of Minnesota Graduate School and the Department of History. I especially benefited from the 2009-2010 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and from my close interaction with the University’s excellent faculty. I feel privileged to have worked with Elaine Tyler May and Lary May. Their feedback has been essential in shaping this dissertation and my identity as a scholar. I could not have asked for more engaged, creative, or supportive advisors. I am also grateful for the mentorship of Thomas Wolfe, who consistently challenged and inspired me to think in new ways. That process was not always easy, but i it made me a better thinker and person. I thank Tracey Deutsch for her pragmatism and practical advice, and for introducing me to business history. J.B Shank introduced me to the history of statistics and probability – without him this would be a very different dissertation. Many other faculty members at the University of Minnesota were instrumental in getting me to this point. Andrew Elfenbein, Barbara Welke, and Kevin Murphy deserve special mention for their excellent teaching and service. Many of the images in this dissertation are from the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History housed at Duke University’s Special Collections Library. Reference archivist Lynn Eaton was a great to me help during my visit to the Center and I thank her and the rest of the staff there for their assistance. This dissertation also benefited from my participation in the Oxford Journals Doctoral Colloquium at the 2010 Business History Conference. I am thankful to the faculty directors of the colloquium and to the other participants for their ideas and feedback on my work. The members of Elaine and Lary May’s dissertation group have contributed much to this dissertation. I am especially indebted to Daniel LaChance, who provided thoughtful comments on every chapter, and whose brilliance and friendship was instrumental at every stage. I am grateful to have shared my years in graduate school with many other friends. I thank Andrew Urban, Aaron Windel, Brian Tochterman, Jeff Manuel, Tovah Bender, Serena Laws, Eric Otremba, Don Vu, Conor Anderson, Rachel Noogle, and Naomi Wood for good conversations and good times. Jay Jee-Yeon Kim and Joe Haker were especially supportive confidants and companions. Others outside the University also deserve thanks. Roger Green saw me through my first year of graduate ii school and a great deal more before that. James Melching is my dearest friend, and I thank him for remaining so during my time in graduate school and while I wrote this dissertation. I owe the most to three people, without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. I thank my mother for teaching me to notice little things, to delight in details as a means of seeking out larger meanings and deeper truths. I thank my father for encouraging me to pursue my education at all costs, and for the strength and sense of self that his pride in me has inspired. Finally, I am grateful to Eric Richtmyer for his practical assistance – technical and emotional – and for encouraging me to look beyond practicality in pursuit of intellectual growth and transformation. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation charts a history of the social and cultural life of private insurance in the United States after 1945. Drawing on analyses of insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, I argue that insurance institutions and actuarial practices played a crucial role in introducing neoliberal rationalities and governance to American life in the years following World War II. Through postwar marketing, public service campaigns, and a host of instructional and lobbying efforts, private insurers sought to train and produce a new kind of responsibilized insurance consumer and entrepreneurial subject-citizen – one who could think in actuarial, risk-based ways about family, finance, and the future, and who eschewed the public provision of social welfare in favor of private security. The emergence of a postwar neoliberal order entailed a spatial transformation as well as a social one. In the three decades following World War II, insurance institutions invested billions of dollars in shopping centers, urban housing developments, suburban subdivisions, and infrastructure projects like natural gas pipelines. These investments helped restructure the American landscape by producing securitized spaces geared towards ensuring the circulation of people, goods, and private capital. The political impacts of actuarial practices were also profound. In debates with insurers over the classification categories used to price and determine availability of insurance coverage, civil rights and women's activists attempted to curtail discrimination by changing the regulatory frameworks that governed the private insurance industry. The failure of activists to secure legislation and their demands for more precise statistical measurements iv in the field of insurance underwriting reflected the diminishing utility of rights-based frameworks in combating discrimination in insurance and signaled the triumph of a new, actuarial, understanding of political community as structured around the notion of risk. The growing presence of actuarial systems and the emerging neoliberal social order did not go unnoticed, or uncontested, by postwar observers. In the years immediately following World War II, opposition to actuarial thinking arose in American popular culture in the critique of private insurance and its ability to provide security in postwar drama, in the dark meditations on fate and fragmentation offered by film noir, and the dystopian and turbulent future worlds depicted by science fiction. Resistance to actuarialism, however, diminished in the final decades of the twentieth century as Americans increasingly began to identify insurance classifications and contracts as natural and inevitable, and to see private security as a right of citizenship. This dissertation offers a genealogy of this transformation, revealing the roots of neoliberalism in risk-based calculative rationalities and the vital role of insurance institutions in shaping America's actuarial age. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... i Abstract ....................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................. vii Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 Chapters 1. Selling “Self-Made” Security: Insurance Marketing and the Privatization of Security in the Postwar United States ............................................................. 30 2. Insurance Investments in the Built Environment and the Reshaping of the Postwar Landscape .......................................................................................... 97 3. Risk Pools and Regulation: Actuarial Classification, Social Activism, and the Insurance Discrimination Debates .................................................................. 146 4. Insurance and Actuarialism in the Postwar Popular Imagination ................... 208 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 261 Bibliography................................................................................................................ 265 vi LIST OF FIGURES 1. Edmund Halley's 1693 Actuarial Table ..................................................................... 2 2. Students Learning to Drive using the Aetna Drivotrainer ......................................... 15 3. “They said Father Didn't Keep His Life Insurance Paid Up!” ................................... 43 4. “Prevent Diphtheria” .................................................................................................
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