Insurance: A Foundation for Modernity in Civilization

Michael Sean Quinn, Ph.D, J.D., Etc.2630 Exposition Blvd  #115Austin, Texas 78703(o) 512-296-2594mquinn@msqlaw.com (Resumes Found Here.)

Insurance, as we know it, is a key to the financial stability and commercial realm, as well as to personal lives, in the contemporary world.  In fact this is true for the entirety of truly modern civilization.  

What follows is virtually the first paragraph of a history of reinsurance.  This part of the book is written by a now deceased famous historian Harold Jame  

 INSURANCE-the pooling of risk, with reinsurance providing a further extent of pooling-helps us to lead more predictable lives.  Such enhanced predictability is an essential element in allowing the establishment of ever more complex social and financial interactions, involving more people, across longer distances, and with new and innovative and inherently unforeseeable technologies.  On this basis, the modern world, and the modern view of the world, has been built.  One of the reasons that pre-modern farmers and artisans- and those living today in poor countries-are vulnerable is that they cannot insure themselves against disasters such as harvest failures which posed and continue to pose a threat to their means of existence.  Experimental psychology has produced an increasing amount of evidence that shows that very poor people under tight resource constraints make poorer quality decisions, and that momentary poverty depresses measured intelligence levels.  Well-being and an increased ability to make rational choices are closely connected with each other, and with a sense of preparedness and of certainty about the future. The instinct to insure is linked to and derived from the instinct to organize and to evolve more and more complex and interlinked structures of mutual support. 

Harold James, Ed., "Introduction: The Insuring Instinct," THE VALUE OF RISK: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance (2013), p. 1, paragraph 1. 

I'm not sure that even I have ever appreciated the  striking, star role insurance has played creating and sustaining the world as we know it.  Of course, this will include the cyber world.