Governmental Conditions for the Economization of Uncertainty

Making climate risks work: Governmentality and “foreign residence” in British life assurance, 1840–1940

“…However, we have suggested that foreign residence represented a form of tinkering, of trying new combinations of elements within this assemblage, rather than an attempt to follow the laws of mortality or climate science. As O'Malley and Roberts note in their study of Australian fire insurance, “risk is a ‘tolerant’ way to govern, allowing individual diversity within broad parameters rather than requiring universal adherence to prescriptive norms” (2014, p. 265). Directors could exercise their discretion to tailor company policy to individual examples.…”

“…Away from the “ordinary” lives that constituted the main business of life assurance, the careful compilation of statistical evidence and the use of probabilistic reasoning were less common or effective. The risk prices produced by Australian fire insurance companies were not based on detailed records and statistical calculation, for example, but on common‐sense judgements and a sense of “cumulative dangerousness,” “a practical epistemology that sought to identify as many hazards as possible in pursuit of identifying bad risks” (O'Malley & Roberts, 2014, p. 257, 258). As we will show in a moment, firms approached foreign residence risks in this way.…”

“…The South African physician J. Paterson MacLaren described this collection of data as a “great harvest of statistical information on almost every disease” (1927, p. 5), but sharing information in this way did not make it easier to calculate residence risks, as these figures were not commensurate (Anon., 1927, p. 335), and “climate” stood in for a complex of risks (Brinton, 1863). Still, this work produced a useful sense of relative risk, and the “cumulative dangerousness” of temperature, humidity, relief, and so on (O'Malley & Roberts, 2014). As we suggested above, disagreements about the dangerousness of specific locations may well have allowed firms to develop a better sense of the interaction between general factors and local conditions.…”

Underinsurance as adaptation: Household agency in places of marketisation and financialisation

“…As Zelizer (2017) recounts in relation to the emergence of the life-insurance industry, insurers have long been proactive in creating and maintaining markets, and they have mobilised a range of devices or actors in this process of marketisation. Like strategies in the 1800s that mobilised clean-cut door-to-door salesmen and notions of respectability (McFall, 2011; Zelizer, 2017) and actuarial calculations of household structural and moral ‘dangerousness’ (O’Malley and Roberts, 2014), underinsurance discourse and associated knowledge production contribute to pacifying relations of risk and uncertainty into insurance goods or products or, more specifically, extending the insurability of human and non-human entities. In this, underinsurance itself is not being marketised.…”

“…Block, 2006; Kunreuther and Pauly, 2009). Those without insurance are at risk or are in and of themselves risky (O’Malley and Roberts, 2014), and those with insurance are not living in risk or are at least living in significantly less risk.…”