Charts the social and cultural life of private insurance in postwar America, showing how insurance institutions and actuarial practices played crucial roles in bringing social, political, and economic neoliberalism into everyday life. Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. Caley Horan’s remarkable book charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life. Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. Insurance Era is a sharply researched and fiercely written account of how and why private insurance and its actuarial market logic came to be so deeply lodged in American visions of social welfare.

This book presents a complete discussion of life insurance distribution. It begins by putting life insurance distribution within the broader context of distribution and marketing in general, thus demonstrating why life insurance distribution is different. It then goes on to discuss the history of how distribution, as we know it today, developed, and the ten primary distribution channels that exist in the business. With all of this as background, the book continues with more detail and discusses the various functions performed by distribution, and how distribution systems are managed today. It also goes into more specifics regarding the compensation and the economics of distribution. The text concludes with a discussion of managing distribution channel conflict, and how distribution of life insurance is expected to evolve in the near future. Spreadsheet models are available on the ACTEX website to assist readers in understanding the economics of distribution.