After more than ten years of writing blog posts and essays for a broader audience, I used this past year to revisit, update, and bring some of those ideas together. The result is a short, non-technical book, Risk-Priced Society — Insurance, Algorithms and Climate in the Age of Prediction.
As data become more granular and models more powerful, insurers can distinguish more precisely between people, behaviours, and places. But better prediction does not tell us how losses should be shared, which differences should affect prices, or what should remain pooled. Drawing on the history of insurance, actuarial practice, decision algorithms, and climate risk, the book argues that technical precision never eliminates political choice. It can support prevention and strengthen protection, but it can also individualise vulnerabilities that are collectively produced. The challenge, then, is not to reject models, but to decide democratically what they should be allowed to do, what consequences should follow from them, and how to avoid leaving each person alone with their risk.
The book is open for review until December. Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are all very welcome. You just need an hypothes.is account. Select a part you want to annotate,
and then add all comments you want to make
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Arthur Charpentier (August 4, 2026). Open Review: Risk Priced Society. Freakonometrics. Retrieved August 16, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16nhw