This post was originally written and published in French, De la prime à la cotisation: retrouver la solidarité
Well, let’s start with something everyone can observe. Insurance has a bad image, a bad press. It is often suspected of being a cold bureaucracy, a paperwork industry, a partner that looks for loopholes precisely when you need it. We talk about premiums the way we talk about a price, and we end up judging insurance the way we judge a purchase. Did I “get my money’s worth” this year. Did I “lose” money if I had no claim. Was I a good customer if I kept quiet. With questions like these, the very idea of solidarity quickly feels out of place.
And yet, if we set aside the forms and the marketing campaigns, insurance is first and foremost a social technology. It makes a simple reality livable. Some events are rare, hit hard, and cannot be financed individually without tipping into ruin. Insurance says the following. We do not know when, we do not know who, we only know that one day someone will have an accident, fall ill, see their home damaged, or cause harm to someone else. And because we cannot decide in advance who that person will be, we choose to be many to carry the associated financial burden. We pool a small share of our resources, and we agree on rules so that, when the day comes, the burden is bearable. For everyone. It is not only a service, it is a common.
I had already tried to look at the issue from a concrete angle, the angle of claims settlement, and the way it can disenchant a tool that is, in principle, virtuous, in an earlier post When insurance falls apart, the silent crisis of claims settlement. And there are other posts too, revolving around pricing, perception, and what we truly expect from an insurance contract, such as The value of life, The paradoxes of segmentation and discrimination in insurance, Cheaper personalized insurance premiums thanks to AI, or Insurance, a zero sum game. But what was missing was a broader lens, more sociological, and probably more political too. And as often, going back to classic works in the social sciences helps clarify what is at stake.
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