"I Need Givers, not Takers." Moral Boundaries and Inequality in the Field of Auto Insurance

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 21: Meaning, Legitimacy and Professions

Abstract

Insurance markets are often portrayed as governed by a question of pure mathematics, with some people likely to confront risks more than others. There are even college degrees in statistics and finance to become an actuary and set the price paid accordingly by each of us. Scholars have shown over the past two decades how this practice of actuarial science has contributed to make insurance markets look like a morally neutral domain, driven by the sole use of quantitative data. My aim here is to shed light on a complementary process driven by local insurance agents. The analysis builds on interviews with specialists in auto insurance (a common product, sold to a great variety of people in the United States). It shows that local agents do not explicitly borrow from actuarial discourse in their daily practice. They rather talk about “givers,” willing to help others, and “takers,” leaning toward selfishness, if not fraud. By so doing, they present the principle of insurance as essentially moral, with villains likely to abuse the system, at the expense of heroes trying to make it work efficiently, for the sake of the community. What appears through the analysis, however, is that these definitions of givers and takers refer implicitly to the categories set up by actuaries to define the clients targeted by firms. This framing does not invalidate the key role of actuaries in making insurance practice look like morally neutral, to prevent criticisms from consumer advocates or regulators at the national level. Instead, it sheds light on a process that is more discrete: using morals at the local level to convince wealthy clients to buy insurance, as “givers,” whereas underprivileged people are likely to be excluded from the system or pay higher rates, due to their alleged propension to be “takers.”

Author

• Stève Bernardin, Université Gustave Eiffel