Anthology

Privatization of Risk Series

Calhoun, Craig Jackson, Hacker, Jacob S

Description

The Social Science Research Council and Columbia University Press, with funding from the MacArthur Foundation, introduce a new series of primers exploring the negative consequences of the privatization of risk on health care security, market stability, employment, pension security and provisions for coping with natural disasters.

The purpose of the Privatization of Risk book series is to better explain how privatizing financial risk has affected ordinary Americans. The term “privatization of risk” refers to a basic fact of contemporary American life: namely, that risks which were once public and shared have become largely individual and private. Over the last thirty years many American politicians, intellectuals and ordinary citizens have increasingly come to regard private sector solutions as the first and best means of dealing with problems of all kind. It is a shift that has rewritten the economic rules-of-the-road for all Americans and greatly complicated the task of managing both long and short term financial risk.

The Privatization of Risk series illustrates the effects of this shift and suggests possible solutions to the problems engendered by it. Written in accessible prose by some of the country’s leading social scientists, the Privatization of Risk books are primers for understanding and dealing with the individual financial effects of health care insecurity, unemployment, market volatility, pension shortfalls and natural disaster.

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