Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for All

Examining why society should pool and spread the financial risk that individual families now bear.

Over the past sixty years, businesses and government have increasingly off-loaded financial risk onto US households. The toll has pushed tens of millions of people to the financial breaking point, worsened social inequity, and jeopardized US democracy. In Sharing Risk, consumer advocate and scholar Patricia A. McCoy draws on the nation’s traditions of risk sharing to argue that society should lift up families by pooling and spreading the financial risks that they now must bear alone.

Most policy discussions of financial stress on households look at the milestones of economic well-being in isolation: making ends meet, homeownership, quality health care, financing college, and a secure retirement. McCoy offers the first integrated examination of how risk sharing can enable families to realistically achieve all five goals without sacrificing one for another. She makes specific policy recommendations and shows how risk sharing, with its long and venerable history that includes Social Security and the Affordable Care Act, would provide economic well-being for all.

Patricia A. McCoy, a founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor at Boston College Law School.