The Risk-Security Balance and the Burden of Choice

Abstract

That American society should be in a transition from industrialism to post-industrialism, from the economics of scarcity to the economics of abundance and subject to a much faster rate of change than any previously experienced is giving rise to different patterns of opportunities and constraints, of security and risk, than those to which we have been accustomed. It is profoundly changing the risk-security balance of the middle class individual. It will place a new burden of choice on many who will enjoy and suffer affluence for the first time in the terminal decades of the present century. How will they fare?

This chapter is based on the author’s contribution to a pilot research project on the ‘Future Environment of Financial Services’, undertaken by the Management and Behavioral Science Center of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and sponsored by the Insurance Company of North America. It was presented to the 1970 Research Conference of the American Society of Actuaries held at the Wharton School.