Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well Being for All

Summary

EXAMINES WHY SOCIETY SHOULD POOL AND SPREAD THE FINANCIAL RISK THAT INDIVIDUAL FAMILIES NOW BEAR

Over the past fifty 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 inequality, and destabilized US democracy. In Sharing Risk, consumer advocate and scholar Patricia A. McCoy draws on the nation’s tradition of risk sharing to argue that society should lift up families by pooling and spreading the financial risk that they now must bear alone.

McCoy defines five milestones of economic well-being: making ends meet, buying a home, affording quality health care, financing college, and paying for retirement. Most discussions of financial stress on households look at these milestones in isolation. McCoy, instead, offers an integrated approach. Providing specific policy recommendations, she shows how risk sharing can enable families to realistically achieve all five goals without sacrificing one for another.

“Patricia A. McCoy’s book offers a blueprint to a renewed American Dream for millions of struggling families.”—Ray Boshara, Senior Fellow, The Aspen Institute