Sharing Risk

The Path to Economic Well-Being for All

Patricia A. McCoy

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

University of California Press
27 May 2025

Poverty & unemployment; Social classes; Social welfare & social services; Economics; Public health & safety law

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.

By: Patricia A. McCoy
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 544g
ISBN: 9780520390140
ISBN 10: 0520390148
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 27 May 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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