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 the Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor at Boston College Law School.
"Risk sharing is central to the US social contract, but too much risk has been shifted to households while new risks have been ignored. Professor McCoy's book brilliantly addresses these critical gaps and offers a blueprint to a renewed American Dream for millions of struggling families."—Ray Boshara, Senior Fellow, the Aspen Institute
"This book provides an amazing blueprint of policy changes necessary to build the United States we all want to live in—where hard work pays off and people can take care of their families without constant financial worries. It offers both big ideas and immediately actionable policy changes to build our country into a place where all can thrive. Everyone involved in making policy should read this book, then act on something in it."—Gail Hillebrand, retired division leader of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
"A pathbreaking book. Sharing Risk brilliantly illuminates our current dysfunction and prescribes a solution both just and efficient, recovering the common good as the compass for public policy. This is a must-read for our times."—Christine A. Desan, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
"Today, vast wealth and income gaps have consigned half of American families to lives of economic want. In Sharing Risk, Patricia McCoy draws on history to present a fresh vision for spreading and lifting the crushing financial risks borne by too many workers."—Darrick Hamilton, University Professor and Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy, The New School
"One of the most significant changes in US society has been the increasing financial risk placed upon the backs of everyday Americans. Sharing Risk is a milestone book for understanding and addressing this economic burden. The concept of insurance and risk pooling that Patricia McCoy develops is a creative and brilliant solution for confronting and alleviating this deeply rooted problem."—Mark Robert Rank, author of The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us
"This book is essential reading for those who care about improving the lives of financially vulnerable American families. McCoy brings her deep expertise to bear, charting a real path forward to increased socioeconomic well-being for all."—Abbye Atkinson, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley
"Sharing Risk provides a compelling, concise account of economic policies behind the insecurity driving today's populist politics and an easy-to-understand set of policies that offer a way out. Sharing Risk is a must-read for anyone—red, blue, or purple—looking to restore Americans' hope for the future."—Tom Baker, William Maul Measey Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
312 pp.6 x 9Illus: 3 b/w figures
9780520390140$27.95|£24.00Hardcover
May 2025