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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McCoy, Patricia A.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Financial security--United States--21st century.

Financial security.

Risk--United States--21st century.

Risk.

Households--Economic aspects--United States.

Households.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (300 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2025.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Part I: The Bottom 50 Percent

1. The Cash-Strapped American Worker

Part II: From Shifting to Sharing Risk

2. Counting the Ways: How Families Are Financially Fragile

3. Power Play: The Fifty-Year Assault on Workers' Economic Security

4. The Broken Savings Discourse

5. The Importance of Sharing Risk

Part III: The Road to Economic Well-Being

6. Making Ends Meet

7. Owning a Home

8. Affording Health Care

9. Paying for College

10. A Financially Secure Retirement

11. What It Will Take

Notes

References

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780520390157

0520390156

OCLC:

1507701034