One good reason for reading De Morgan is the fact that he is older than the majority of his readers. We read so much, we hear so much acclaimed that is written by children of twenty, whose experience of life must necessarily be got, like Cicely’s, “out of a book.” The saying of De Maupassant surely applies here—that the writer must sit down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it. De Morgan has had the opportunity of seeing life, surely, and knowing what most of it amounts to. The result is a large tolerance and tenderness toward his fellow men.
M. H. P.
The Economics of Social Insurance
Social Insurance: With Special Reference to American Conditions, by I. M. Rubinow. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
The logic of events is rapidly forcing nation after nation into what has hitherto been damned with the epithet paternalism. America, perhaps, is the last important country in the world to face the problems raised by the march of events in this direction. Social insurance, a thing accomplished and a commonplace of government functioning in so many countries, recently adopted in England, is, in this country, still a novelty outside the university class room and the lecture halls of fanatical demagogues who wish to upset the foundations of our civil government and civilization—as the elder politicians express it when their attention is drawn to these sinister activities of thought.
The author of this book in fact was the first academic lecturer on the subject to give a university course in the various forms which social insurance has taken. These lectures he delivered before the New York School of Philanthropy, and they are reprinted here in an extended form.
After giving the philosophy of the matter, the underlying social necessity for insurance, the author takes up the various forms of the activity. Accident, disease, old age, and unemployment must all be provided against, and the state, the employer, and the laborer may share the burden among them, or the two latter may be relieved—as in various types of non-contributory insurance.
Of course the old school economist will ask why the latter two are not relieved, and why the employe or private citizen is not just encouraged to insure with a private corporation. The author’s answer is that, even if he were educated to the point of desiring to do that, he could not. A man insures his house because the feeling of security is worth the small premium he pays, even if that premium is larger than the actual risk involved would warrant—larger by a sum equal to the cost and profits of the business of the insurance company. But the poor man’s chances of loss of employment, accident, or sickness are so much greater in proportion to the capitalized value of his job that he could never afford to pay the premium necessary for a private company to take care of him; while his old age could not be insured without taking all of his earnings—and even then he might die before he reached it.
The situation then is that an admitted necessity cannot be obtained unless the state as a whole takes steps to attain it for all the members of the state. How other states have done this, how type after type of insurance has been evolved, and how these types may be adapted to American practice is the burden of the present work.
The author writes in a clear and non-technical manner, and makes no extravagant claims for what some people may regard as a social panacea; but he is confident that the full development of the idea of social insurance will relieve the worst aspects of poverty—the aspects in which poverty is not only a hardship, but a haunting spirit, sapping the vitality of its victims until they are rendered socially useless.