Vivian Zelizer

  • Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer has detailed in her book “Morals and Markets,” for a long time life insurance failed to thrive in the U.S. because people didn’t like the idea of placing a value on human life, and wives often felt as if they were betting on the deaths of their husbands.
  • Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families.

newyorker.com/magazine/2006/05/08/through-the-roof

  • 1978 - AP - Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death in 19th-Century America, by Viviana A. Zelizer - 
    • American Journal of Sociology, v84 n3 p591-610 Nov 1978, Nov78