On a spring morning in 1752, a group of Philadelphians led by Benjamin Franklin sat down and did something that, in retrospect, seems like inventing an industry. They pooled their money in a mutual company, the Philadelphia Contributionship, and promised to rebuild each other’s homes if there ever was a fire. It was a modest, almost neighborly idea – insurance as a contract between people who knew each other. Nearly 275 years later, the same impulse to pool risk underpins a domestic market that, by 2023 (the most recently verified figure), accounted for about 45% of the $7.2 trillion in insurance premiums written worldwide that year, according to Swiss Re figures cited in Wikipedia’s overview of insurance in the United States. More current totals almost certainly exist, but I was not able to verify the more recent figure, so consider it directional rather than minute. The story of how the country got from there to here is, in miniature, the story of the American economy itself: its fires, its wars, its migration, its financial crisis, and – increasingly – its climate.
From coffee houses to climate models: 250 years of American insurance. & more related News Here
