Book Description
Excerpt from Principles of Insurance Legislation Insurance is the equalization of fortune. The definition may sound like a mere commonplace; but it is 110 such thing The line of demarcation is just there. Insurance prevents those inequalities, which are induced by misfortunes to individuals, by spreading the loss over a larger surface, by dividing it among a larger number; by this very means also, the inequalities, caused by the good fortune of individuals, are sensibly reduced by their contributions to cover the common loss, by their premium payments. The kinship between insurance and gambling is close; they both deal with the science of average, applied to chance. And so far as that science is concerned, aside from the hazard arising from men's conscious efforts to gain which is known as the moral hazard, there is no distinction whether a company bets you that your house will not burn or that your neighbor's house will hot burn. But there is a difference, nevertheless, between those two transactions. The difference is that in the former case you have nothing to gain; you are merely striving to avoid loss or, more accurately, to share the risk of loss, common to such property. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.