Welcome! I’m Meredith Brasher, and I talk about insurance and history. Thanks for checking out my Substack—I think you’ll find it illuminating.

Who am I?

Well, before I worked in the insurance industry, I thought I was going to be a history professor. Turns out I didn’t like graduate school very much, and instead of finishing my PhD program, I decided to quit after my master’s degree was finished. So, I have both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in history, and after that…well, like a lot of 20 somethings, I had absolutely no plan.

After a few attempts at the dot.com world in the late 90’s and early 2000’s (in which I became very good at getting laid off from jobs) I fell into insurance underwriting. A friend of mine thought I might like it, and I especially liked being able to pay my bills, so I gave it a shot, and it turns out…I loved it. And if you have absolutely no idea what “insurance underwriting” means, you are not alone.

I’ll explain in it in a bit, as I explain a lot about the world of insurance and how it works in my podcast.

But as someone who loved research, and who liked writing papers, and who had a tendency to think about the worst thing that could possibly happen in their own life in just about any situation, I was a natural at insurance underwriting. I did well; I gradually moved up in my profession, and generally believed that what I did mattered.

I spent about 20 years in the insurance industry, after which I decided I’d done all the things I had wanted to in that profession. I’d gotten the job I’d always wanted, worked on the types of projects I’d always wanted to work on, and learned a ton.

But I was ready to move on, and do something I’d always dreamed of doing—acting. And then the pandemic happened, and any acting momentum I’d built up came to a screeching halt. With nothing on my plate but time, I started the Insurance vs History podcast. It was supposed to be a few episodes, I’d practice my neutral American accent (that I’d worked hard to obtain) and I’d answer some questions that I had about insurance, and no one would listen, and that would be…fine.

Except that’s not what happened—people did listen, and I kept having more questions. Three years in, I’m still going strong.

Why should I care about Insurance? It sounds boring.

Congratulations, you’ve just hit upon a truth the industry wants you to believe: that insurance is boring. So boring you shouldn’t pay attention to it at all.

First: the way I look at it, there are two types of insurance: the ones you are expected to use regularly, and the ones you only use in the case of a catastrophic event.

The first type of insurance—the kind you use regularly--is probably the type of insurance that first came to mind when you read the word “insurance”—your health insurance, if you’re lucky enough to have health insurance. Yes, health insurance does cover catastrophic events that are unexpected—a heart attack out of the blue, an accident causing severe injury, that kind of thing. But you also use it regularly (I hope): annual physicals, vaccines, minor illness, that kind of thing. Other insurance you are expected to use regularly, if you have it: Medicare and Medicaid and even health insurance for your pet. And of course, life insurance.

In addition, you also have some insurance you’re expected to use that you may not even think about as “insurance”—unemployment insurance and social security. Both are a type of insurance, and you would expect to use them at some point in your life. (Yes, unemployment is usually an unexpected event, but let’s face it, most people will access unemployment insurance at some point in their life if they live in America, at least.)

So that’s one kind of insurance. The other kind is the one we don’t think about most of the time: catastrophic insurance products. These are the ones you pay for and hope you never need to use: Home insurance, renter’s insurance, auto insurance, hurricane and earthquake insurance. There are also things like Worker’s Compensation. If you own a business, you have a whole host of these types of insurances: general liability, property insurance, business interruption, Employee Practices Liability Insurance, Cyber Insurance…this list could go on for a while.

The average person in the US interacts with perhaps 15-20 insurance products in their lifetimes. You are likely right now—are paying for (either directly or through pay deductions or Payroll taxes) at least 10 different types of insurance. We don’t think about this much, but insurance is a big part of our lives.

Fine, Whatever. What does this have to do with history?

Well, insurance has been around in some form since people formed societies, though it didn’t always look like insurance today. Insurance and banking are closely related, and in some cases, early insurance was a form of early banking. Insurance is, essentially, risk transfer: You pay someone money and that person assumes the risk of something in your life. If the thing you are worried about doesn’t happen, that person gets to keep that money. If that something does happen, you will get back more money than you paid in, often a lot more money. If it sounds a little like gambling, well, some early insurance products looked at lot like gambling.

Without this idea of risk transfer—without insurance--modern capitalism would not exist. (I’ll give you a minute to decide if that’s a good or bad thing. I’m not 100% sold on modern capitalism either.)

This means that historically, insurance was essential to the development of modern capitalism. And a lot of our history was driven by capitalism in some way. It makes sense that insurance impacted history in some way. Here are some examples:

Without insurance, the Atlantic Slave trade—the forced transportation of approximately 12 million people from Africa—would not have existed on that scale. Slave ship voyages were very expensive—the ship was costly, outfitting it was costly, and without insurance, many slavers would not have been able to operate. The sheer size of the slave trade would have been impossible without insurance. This is not an example I expect will make you enthusiastic about insurance, but I think it illustrates how insurance changed history, in this case, not for the better.

On the other hand, San Francisco would not look the way it does today without insurance. In 1906, an earthquake hit San Francisco, followed by a fire caused by the earthquake, destroying nearly all of the city. Land developers were hungry to buy up the destroyed city and remake it in their own image. But San Francisco was also the first city to be significantly insured, and as a result, many residents were able to rebuild. When we look at stories about wildfires in California and Maui and the worry about developers buying property and forcing out residents, insurance may be the primary thing keeping that from happening. If residents have insurance, they can rebuild. Without it, they are far more likely to sell or be forced to relocate.

Okay, fine. But why does insurance want us to think it is boring?

If an industry like banking can be said to keep a low profile, well, insurance keeps an even lower profile, on purpose. You probably think insurance is boring, hard to understand, and a waste of money. The first two things are deliberate, and the industry wants it that way. The third one: well, we’ve been here before—hating insurance is sort of a worldwide pastime, and it is something to think about that an industry would rather you hate them than become more transparent. The industry, globally, represents almost 9 trillion dollars in premium, and they control over 40 trillion dollars in assets. Insurance is huge. I personally consider it my calling to pull back the veil and explain as best I can how it works, why it does what it does, and why you should pay attention.

What you’ll find here:

While my primary focus is still producing episodes of the Insurance vs History podcast, there are a lot of things I cannot share on the podcast because of the audio format. I can explain a policy form on the pod, but being able to show the actual form to you is…even better. I can also share primary source documents, pictures, and even the things that get cut from the podcast due to time or relevance. (Yes, believe it or not, I do cut things for time.)

I’ll also be using this platform to talk about things that don’t deserve the full podcast treatment, both historical and current events; the occasional insurance related book/movie/TV show review, and of course, all the odds and ends. And you can comment, which is a plus!

If you are interested in history, and in economic history, I encourage you to check it out and follow me for more stories.

Thanks—

Meredith