Why Are We All Cowards?

The Rising Premium of Life, Or: How We Learned to Start Worrying and Fear Everything.

In this article, I argue that “our premium for life” – that is, our willingness to keep living, and our willingness to pay to avoid incremental chances of dying – has gone up over time. I argue that this cannot be explained by wealth alone. I trace three main factors that might result in this change: wealth effects, safety-risk feedback loops, and secularization, and argue that this shift has had profound implications for how we organize society.