Money, Morals and Health

...One is education and the other is the development of a body of ideals or convictions which will constitute the well-springs of right conduct...

...Life insurance does not rest upon benevolence or love of one's fellow-man any more than the machine tool industry or investment banking, yet it is displaying constantly increasing concern over problems of civilization we have long considered the affair only of the Sunday-school classes...

...Business is traditionally regarded as having to do with money and not with morals...

...It has not been able to prove the deleterious effects of theft by its own standards of measure-ment or to develop a protoplasmic brotherly love...

...It cannot be done now as it could not be done then...

...The psychologists and psychoanalysts have been groping for the motivating source of human conduct which, if discovered, would enable us to chart the ideal scientific existence, but behavior has not yet yielded the secret of its origin to the microscope and the test-tube...

...Quite apart from Dr...

...Preliminary figures for 1929 indicate a total of more than 30,000, as large, perhaps, as the number killed in the American army during the world war...

...Nor are we meeting the shock of civilization, the struggle and disappointments of the crowded existence in which most of us find ourselves, with the hardihood of spirit and serenity of mind that are the gifts of a soul at peace...

...And so religion appears as a foot-note in the counting-house ledgers and statistical summaries in which the entries are uniformly dollars and cents...

...But the man of fifty is assured of no greater longevity now than he was in the days of Tiglath Pilesar or the age of Pericles...

...Science has enormously increased our common stock of knowledge...

...But the deaths due to degenerative diseases rose from something over 350 to more than 500...

...In discussing the educational system he said: It is undoubtedly responsible for many of the mental derangements which have filled our asylums to overflowing and is also responsible for even more of the social and intellectual maladjustments of modern society which have serious and far-reaching effects, but which may not reach the degree of institutional treatment...

...Sickness, poverty and human misery were no longer subjects for experimental study or philosophical speculation...

...Some sections of the country have learned this truth but recognition of its application to such statutes as the prohibition amendment falls far short of universality...

...The rising line depicting the advance of degenerative diseases summarizes the record of dismal and disturbing failure...

...But in the main insurer and insured in the life field are driving toward the same ends...

...Wisdom cannot be injected like a serum nor ean virtue be transplanted like a bacteriological culture...

...In the following paper Mr...

...But the life insurance companies are able to weigh the economic effects of moral delinquency where the individual cannot...

...Policy holders have been known to sacrifice voluntarily arms and legs to collect indemnity insurance-an illustration, by the way, of the lengths to which human nature will go to escape the uncertainty of financial income...

...The interests of life insurance companies, and the interests of the policy holder run more nearly parallel...

...Henry Wire-man Cook, vice-president and medical director of the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company of Minneapolis, cited nine factors "in the life of the modern man of our much-vaunted civilization" the review of which was prompted by "a consideration of present unfavorable mortality trends...

...Cook himself mentions...

...Cook, who falls into the common error that the new learning was a scientific and not a religious movement, seems to be of the opinion that in time we shall have a natural rather than a supernatural anchorage to which we may tie...

...He says in part: With the decline in Greek culture and the passing of the age of reason, civilization crumbled, and the advances so nobly made in science and philosophy were lost in the darkness and superstition of the following centuries...

...But with the broadening of the scope of business the theory that its interest is restricted to hard cash no longer holds water...

...The manufacturer who subscribes to the ethical code of his trade association finds that its strict observance lays him open to the attacks of less scrupulous competitors...

...While vice oftentimes leads to financial bankruptcy and virtue is rewarded with a full purse as well as an easy conscience, the reverse is too frequently true to make the materialistic appeal to righteousness very persuasive...

...Speaking of the accomplishments of science in stretching the span of life, he says that with infancy as the starting point seventeen years have been added to the average human existence...

...The actuarial unit of measurement is so broad that the variations in personal experience do not materially affect it...

...Cook's opinions concerning the possibility of devising a substitute for spiritual certitude, the impressive fact is that the lack of it enters into the calculations of the life insurance companies...

...bile fatalities is cited by way of warning of what is taking place...

...In spite of all our efforts to persuade the faltering that it pays-in coin of the realm-- to be good, the proposition needs demonstration and we have not been able to prove it...

...Murphy analyzes remarks which interested a recent meeting of life insurance presidents...

...Cook continues: While modern interest in health and hygiene may be interpreted as one significant illustration of a changing philosophy of life in which more primitive and supernatural religious beliefs are being supplanted by a humanistic philosophy, nevertheless, the transitional period is leaving many without the spiritual certitude which formerly anchored their emotional life and guided their daily actions...

...causes and effects which lie beyond the limited range of our vision are traced in imposing financial aggregates...

...From this it appears that science has been very successful in checking the ravages of bacteria, but it has been singularly unsuccessful in improving "our faulty methods of living...

...Cook explains that The improvement has come almost entirely in the control of communicable diseases caused by bacteria, and no gain, but a loss, is demonstrable for those diseases due to faulty methods of living...

...Our moral progress, in other words, is charted on the actuarial diagram by a decisive dip rather than a rising curve and all the knowledge we have acquired has not appreciably changed human behavior...

...The actuarial records of the insurance companies tell a disconcerting story but it is nevertheless a story of results, not of causes...

...Cook, develop a humanistic philosophy to which the storm-beaten may tie, but as yet we have not, and in the cold, practical light of business scrutiny we are paying in cash for having cast off from the old moorings and embarked on a tempestuous sea...

...The bank balance of the sinner is as acceptable as that of the saint...

...Some clarification, however, is thrown upon it by the numerous statistics which Dr...

...Nevertheless we are trying harder than ever to mold conduct from without and by appeal, even by compulsion, attempting to bring behavior into conformity with fixed standards...

...At length it seems to have discovered that the state of our morals has an economic aspect and they, too, have been brought within the lengthening perspective of business and application to its many problems...

...It is apparent, however, that moral and spiritual conduct do affect the happiness of the individual...

...Perhaps there is a larger moral to be drawn from this actuarial survey...

...We might in the course of time, according to Dr...

...Students are crammed with a heterogeneous mass of ill-assorted information but given little true appreciation of wisdom...

...The aim is material success, not to deepen understanding...

...Fire insurance companies, for example, have brought to light the "moral hazard" reflected in the unmistakable relation between fires and business failures...

...And the two are much the same thing...

...The findings and the commentary both seem unusually striking.-The Editors...

...But the mere recognition by so matter-of-fact an agency as an insurance company that something of the kind is necessary to our material progress gives rise to the hope that it will be considered, not as an academic problem far above the rush and confusion of day-to-day existence, but as something which should be effectively and promptly dealt with here and now.ly dealt with here and now...

...Specifically, the deaths caused by communicable diseases have declined from 400 per 100,000 of population in 1901, to fewer than 150 in 1929...

...For we are still very much like our forefathers who fallaciously assumed that by making gaiety on the Sabbath a crime they were inculcating reverence for the Lord...

...On the subject of spiritual uncertainty, after quoting Lippmann on "the present confusion of ideals which tends to destroy that confident and serene background to life which is so essential to physical and mental health," Dr...

...Even Dr...

...It has provided us with weapons to fight off attacks from without but in the aggregate it seems to have had little effect in persuading us to strengthen the citadel of our existence from within...

...We are engaged in establishing sobriety by statute and discovering that it cannot be done...

...Collecting the insurance offers a rear exit when disaster knocks at the front door and many merchants take advantage of it even at the risk of running afoul of the arson laws...

...The criminal, the anarchist, the divorcee-common types of maladjustments in our social, national and family life- may often be the result of poor training and education, combined perhaps with other physical and emotional defects...

...In 1928 they numbered 27,500...

...When policy holders became so numerous that the value of its resources fluctuated with the state of the public health, it began to take an intimate interest in our diet and habits of living...

...Whether from the life insurance view-point Greek culture, earmarked by slavery, subservience of women and Dionysian rites, is not rated a bit high and the age of superstition, which built the cathedrals and raised all human souls to a uniform level, a bit low is one of those controversial questions that actuarial statistics cannot answer...

...We are endeavoring to establish by covenant the virtue of peace, a quality of the soul that cannot be compressed into treaty formulas...

...Cook, who hopes that science will eventually supply us with the convictions which alone are effective in shaping our conduct, is obliged to admit that so far it has not been done...

...ALL of the ingenuity we have been able to mus-ter in solving the problems of civilization has been unable to bridge successfully the gap between morals and money...

...When it is completely understood and generally accepted, we may begin to expect that Vol-steadism will disappear...

...Attempts by beneficiaries to turn murder to profit are happily rare...

...The Association of Life Insurance Presidents, at its last meeting, held in December, weighed in the scale of dollars and cents such imponderable elements as education, heredity and behavior...

...He looks longingly back to Greece for the insurance company's ideal of civilization...

...The appalling increase in automo...

...The implication is that in spite of all the traffic lights, laws and ordinances, consideration for the well-being of others, their lives and their property, is rapidly and alarmingly becoming a dead letter...

...The impulse to good behavior and right living must come from within...

...It cannot be grafted upon the individual by scientific formula or legislative decree...

...At first it only urged us to be thrifty and provident...

...To both serenity and a long life span are desirable...

...The prohibitionist who attempts to defend his thesis on the ground that it puts money into the pocket of the working-man stumbles over the fact that it also swells the income of the bootlegger and the rum-runner...

...Dogma and superstition replaced scientific research and reason...

...It has, in other words, given us bathtubs and demonstrated the virtues of cleanliness, but it cannot supply the stimulus which prompts us to bathe...

...But here it is vice, not virtue, that profits...

...Among these were heredity, from the view-point of the breaking down of social barriers, "our confused, superficial and commercialized system of formal education" and, finally, "spiritual uncertainty and unrest...

...and since life insurance is a business which directly finances individuals it may have something to tell us regarding present conditions...

...Most of the movements for social reform usually wind up with the realization, as the insurance companies have done, that there are only two avenues of effective effort open...