Froth on Insurance
Kimball, Spencer L.
Froth on Insurance Pay Now, Die Later, by James Gol-lin. Random House. 267 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Spencer L. Kimball Dandom House must be kidding us. This "dispassionate scrutiny of America's...
...It is not that what James Gollin has said is unreliable...
...This is only partly true, for there are many companies whose lack of financial strength and solvency gives sleepless nights to insurance commissioners...
...Gollin does have a certain flair for putting words together...
...Life insurance is a business too technical, too complex, too ramified, to be criticized effectively by amateurs—even well-informed amateurs...
...He does know quite a lot about life insurance...
...It is readable, even lucid...
...Fortunately such companies are fewer in life insurance than in property and liability insurance, but they still exist in sufficient number...
...What has been done is trivial...
...And Random House should have known better...
...That could so easily happen, among the hundreds of timid and fearful men who are executives in the insurance business...
...But it is really misleading to say that "everything" is made to fit a thesis...
...Even the story about the two gentlemen who dropped in on the labor room at Random House to volunteer their services as midwives by inspecting the book's galleys has the ring of truth...
...Moreover, we are told, life insurance is "one of America's most politically sophisticated businesses...
...There are a few facts, and some impressions, and numerous anecdotes...
...It does have virtues, too...
...Only those people who have made it a subject of close and constant study for many years are likely to understand enough about it...
...The defects of Pay Now, Die Later have been emphasized...
...It is not a matter of mere knowledge but of level of comprehension and understanding...
...Somehow, in a way too subtle for me to comprehend, this is supposed to come out as part of a devastating demonstration that the industry is "the worst-managed Big Business in America," to the documenting of which the entire book is devoted...
...But if, as the dust jacket says, the "episode only underscores the need for a book about the industry these men are so anxious to protect," the publication of this book then doubly underscores it, since the job remains quite undone...
...If the subject were susceptible to "journalistic" treatment, he might have succeeded...
...There is a lack of perspective here that results, perhaps, from an effort to make everything fit a preconceived thesis...
...Because the investment men are so impressively expert, you'll never have to lie awake nights wondering whether the company that insures you is financially strong and solvent...
...But it is not...
...But he does not tell us much that is worth telling...
...Some of them are entertaining, some of them illuminating, some of them quite pointless...
...But unfortunately that would only be partly true...
...One reason life insurance is so seldom effectively criticized is that few people could do it...
...I should find this an appropriate datum to help support an assertion that the business is immoral, but how it helps show that it is one of the "worst-managed" escapes me completely...
...And he did not...
...This "dispassionate scrutiny of America's life-and-death industry," as the dust jacket calls this "great" piece of social science reporting, promises to tell us "What's Wrong with Life Insurance: A Report on Our Biggest and Most Wasteful Industry...
...The basic weaknesses of Pay Now, Die Later can be summed up in the old saw about never sending a boy to do a man's work...
...Good editorial assistance should have first revealed and then either corrected or concealed them, depending on the publisher's standards...
...That was a large undertaking for 267 pages of journalistic froth, even with the addition of some preliminary pages to give it the aura of scholarship...
...But that is not my basic objection to the statement...
...The "documentation" of the author's thesis and our "intimate" knowledge of this or that, to which he alludes from time to time as if he were doing a scholarly piece for an academic journal, is singularly unimpressive...
...He obviously tried hard, and that is something...
...Some weaknesses of the book are apparent on the surface...
...It sounds true enough, and there is probably little of the information presented with which one could argue...
...For example, the chapter on life insurance investment, entitled "How to Make $7,000,000,000 a Year," concludes that there is "no question about the skill and finesse with which insurance companies move money around...
...One could have done a useful part of the task in 80,000 words, but not even an effective start has been made here...
...There really isn't much of anything to make fit...
...And most of them are emotionally committed to the side of the industry in which they earn their livelihood and consider themselves professionally engaged...
...It would be charitable for one to say merely that the stated goal was too big for the vehicle chosen—that an encyclopedia or at least a treatise was called for rather than a monograph...
Vol. 31 • January 1967 • No. 1
