Longevity Risk: A Report on the Banality of Finance Capital

Abstract

The term “longevity risk” exemplifies how finance capital makes people’s investments against themselves appear both self-serving and collectively enriching by assimilating the insurance risk pool with the financial investment. I develop this argument by drawing on Frank Knight and Georg Lukács, whose contrasting commentaries on the early stages of finance capitalism disturb some of the taken-for-granted aspects of their present articulation. People place their unspent earnings in risk pooling systems as a precautionary measure. My goal is to make explicit that their resources are reinvested and managed not to allay and exploit risks to their lives but rather to allay and exploit the risk of their lives, insofar as these lives do not serve accumulation.