The ‘New Orleans effect’: The future of the welfare state as collective insurance against uninsurable risk

When it imagines the future of the welfare state, the existing institutionalist political economy of welfare capitalism projects the path dependent reproduction of welfare typicity in the absence of (unanticipated and untheorized) ‘exogenous shocks’. Yet as we enter a new age of anthropocenic environmental catastrophism, it is not difficult to see that such shocks are likely nor where they are most likely to come from. They are no longer unanticipated and there is no longer an excuse for leaving them untheorized. It is time to endogenize them. This paper explores the implications of so doing. In the process, it points to the limits of the classic focus on decommodification and argues for a rethinking of the concept of the welfare state that pays more attention to its role in the collective insurance of citizens against uninsurable risk. It shows too how such a conception leads us to anticipate a new fiscal crisis of the welfare state associated with the cost of insuring citizens against risks for which there is no market premium in an age when those risks become ever more prevalent and ever more menacing.