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Book Review: When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorDeborah Mabbett
DOI10.1177/138826270500700306
Published date01 September 2005
Date01 September 2005
Subject MatterBook Review
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BOOK REVIEWS
David Moss, When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager,
Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, viii+456 pages, June 2002 (hardcover),
ISBN: 0-674-00757-3; October 2004(paperback) ISBN: 0-674-01609-2
It has become fashionable to view social policy through the lens of social risk. We live
in a ‘risk society’. Pressures on the welfare state arising from social change are
interpreted as problems in responding to ‘new social risks’. The potential for replacing
existing welfare state structures with market mechanisms is described as a new
approach to ‘social risk management’. This language is suggestive and promising, but
often the resulting research and analysis do not take us on much further from familiar
and well-established social policy issues and arguments.
David Moss’s book brings genuinely new insights into risk management by
disregarding the traditional boundaries of social policy analysis focused on individual
income risk. His framework allows him to bring the risk of bank failure into the same
field of vision as the risk of unemployment or disability. In successive chapters, Moss
presents accounts of the historical development of seven major legal and
administrative devices for risk management and risk shifting in the USA. The first
three are business-oriented: the institutions of limited liability, money and
bankruptcy. These Moss designates as constituting the first phase of American risk
management policy, ‘creating a secure environment for business’. Then follow
accounts of workers’ industrial accident and occupational disease insurance, and the
advent of Social Security in the 1930s. This is the second phase, ‘creating a secure
environment for workers’. Finally, discussions of product liability law and federal
disaster relief, along with smaller studies of various other examples, constitute the
third phase, ‘creating a secure environment for all citizens’.
What new insights does this approach bring? Moss’s first target...

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