You’re arm wrestling with your insurance company over a policy language detail that is messing with your ability to recover from a loss. Should have read the policy more closely before agreeing, right? Well, maybe. And there may have been some foresight in the design to prevent the sense of being wronged by these risk experts, to offer a contract that was likely to deal with the bad situations you’ll face. Now it’s time for the lawyers.
Don’t get me wrong, I like lawyers. They are logical, often creative. Constraint systems are nothing to these needle threading types. However, and every lawyer I’ve worked with has preemptively agreed with this statement; they are called in far too late. “If only I had been part of this before the contract was written/negotiation started/etc.” But this is not aggressive enough, chronologically. The design of a system from before the preamble of that system’s constitution is often the place to start to deal with conflict.
Libertarian capitalists will tell you that the freedom to truck and barter and sign contracts is paramount, and that freedom must be protected at all costs. What they always forget to say is that the trucking and bartering ecosystem (and the design and enforcement of all contracts) were brought into being and are maintained under pre-existing conditions (no contract if you have those, right?). There are structures and players that are not signing on dotted lines from anything like the same starting point. How fun would Monopoly be, if it’s even fun at all, if one player started the game with hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place and an extra stack of 500s?
Zooming out to the conflict system level and developing alternatives (in addition to finding ways to test these alternatives) is the challenge of our time. Yes, unions and litigation are necessary when, for example, the management vs. labor conflict is zero sum and baked into the ownership system that we have today (another point that you Randians will not like, perhaps). But that arm-wrestling becomes unnecessary in a world like the one Yanis Varoufakis builds in his 2021 social sci-fi novel Another Now. When ownership is equal between the holders of corporate equity and all those owners work for the company in a cross between a partnership and a worker co-op, union/management conflicts become mostly irrelevant (though politics, social network dynamics, and crafty members would likely still yield some fights). Mutual insurers have some of these dynamics with their policyholders, but many have forgotten that the insurance company itself is not a member of the group.
And to return to the policy language and claim problem we started with: if insurance companies treated risk a little less like a commodity to spend billions marketing to as many people as possible and more like a custom challenge with specific causes, our conflicts might be over before they start. Water sensors, building materials, alternatives to driving and other risk prevention mechanisms could open up space for expansive policy language (and the actuarial math to back it up).