Certain Amish communities ban members from purchasing insurance. Rather, the community itself is their “insurance pool”: members seek to foster a community where it is everyone’s shared responsibility and obligation to make someone who suffers a loss “whole” again.10 As the economist Stephen Marglin writes in his insightful book The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, “The Amish, perhaps unique in twentieth-century America in their attention to fostering community, forbid insurance precisely because they understand that the market relationship between an
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Amish lessons
