History of The Term
According to research by Dembe and Boden, the term dates back to the 17th century and was widely used by English insurance companies by the late 19th century. Early usage of the term carried negative connotations, implying fraud or immoral behavior (usually on the part of an insured party). Dembe and Boden point out, however, that prominent mathematicians studying decision making in the 18th century used "moral" to mean "subjective", which may cloud the true ethical significance in the term.
The concept of moral hazard was the subject of renewed study by economists in the 1960s and then did not imply immoral behavior or fraud; rather, economists would use the term to describe inefficiencies that can occur when risks are displaced, not the ethics or morals of the involved parties.
Read more about this topic: Moral Hazard
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history and/or term:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Orlando. Who stays it still withal?
Rosalind. With lawyers in the vacation; for they sleep
between term and term, and then they perceive not how Time
moves.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)