Richard Posner refers to the “insurance function of marriage,” pointing to the fact that marriage is expected to serve as a form of risk protection in those social contexts “where kinship has receded but market and social insurance is not yet common” (or, we might add, has significantly diminished). The “insurance function” of marriage, he writes, “arises from the fact that the correlation of spouses’ health and other welfare factors is less than one, so given a mutual obligation of support and assistance, marriage serves as a form of health, hunger, and life insurance.”

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 888