Giving Eternal Life. Notes on a Recent Book by Marco Dotti

Dotti proposes life annuities as an epistemological laboratory for the development of the doctrine of chance and at the same time as a testing ground for (more or less) new forecasting and estimation systems. Due to their complex heterogeneity, life annuities reveal how various types of practices, such as pro anima bequests, are accumulated within the instrument. The author looks at this multiplicity by asking “What decision does the stipulation of a life annuity respond to”, thus confronting the social and economic context of the subscriber, and identifying possible factors that influenced his choice.