[bsoule]

There's a huge difference between insurance and buying stuff from a store -- at a store I buy things when I have a higher utility for the item than the cost to the manufacturer to produce and sell it to me. Insurance is a zero-sum game. Actually, the article addresses that:

    "The difference is quite fundamental. It’s that insurance is fundamentally
    zero-sum — the only transaction is money going back and forth. When you 
    buy a refrigerator, say, your value for it is huge. (If refrigerators cost
    $50k you’d probably suck it up and buy one — how the hell are you going to
    live without a refrigerator?) So you come out way ahead when you get it for
    [I haven’t actually the faintest clue what a refrigerator costs]. And
    Maytag or whoever does too. Win-win! Insurance is fundamentally either 
    win-lose or lose-win."

[rayiner]

Insurance is only zero-sum if there is no value in certainty, which is just plain false (huge amounts of money are spent managing and trading risk).

[bsoule]

I think that's kind of the point of the article: When you can afford the worst case, there really isn't any value in certainty.