When buying plane tickets recently on a major travel site, I was confronted with an offer to buy “travel insurance” for my trip. Digging deeper, I discovered that this insurance policy would reimburse me the cost of the tickets if I canceled because of illness (any other reason for canceling wouldn’t fly — pardon the pun). Niche insurance products like this have proliferated in recent decades, playing on our fear of the future in order to separate us from our money.