Actuarial Quotes

If I die this instant will you be more content with the morning news? Will your coffee taste better? I am not your fate. I am not your government…I am not your mother, not your father or your nightmare or your health. I am not a fence, not a wall. I am not the law or actuarial tables of your insurance broker. I am a woman with my guts loose in my hands, howling and it’s not because I committed hari-kiri. I suggest either you cook me or sew me back up. I suggest you walk into my pain as into the breaking waves of an ocean of blood, and either we will climb out together and walk away.

So I'm delighted to open up a bit about these particular details, in honor of Valentine's Day (when every balding, chubby, and short actuary wants people - especially the babes out there - to know about his studly past" From: "My Best Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story

Every time the economy goes south, art grows. If you were an actuary or an accountant you’d consider those years horrid, but if you were an artist, you’d consider them magic.

What’s SQ?” asked Evan. “Sexual Quotient.” “What’s that?” “Basically, it’s your odds of getting laid. Everyone has an SQ. just like everyone has an IQ.” “I’ve never heard that term before.” “That’s because I made it up.” “That figures. Finally applying your actuarial skills to what really matters, eh?

Diane sometimes hears that Troy is an actuary. Sometimes she hears Troy is a florist. Sometimes she hears Troy is a cop, a toll collector, a professor, a musician, a stand-up comedian. Once, she heard a terrible rumor he became a librarian but she could not imagine Troy becoming the darkest of evil beasts no matter what he had done to her. Is it even possible for a human to become a librarian?

If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of

People prefer jokes to history, so here are some actuarial jokes: Old actuaries never die; they just get broken down by age and sex. I find that quite amusing. You may not.

De Morgan was explaining to an actuary what was the chance that a certain proportion of some group of people would at the end of a given time be alive; and quoted the actuarial formula, involving p [pi], which, in answer to a question, he explained stood for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. His acquaintance, who had so far listened to the explanation with interest, interrupted him and exclaimed, 'My dear friend, that must be a delusion, what can a circle have to do with the number of people alive at a given time?

We are entering an age of super-intelligent computers that can take any complex data set—every legal precedent, radiology film, asset price, financial transaction, actuarial table, Facebook like, customer review, résumé bullet, facial expression, and so on—synthesize it, and then perform tasks and make decisions in ways that are as good as or better than the smartest human in the vast majority of cases.

All I can do is sincerely apologize and make this clear: I am not a psychic. I am a bereaved retired actuary who suffered a mental health crisis on a flight.

Don’t write your books for people who won’t like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write and don’t try to please readers who like something different. Otherwise, you’ll end up with the worst of both worlds. I write lyrical, introspective, experiential books concerned with consciousness and perception. If a reader wants to know what my protagonist’s insurance policies are, he’ll be better off curling up with a nice cup of chamomile tea and an actuarial table. Similarly, don’t write your books for bad readers. Your books will suffer from bad readers no matter what, so write them for brilliant, big-brained and big-hearted people who will love you for feeding their minds with feasts of beauty.

Optimists Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality. Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders—not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.

Now give me some advice about how to take full advantage of this city. I’m always looking to improve my odds.” “Just what I’d expect from a horny actuary.” “I’m serious.” Carlos reflected for a moment on the problem at hand. He actually had never needed or tried to take full advantage of the city in order to meet women, but he thought about all of his friends who regularly did. His face lit up as he thought of some helpful advice: “Get into the arts.” “The arts?” “Yeah.” “But I’m not artistic.” “It doesn’t matter. Many women are into the arts. Theater. Painting. Dance. They love that stuff.” “You want me to get into dance? Earthquakes have better rhythm than me…And can you really picture me in those tights?” “Take an art history class. Learn photography. Get involved in a play or an independent film production. Get artsy, Sammy. I’m telling you, the senoritas dig that stuff.” “Really?” “Yeah. You need to sign up for a bunch of artistic activities. But you can’t let on that it’s all just a pretext to meet women. You have to take a real interest in the subject or they’ll quickly sniff out your game.” “I don’t know…It’s all so foreign to me…I don’t know the first thing about being artistic.” “Heeb, this is the time to expand your horizons. And you’re in the perfect city to do it. New York is all about reinventing yourself. Get out of your comfort zones. Become more of a Renaissance man. That’s much more interesting to women.

Experts can sound pretty impressive, of course, especially when they bolster their claims by citing their years of training and experience in a field. Yet hundreds of studies have shown that, compared to predictions based on actuarial data, predictions based on an expert's years of training and personal experience are rarely better than chance. But when an expert is wrong, the centerpiece of his or her professional identity is threatened. Therefore, dissonance theory predicts that the more self-confident and famous experts are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes. And that is just what Tetlock found. Experts reduced the dissonance caused by their failed forecasts by coming up with explanations of why they would have been right "if only" - if only that improbable calamity had not intervened; if only the timing of events had been different; if only blah-blah-blah.

He wrote authoritatively on magnetism, tides, and the motions of the planets, and fondly on the effects of opium. He invented the weather map and actuarial table, proposed methods for working out the age of the Earth and its distance from the Sun, even devised a practical method for keeping fish fresh out of season. The one thing he didn’t do, interestingly enough, was discover the comet that bears his name. He merely recognized that the comet he saw in 1682 was the same one that had been seen by others in 1456, 1531, and 1607. It didn’t become Halley’s comet until 1758, some sixteen years after his death.

The doctor told Nero "72% 5-year actuarially adjusted survival rate". It meant that 72 people out of hundred make it. It takes between 3 to 5 years for the body without clinical manifestations of the disease for the patient to be pronounced cured (closer to three at his age). He then felt in his guts quite certain that he was going to make it. now the reader might wonder about the mathematical difference between a 28% chance of death and a 72% chance of suvival over the next 5 years. Clearly, there is none, but we are not made for mathematics. In Nero's mind 28% chance of death meant the image of himself dead, and thoughts of the cumbersome details of his funeral. A 72% chance of survival put him in a cheerful mood; his mind was planning the result of a cured Nero skiing in the Alps. At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.

If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality.

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

An accountant is someone who attempts to value the present. An actuary is someone who attempts to value the future.

Limitation #4 – Specified Service Businesses Businesses that are in the accounting, legal, health, performing arts, actuarial, athletic, consulting, financial services and brokerage services do not qualify for the 20% pass-through business deduction unless the taxable income of the owner is less than $315,000 ($157,500 for single individuals). This limitation also applies to any business whose principal asset is the skill or reputation of one of the employees or owners, such as an independent contractor

He fires up a cigar and considers the coming hours with an actuary’s eye for peril and profit.

Not many people commit suicide, but many people act as if their lives are not very valuable to them. They risk actual death or social death by gambling their present circumstances on a small chance of future payoff, in a manner that is not actuarially sound. They choose, with their economic decisions, to believe in a counterfactual world, indicating dissatisfaction with the real world. They palliate present suffering in a manner that harms future prospects. This gamble/palliate behavior [...] indicates that, rather than valuing life as a precious gift, people frequently treat life as having a zero or negative value with their actual actions.

In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

La victimización nos convierte en personas vulnerables y débiles, lo cual paraliza nuestro proceder, no podemos actuar y generalmente terminamos tomando decisiones incorrectas que nos acarrea problemas y trae como consecuencia el no podernos centrar en resolver los verdaderos problemas que podrían estar obstaculizando la ejecución de los objetivos planteados.

Like that long talk about “mathematical Platonism.” We lay in bed on a Sunday morning because we had nowhere to be and talked about the belief that mathematical truths are discovered, not invented, because they already exist, which, if correct, means reality must extend beyond the physical world. We talked about the idea that math is a sense like sight and touch, and if that is true, well, then, was it also possible my mother possessed another sense that gave her the ability to access another reality? I wondered if my love of math and her love of the spiritual could therefore coalesce in a way far more beautiful and mysterious than my cynical belief that she used data and probability to make her predictions, no different from an actuarial table.

All work is knowledge work. The carpenter’s mind is no less animated and engaged than the actuary’s. The architect’s accomplishments depend as much on the body and its senses as the hunter’s do.

He had a reasonable job as an actuary (whatever that was),

Take another example. An Intel development engineer who has uniquely detailed knowledge of a particular manufacturing process effectively controls how it is used. Since the process will eventually provide the foundation for the work of many product designers all over the company, the leverage the development engineer exerts is enormous. The same is true for a geologist in an oil company or an actuary in an insurance firm. All are specialists whose work is important for the work of their organization at large. The person who comprehends the critical facts or has the critical insights—the “knowledge specialist” or the “know-how manager”—has tremendous authority and influence on the work of others, and therefore very high leverage. The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them. For me, paying close attention to customer complaints constitutes a high-leverage activity. Aside from making a customer happy, the pursuit tends to produce important insights into the workings of my own operation. Such complaints may be numerous, and though all of them need to be followed up by someone, they don’t all require or wouldn’t all benefit from my personal attention. Which one out of ten or twenty complaints to dig into, analyze, and follow up is where art comes into the work of a manager. The basis of that art is an intuition that behind this complaint and not the other lurk many deeper problems.

In 2011, Insurance giant Allstate, with forty of the best actuaries and data scientists money could buy, wanted to see if its claims algorithm could be improved upon, so it ran a contest on Kaggle.

Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes.

Spending a few more years in the labor force greatly increases monthly Social Security benefits. Under the program’s current structure, participants can start collecting benefits at any age between 62 and 70.2 But, to maintain fairness, benefits claimed before 70 are actuarially reduced so lifetime benefits are made roughly equal for both early and late claimers. These adjustments are very significant. Monthly benefits for those who start claiming Social Security benefits at 70 are a full 76 percent higher than for those who start taking benefits at age 62 (see table 4.1). (If working longer also raises the average level of our 35 years of earnings used in the Social Security benefit calculation—which it probably will—the increase could be even greater.)

An actuary engaged by the London Times calculated the probability that at least 18 witnesses would die of any cause within 3 years of the JFK assassination as 1 in 100,000 trillion.5

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achievement to create the first modern insurance fund, based on correct actuarial and financial principles, rather than mercantile gambling.

One of my favorites: I feel stupid asking, but I've learned it's more stupid not to ask what I don't know. From the book Magic Numbers

The law isn’t that simple, and the practical damage will be great. State pensions are underfunded by $111 billion—a 500% increase from 1995 and up 75% in the past five years. About one in four state tax dollars already finances pensions, which is more than Illinois spends on education. Yet the court accuses politicians of shortchanging pensions. Politicians are to blame for the state’s fiscal woes, but mainly because they colluded with unions to promise unsustainable benefits in return for political support. Less than 40% of the increase in the state’s unfunded liability since 1995 is due to inadequate payments. The rest is due mainly to benefit growth and faulty actuarial assumptions such as investment rate of return. The 2013 reforms at issue capped salaries of

Four times a year, the program's street team sifts through police records and its own intelligence to determine, with actuarial detachment, the 50 people in Richmond most likely to shoot someone and to be shot themselves.ONS tracks them and approaches the most lethal (and vulnerable) on the list, offering them a spot in a program that includes a stipend to turn their lives around. While

If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality.

a basic income is arguably more justified by the need for economic security than by a desire to eradicate poverty. Martin Luther King captured several aspects of this rather well in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here? [A] host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.15 Twentieth-century welfare states tried to reduce certain risks of insecurity with contributory insurance schemes. In an industrial economy, the probability of so-called ‘contingency risks’, such as illness, workplace accidents, unemployment and disability, could be estimated actuarially. A system of social insurance could be constructed that worked reasonably well for the majority. In a predominantly ‘tertiary’ economy, in which more people are in and out of temporary, part-time and casual jobs and are doing a lot of unpaid job-related work outside fixed hours and workplaces, this route to providing basic security has broken down. The

Let’s take the example of life insurance. How can life insurance companies—some of the most conservative companies in America—insure people’s lives when they know they’re all going to die? • It’s risk they’re aware of. They know everyone’s going to die. Thus they factor this reality into their approach. • It’s risk they can analyze. That’s why they have doctors assess applicants’ health. • It’s risk they can diversify. By ensuring a mix of policyholders by age, gender, occupation and location, they make sure they’re not exposed to freak occurrences and widespread losses. • And it’s risk they can be sure they’re well paid to bear. They set premiums so they’ll make a profit if the policyholders die according to the actuarial tables on average. And if the insurance market is inefficient—for example, if the company can sell a policy to someone likely to die at age eighty at a premium that assumes he’ll die at seventy—they’ll be better protected against risk and positioned for exceptional profits if things go as expected. We do exactly the same things in high yield bonds, and in the rest of Oaktree’s strategies.

hundreds of studies have shown that, compared to predictions based on actuarial data, predictions based on an expert’s years of training and personal experience are rarely better than chance. But when an expert is wrong, the centerpiece of his or her professional identity is threatened. Therefore, dissonance theory predicts that the more self-confident and famous experts are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes.

I just realised I haven’t asked what you do for a living.’ Laura’s words brought me back to the office. ‘I am an actuary,’ I said. ‘Well, I gave my notice two weeks ago.’ ‘Because of YouMeFun?’ I shook my head. ‘I didn’t know about this park at the time. I resigned because I couldn’t stand watching my workplace turn into a playground. Then I inherited one.’ Was Laura Helanto smiling? I didn’t think I’d said anything amusing. She had raised a hand in front of her mouth. When she lowered it again, her expression was neutral.

From past experience, it seems that at my rate of writing it takes about a decade to produce enough new essays for assembly in a collection. I hope nevertheless that this will not be my last collection. But given actuarial realities, perhaps this would be a good time for me to add a word of thanks to readers who over many years have put up with my polemics and explanations, and have thereby given me a precious contact with the world beyond physics.

Perhaps no one else would want me. Well, the rejection rate for new job applications is extraordinarily high. I tell my clients to assume 50:1, so their expectations are set properly. You are going to be passed over, in many cases, for many positions for which you are qualified. But that is rarely personal. It is, instead, a condition of existence, an inevitable consequence of somewhat arbitrary subjection to the ambivalent conditions of worth characterizing society. It is the consequence of the fact that CVs are easy to disseminate and difficult to process; that many jobs have unannounced internal candidates (and so are just going through the motions); and that some companies keep a rolling stock of applicants, in case they need to hire quickly. That is an actuarial problem, a statistical problem, a baseline problem—and not necessarily an indication that there is something specifically flawed about you. You must incorporate all that sustainingly pessimistic realism into your expectations, so that you do not become unreasonably downhearted. One hundred and fifty applications, carefully chosen; three to five interviews thereby acquired. That could be a mission of a year or more. That is much less than a lifetime of misery and downward trajectory. But it is not nothing. You need to fortify yourself for it, plan, and garner support from people who understand what you are up to and are realistically appraised of the difficulty and the options.

The pandemic of 1918–1919 was clearly one of influenza, except in two of its features. One, it killed more humans than any other disease in a period of similar duration in the history of the world. Two, it killed an unprecedentedly large proportion of the members of a group who, according to records before and since, should have survived it with no permanent injury. The year 1918 was an actuarial nightmare: the flu and pneumonia death rate of life insurance policy holders over 45 and 50, for whose deaths the insurance companies were at least partly prepared, did, of course, rise, but only slightly as compared to the rate of young adults, whose deaths in great numbers no insurance company anticipated.16

It could rapidly perform the most tedious accounting functions for any enterprise: from freight bills for the New York Central Railroad to actuarial and financial records for Prudential Insurance.

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Elle held her breath as Darcy frowned thoughtfully. “Okay, got it. May I ask a question?” “Absolutely.” Elle gestured for Darcy to go on. “There’s no such thing as a stupid question. There’s a definite learning curve to this.” Darcy nodded. “All right. If your Jupiter is . . . in Virgo?” Elle nodded. “Where’s your Uranus?” “My Uranus is in Capri—” Elle froze. “Wow.” Darcy’s dimples deepened as she smiled impishly. “Sorry, it was just right there. You probably get that a lot.” “From frat boys and five-year-olds, not . . .” She trailed off, gesturing up and down in Darcy’s general direction with her free hand. “People like you.” “People like me?” Darcy’s brows rose and fell. “Like me how?” People who drank fifty-six-dollar glasses of wine and wore tight little pencil skirts and Christian Louboutin heels and worked as actuaries. Insufferable know-it-alls with cunning sensibilities and kissable little moon-shaped freckles. People with eyes like burnt caramel and full lips that looked candy-apple sweet. People who . . . who . . . Elle waved the notebooks in the air. “I don’t know. Which is why I’m here. I figured, we’d drink a little wine, play twenty questions, jot down our notes, and get to know each other a little. Make this charade a little more believable, if not truthful. Or close enough to assuage my conscience.” Darcy did that thing where she stared, brown eyes studying Elle from across the living room. It was only a look and yet it made Elle feel weirdly naked. “If you think it’s silly, we can—” “No.” Darcy shook her head and stepped closer, nudging the remaining bag with a stocking-covered toe. Stockings. Fuck. Elle sunk her teeth into her bottom lip. Pantyhose were the bane of her existence—if she so much as tried to put on a pair, she’d immediately get a run—but on Darcy . . . Elle tore her eyes away and feigned interest in ripping open the cardboard pen packaging. Darcy went on, “It’s not silly. No doubt Brendon will dig for details. It’s important for us to be on the same page. Good idea.

It was just a dream—Elle didn’t really believe the deal with OTP was predicated or somehow tied to the success of her relationship with Darcy—but Darcy had a point. She didn’t know Darcy’s birth date or . . . well, anything about her beside the fact that she was an actuary and workaholic. They needed to get to know each other better before this double date or else it’d look like the sham it was.

The formula was simple. It was based on one that a judge named Learned Hand—his actual given name—had written in a legal opinion, probably unaware what the implications were. The food industry had run with it. Defects in food—bacterial infections, rot, mold, cross-contamination with allergens, exposure to toxic substances, and everything else that could go wrong—were discovered by manufacturers long before the general public knew. The manufacturer then had a decision to make: do we recall the food or not? Actuaries worked out death tables that predicted how many people would die or become ill because of the defect. They could determine how much money the average person who bought the product earned per year: that person’s earning capacity. Adding up the earning capacity of everyone who could potentially die or get sick because of the defect gave them an estimate of how much settlements would cost. Under the law, a consumer’s value equaled the amount of money that person could have earned in a lifetime, had he or she lived. If the calculation of damages in all the wrongful death lawsuits was greater than the cost of a recall, the manufacturer would recall the product. If the settlements would cost the company less than the recall, then they just ignored the defect. Damages > Profit = Recall

El modelo actuarial producido por Quincey, Harris y Rice (Harris, Rice, Quinsey, & Cormier, 2015; Quinsey, Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1999; Quinsey, Rice, & Harris, 1995; Rice, Harris, & Quinsey, 2002), operacionalizado con instrumentos como el VRAG y el VRAG-R, está respaldado por evidencias en ámbitos psiquiátrico forenses y penitenciarios, incluso latinoamericanos (Jorge O. Folino, 2005, 2015).

Trump sat and took in the data Mulvaney presented to him. The chart’s “hockey stick” curve appeared to show that the national debt would reach a critical mass in the late 2020s. Mulvaney confirmed that that was indeed the case, stressing that in actuarial terms that was a very tight timeline. “Yeah,” Trump responded. “But I won’t be here.

Whether it's a usurer's usury or an actuary's actuality, they all sail on the liquid of liquidity.

Industrious, trustworthy and politically correct, the Scandinavians are the actuary at the party, five countries’ worth of local government Liberal Democrats, finger-wagging social workers, and humourless party poopers.

(What was an actuary? Juliet wondered. It sounded as if it belonged in a zoo, along with a cassowary and a dromedary.)

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I’m not holding my breath.

Like a sixty-year-old person on actuarial charts, the habitable Earth is three-quarters of the way through its calculated life expectancy. Earth is about 4.57 billion years old, and the laws of stellar physics tell of another billion years before the sun expands to the point that it bakes the possibility for life off the planet.

Survey data collected in 2008 suggested that adults collectively watched 9.8 billion hours of television over the course of a year. In further studies using actuarial tables, researchers determined that, for every hour of television watched by an adult over the age of twenty-five, that adult’s life expectancy was reduced by 21.8 minutes.

announced that families of victims would receive compensation for their loss based in part on the salary each victim was earning at the time of his or her death. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Congress had taken the unprecedented step of assuming national responsibility for restitution to the families of the victims. Though the inspiration for this decision was to forestall expensive lawsuits against the airline industry, many observers took it as a signal of a new spirit in the land: in the face of national tragedy, political leaders were i nally breaking with the jungle survivalism of the Reagan-Clinton years. But even in death, the market—and the inequalities it generates—was the only language America’s leaders knew how to speak. Abandoning the notion of shared sacrii ce, Feinberg opted for the actuarial tables to calculate appropriate compensation packages. The family of a single sixty-i ve-year-old grandmother earning $10,000 a year—perhaps a minimum-wage kitchen worker—would draw $300,000 from the fund, while the family of a thirty-year-old Wall Street trader would get $3,870,064. The men and women killed on September 11 were not citizens of a democracy; they were earners, and rewards would be distributed accordingly. Virtually no one—not even the commentators and politicians who denounced the Feinberg calculus for other reasons—criticized this aspect of his decision. 28

The Achilles of the Iliad was an invention of Homer, but many think this way in real life. One of the most common strategies to avoid the agony of being forgotten is by trying to engineer a professional legacy. In my conversations for this book, many people in the end stages of their careers talked about how they wanted to be remembered. But it doesn’t work: they forget you. People move on. In the popular Jack Nicholson movie About Schmidt, the lead character is a retiring successful actuary, stunned to find that no one seeks out his advice; when he drops by the office to help out a few days after retirement, he finds them throwing all his old work in the dumpster. It’s a scene with a lot of pathos, but it is based on truth. As one retired CEO told me as I was writing this book, “In just six months I went from ‘Who’s Who’ to ‘Who’s He?’ 

Bartolomé de las Casas had invented actuary science in the early 16th century by studying what happened when you forced people to move from one environment to another—they died. Which was apparently the intended result in the Yaqui’s case. Like Hitler’s victims, the Yaquis were forced into overloaded cattle cars, transported across the country (with many dying along the way) and forced to work until they died. As with the Nazi camps, the Yaquis were housed in overcrowded barracks, underfed and worked until they dropped dead. In a final comparison with the Nazis, the bodies were then cremated.

As a young revenue manager at Irish carrier Aer Lingus in the early 1990s, Joyce had – with the help of his younger brother Anthony, an actuary – designed the mathematical model for overbooking flights on the basis that a percentage of passengers never turn up. ‘That’s how he made a name for himself at the start of his career, and he’s ended it the same way,’ I wrote in the AFR. ‘He’s optimised revenue to the point where it’s now the planes that don’t show up for the flights. It’s a logical extension.

He might even welcome it enough not to wonder why Brendan would have taken his savings with him to check out suitable locations for actuaries to build tree forts, or why the actuaries would need lab masks.

Price started by studying records kept in London, but the life expectancies in those records turned out to be well below actual mortality rates.19 He then turned to the shire of Northampton, where records were more carefully kept than in London. He published the results of his study in 1771 in a book titled Observations on Reversionary Payments, which was regarded as the bible on the subject until well into the nineteenth century. This work has earned him the title of the founding father of actuarial science—