Today’s Insight Several people have asked me about how we should compare ourselves to Italy. There are quite a few ways, and I’m going to go through them. Yesterday (22 March) the number of confirmed cases in Australia was 1,363. In Italy, the point where that number was reached wasContinue Reading
Today’s Insight Something that I find somewhat cheering in all the news is that here in Australia, we seem to be doing quite well on testing. The graph below, from our world in data (currently my favourite overall source) shows that we are high on the list of total testsContinue Reading
Six weeks ago, I posted about the Coronavirus in China. Reading that blogpost now seems like reading something I wrote years ago. Since then, I’ve been reading obsessively and contributed a bit in the background to some of the Actuaries Institute material, and we now have more than 1,000 cases in Australia (there were 15 when I wrote the original blog post). This post is the start of my series of posts on the Coronavirus from an actuarial perspective.Continue Reading
The shocking murder of a woman and her three children by her ex-husband (and the children’s father) in Queensland this week has led to a lot of discussion of the statistics of family violence. The statistic I want to look at today is the deaths of children. The Drum onContinue Reading
Last week was the annual release of the Closing the Gap report. As the report describes: In 2007, Commonwealth, state, territory and local governments made a commitment to work together to close the gap in Indigenous disadvantage. This led to the National Indigenous Reform Agreement, a significant step toward moreContinue Reading
Get a bunch of actuaries together (particularly life insurance actuaries) and sooner or later we will start talking about pandemics. Fortunately for us, our experiences are almost entirely theoretical. We’ve lived through AIDS (for the life insurance actuary, a very slow-moving pandemic, where the challenge was more about underwriting thanContinue Reading
Climate change affects extremes more than you think. If the distribution shifts even a little bit to be hotter/wetter/drier/windier, then even without changing the likelihood of extremes, the very rare extremes we were used to become much more likely. Continue Reading
I’ve just published my annual round-up of my non fiction reading for last year here. Do go and read the whole post, but here I’ll just mention my absolute favourites for the year (or at least the ones I keep telling people to go and read). Continue Reading
Today’s Book Review is Men at Work: Australia’s Parenthood Trap, the latest Quarterly Essay by Annabel Crabb In a follow up essay to her previous book The Wife Drought, Annabel Crabb investigates what is stopping men taking on more of the parenting load. In the last 50 years, women haveContinue Reading
Why we Sleep; Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker Today’s book review is a topic close to my heart. Many people I work with have heard me say that my KPI for myself is that my team gets enough sleep. That is short hand for quiteContinue Reading