This week’s Economist has a sobering article about the gap between black and white america. It included a graphic of various statistics, showing the difference between black and white america on a range of measures. It also showed how the two compared with various countries around the world – forContinue Reading
Since I blogged about Ebola a couple of months ago it’s become very mainstream news (so much so that the primary school kids are talking about it now). So here are a couple of great diagrams that caught my eye from this Economist graphical summary of various ways of thinking about Ebola.Continue Reading
The Financial System Inquiry, headed by David Murray (former Chairman of the Future Fund and CEO of Commonwealth Bank) has released its Interim Report (all 460 pages of it). For those who haven’t been following this, this inquiry (which is already known as the Murray inquiry) is the natural successor toContinue Reading
Today’s book review is Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific, by Robert Kaplan. Robert Kaplan is an American journalist and foreign policy adviser. Although this book is about Asia, he writes this book not so much an Asian expert (although he clearly is), asContinue Reading
Every year, the ABS puts out an analysis of mortality statistics for the calendar year, imaginatively entitled Deaths. And most years I post a quick analysis. The most recent one is based on mortality statistics for the calendar year 2012. This year I’ve focused on mortality improvement, and what has beenContinue Reading
People continue to live longer and longer around the world (for an interesting discussion of how superannuation should respond, see Paul Keating on Cuffelinks), which is mostly good. But different parts of populations have quite different experiences of mortality improvement. The (UK) Institute of Actuaries publishes a regular longevity bulletin. TheContinue Reading
A few months ago, I posted about some press actuaries had received about their crystal balls proving inadequate in the life insurance industry. Well the news hasn’t been getting any better. Recent reports from two of Australia’s major life reinsurers have continued the bad news. Most recently, APRA released theirContinue Reading
Today there was a comment about actuaries in the Financial Review – in a much more prominent place than most actuaries achieve. The context was a downgrade to AMP profit expectations, but it has wider interest in that Chanticleer finds actuaries in the life insurance industry wanting: Actuaries have a wonderful reputationContinue Reading
Despite watching the first season, I’m not a big fan of Mad Men. One of my regular readers thought that was my feminism coming out, but I think it’s just the lack of likeable characters. Nevertheless, I have to share this estimate of Don Draper’s life expectancy. Hat tip to fellowContinue Reading
Via Paul Krugman, I read the most polite putdown from an actuary I’ve seen for a while. In an op-ed in the NY Times, Gary King and Somar Soneji alleged that Social Security projections understate life expectancy and are therefore far too optimistic: We reached these conclusions, and presented them in an article inContinue Reading