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Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

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Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#101

Post by dragonwriter »

SilasX wrote: post #80
gizmo686 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the scam? The insurance company was hired to provide insurance for the other driver. By all accounts they did so. If the other driver had no insurance, your options would have been the same: hope they pay out of good will, or sue them. The public policy motivation for liability insurance is to protect the lawsuit route. If you sue an uninsured driver and win, you might not be able to collect (getting blood from…

No, he’s (reasonably) upset that the other side’s insurance did not pay out when it was clearly their client’s fault, banking on his difficulty of filing a lawsuit. What do you call someone who victimizes people he know have a disadvantage in suing him?

> What do you call someone who victimizes people he know have a disadvantage in suing him?

A for-profit business.

Sure, unequal, wealth-gated practical access to the courts is a real problem, and it impacts basically every area of American society.

But it doesn't make mandatory auto liability insurance a scam, any more than it makes literally every commercial industry a scam.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#102

Post by TameAntelope »

romwell wrote: post #59
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While corruption may have been the source of this particular business, the fact that insurance is required by law is a good thing. The counterfactual involves a bunch of uninsured judgement proof drivers clogging the road and ruining everyone else's day/life. The problem is already bad enough now when it is illegal to do.

Hot take: if it's something that's universally a good thing that should be required of every driver, it should be provided by the state and paid for with taxes / annual registration fees. Otherwise, it's just an income-generating scheme for private parties. Oh, and fun fact: the liability insurance isn't required to pay up anything unless the covered driver loses in court . They don't have to follow that the police r…

Insurance is one of those areas of knowledge where, unless you're an expert, you can easily be told true statements that are highly misleading. Overlap that with the law, and you get a fantastic tangle of misleading information that can cripple your ability to make good choices.

It's probably true that, technically, liability insurance is only available once the driver loses in court, but that means very different things than it implies. For one, the driver has no knowledge of the court case, in many situations. The insurance companies work with one another to figure out who is paying what, and the insured is largely uninvolved.

You can "be told" many things about a system you're unfamiliar with that sound, on their face, absurd, but upon inspection actually make plenty of sense. This sounds like one of those things.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#103

Post by mb7733 »

romwell wrote: post #59
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While corruption may have been the source of this particular business, the fact that insurance is required by law is a good thing. The counterfactual involves a bunch of uninsured judgement proof drivers clogging the road and ruining everyone else's day/life. The problem is already bad enough now when it is illegal to do.

Hot take: if it's something that's universally a good thing that should be required of every driver, it should be provided by the state and paid for with taxes / annual registration fees. Otherwise, it's just an income-generating scheme for private parties. Oh, and fun fact: the liability insurance isn't required to pay up anything unless the covered driver loses in court . They don't have to follow that the police r…

British Columbia forces you to buy liability insurance from the provincial government and it's awful. The premium calculations are illogical and inefficient. Bad drivers are subsidized by good ones, the rates are among the highest in the country and the govt manages to lose money on it.

My experience in other provinces with private insurance companies was much better.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#104

Post by gompertz »

datan3rd wrote: post #92

Was an actuary for 8 years, got my Associateship (roughly halfway through the progression to Fellow). Failed a few of the exams a couple of times, passed a few on the first try. At the time, each exam had a roughly 40-60% pass rate, so by the time you get to the 4th or 5th exam, you are dealing with a pretty smart, invested group...AND it is still difficult to pass. My job mainly consisted of statistics and data appl…

Congratulations from someone who has passed three of the exams, and then bailed.

I would hire anyone who has passed even a single SOA/CAS exam in a Data Science role in a heartbeat - likely above most other candidates. While I don't directly monitor the "State of the Actuaries", I would have expected the industry to better poise itself as the penultimate "Data Science" candidate-incubator and stretch beyond insurance. I haven't seen an actuarial program that didn't cover computing science as part of degree requirements - and in my case, I also met all degree requirements for BSc Statistics. I did see however the SOA added a predictive analytics exam, exercised in R language.... so that's a start.

/resists urge to bash the term "Data Science" as a Science... because it's really just a combination of {actuarial,stats,cs} which are real science disciplines.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#105

Post by bobsmooth »

duckmysick wrote: post #62
throwawaygh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It blew my mind at how candid he was about the fact that his business exists due to regulatory mandates. This is extraordinarily well understood in the insurance industry. They don't think of it as odd or a dirty secret, at all. It's more surprising that he was so open about the naked corruption/nepotism in the origin story. Apparently there's a sector of society for whom that is also normal and acceptable. > I fee…

> Health insurance is a pretty terrible product. What's the alternative?

In addition to the other comments, it should be pointed out that not everyone needs car insurance but everyone will require medical attention at some point.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#106

Post by thechao »

stefan_ wrote: post #75
d136o wrote: post #39

In this [1] interview by Barry Ritholtz, Markel CEO essentially told the origin story of an insurance giant. Basically a family member was a lawmaker, passed a law that drivers of the newly invented cars (maybe horse buggies?) must be insured. They simultaneously started a company that sold insurance. Over time they learned to make money from investing their customers capital. It blew my mind at how candid he was abo…

The joke there is that every driver in the US still needs to carry uninsured driver insurance because so many don't have any and there are no checks. And of course the coverage minimums are utterly laughable; put a kid in a wheelchair and you are looking at many many millions of damage, $100k isn't gonna cut it.

I watched a four-tone college Corolla rear-end a metallic fleck baby blue Bentley being driven from N to S Austin. Since I was stuck there (caught in the pileup, but undamaged), I chatted with the valet. He said that the Bentley would be totaled -- no purchaser would take it, obviously. He said the dealer insurance would handle the whole thing; there was simply no point in even calling the kid's insurance: the car was probably easily 5-10 times the kid's liability limit.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#108

Post by Buge »

dragonwriter wrote: post #96
romwell wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side story about how satisfied people can be with the mandated insurance. I was on coast-to-coast road trip when I got into an accident in TX. Someone was trying to pass me on the left in a turning lane, veered into the incoming lane, and then hit my vehicle's front wheels from the back. The police ticketed the other driver, and told me that insurance will surely take care of that on my side. "Wow, it's worse than we…

> ...I got zero ($0.00, zlich, nada) from the other driver's liability insurance. Well, yeah, you didn't legally establish any liability, or even, apparently, make even the suggestion of the intent to do so. Insurance companies, being for-profit entities, aren't in the business of giving out gifts. > Now, if I had comprehensive coverage, they'd be facing my insurance company Yes, dealing with other driver's insurance…

>I don't see a scam anywhere.

They are telling the government they will pay out if the insured party is at fault for an accident, but in some (many?) cases they don't actually pay out. That sounds like a scam to me.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#109

Post by lostcolony »

dragonwriter wrote: post #96
romwell wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side story about how satisfied people can be with the mandated insurance. I was on coast-to-coast road trip when I got into an accident in TX. Someone was trying to pass me on the left in a turning lane, veered into the incoming lane, and then hit my vehicle's front wheels from the back. The police ticketed the other driver, and told me that insurance will surely take care of that on my side. "Wow, it's worse than we…

> ...I got zero ($0.00, zlich, nada) from the other driver's liability insurance. Well, yeah, you didn't legally establish any liability, or even, apparently, make even the suggestion of the intent to do so. Insurance companies, being for-profit entities, aren't in the business of giving out gifts. > Now, if I had comprehensive coverage, they'd be facing my insurance company Yes, dealing with other driver's insurance…

The police report, however, did. Throwing ones hands up to say "well, of -course- the company is going to avoid paying anything out unless taken to a court of law" is to abdicate corporations of all responsibility other than profit making. Just because a person can't afford justice doesn't mean we should accept injustice.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#110

Post by timoth3y »

> Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

The article is paywalled, so I can't tell if the irony is intentional.

Anyone even thinking of taking actuarial exams should understand that since exam results are non-random, statistics based on the general population are not predictive of specific results.

For many instances of "you" the odds are they will pass.

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