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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

#271

Post by mattkrause »

HWR_14 wrote: post #199
redis_mlc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was sworn to the bar without actually going to any sort of law school. It can still be done today in most US states. Also, note that even the self-represented can take on a government and win. See Jim Pattison's (Canadian billionaire) tax hearings vs. the Crown (Canada), which he won after a decade of litigation. Multiple prosecutors and judges retired during that time period. Besides developing further tax filing…

> It can still be done today in most US states. If by "most" you mean 4 or 5 US States (California, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and maybe West Virginia). That's 10% of states, although more than 10% of the US population (but still a very small minority). Meanwhile, anyone can represent themselves in court, and with sufficient facts on their side have won. However, the Supreme Court no longer allows people to repre…

Even in those states, you can't just show up to the bar exam and ace it.

Thost states all requires you to spend four years (i.e., even longer than law school) working/studying under an attorney. Washington even charges "tuition" of $2000/year.

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

#272

Post by mattkrause »

throwawaygh wrote: post #41
lordnacho wrote: post #15

If it took a math professor over 3 years to do it, it sounds tough. What is the reward? I consistently see actuarial science as a top earning degree in certain papers, but there's not much color on whether it's worthwhile. How many openings are there for each person who passes, what are working conditions like?

> How many openings are there for each person who passes Think of the SoA as a union, if that helps. > what are working conditions like? It's a boring office job. The job is what it is. A safe and well-paid job that guarantees you'll never be a pauper or a prince. Not dissimilar from university teaching.

> Not dissimilar from university teaching

You...may want to look at the state of the academic job market.

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

#273

Post by namdnay »

seibelj wrote: post #258
civilized wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exams have two ultimate objectives: 1. Perpetuate the actuarial guild 2. Shovel money from aspiring actuaries and insurance companies into the SOA's coffers They aren't really, and aren't really meant to be, a marker of general, transferable intellectual skills or achievement outside the insurance industry. So it's not surprising that no one other than the parties involved (the SOA, aspiring actuaries, and insura…

This is the same model of all licenses, which is inherited from the guild system common throughout all of human history (the government (monarchs, oligarchies, democracies) protect favored industries from competition). I put them on a spectrum: - Licenses that anyone can obtain by showing the requisite skills. This is the least nefarious, and the clearest example would be driver's licenses. In a perfect world anyone…

> Licenses that anyone can get, but are purely graded on a curve in order to protect existing members. Finally we get to the actuarial licenses! Similar licenses would be Michelin star restaurants and wine sommeliers. Only a very small community appreciates these licenses, but the value to those that have them is high via the artificial scarcity. In order to keep them fair they offer the test(s) to anyone, but grade on an absurdly difficult curve to make them essentially random, and then take only the top scorers to preserve their scarcity. The process to get the license is to cram test exams ad infinitum and continue to take the test until you randomly get the top score. They ultimately mean nothing, at least compared to the amount of people who deserve the license vs. those that have them.

If I follow you correctly, this last category is basically all "competitive examinations"? I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them (maybe that's because I live in France, where competitive examinations are the third national pastime, just behind moaning and striking).

Michelin stars for example are supposed to distinguish the best restaurants, so of course they're going to be competitive! Would you complain that we only give three Olympic medals per event?

These competitions can be useful in case of limited availability (e.g. number of places every year in an elite engineering college), but also just as a signal that you're dealing with the best of the best. For example, if you go to a Boulangerie held by a "Meilleur Ouvrier de France", you know you're going to get some of the best croissants in the world.

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

#275

Post by heisenbit »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #212
heavyset_go wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A family member's dog's ACL surgery cost more than the ACL surgery they themselves got a few years before. Pet medicine is filled by pharmacies and costs as much as human medicine does. It's nuts.

What's supposed to be nuts about that? The surgery costs the same no matter whether you want me to do it to a dog or a person. The pills cost the same whether you want to feed them to a dog or a person. That's exactly what you'd expect.

Drug costs are mostly a function of development and marketing (there are exceptions where production dominates). Development cost is dominated by cost of human trials. It is not clear that drugs (particularly for non animals not destined for human consumption) should be as expensive as human drugs. And that is before getting to to unusual gap between US drug prices and international drug prices.

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

#276

Post by refurb »

pkaye wrote: post #206
lostlogin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a ‘small claims’ court process in the US? Here in New Zealand there is a court process that is cheap and fairly efficient for low value claims. This sort of thing would probably sneak into that category.

Yes there is small claims courts in the US but I think cross state lawsuits may not work in all situations. So if you are from California and are suing for an incident that happened in Texas, you would have to go the small claims court in Texas which involved time and money to travel there.

The benefits of Covid! Many switched to Zoom at least for the time being.

And the idea is you sue and when they get served they just settle as it’s cheaper.

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

#277

Post by mch82 »

seibelj wrote: post #258
civilized wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exams have two ultimate objectives: 1. Perpetuate the actuarial guild 2. Shovel money from aspiring actuaries and insurance companies into the SOA's coffers They aren't really, and aren't really meant to be, a marker of general, transferable intellectual skills or achievement outside the insurance industry. So it's not surprising that no one other than the parties involved (the SOA, aspiring actuaries, and insura…

This is the same model of all licenses, which is inherited from the guild system common throughout all of human history (the government (monarchs, oligarchies, democracies) protect favored industries from competition). I put them on a spectrum: - Licenses that anyone can obtain by showing the requisite skills. This is the least nefarious, and the clearest example would be driver's licenses. In a perfect world anyone…

Licenses actually mean a lot and are integral to many industries. Software isn’t traditionally regulated because society still doesn’t understand the danger of defective software.

Buildings, electronics, phones/radios, vehicles, food, medicine, and serious industries are all licensed.

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

#278

Post by Bootvis »

nwiswell wrote: post #248
specialist wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders... Citation please.

Does this work? https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi... .

No, that paragraph describes the duty of officers of the company to put the interests of the company before their own. It doesn’t claim that these officers need to behave unethically. You could even argue that displaying unethical behavior is not in the best interests of the company in the long run but this is of course hard to prove in any direction.

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

#279

Post by thaumasiotes »

heisenbit wrote: post #275
thaumasiotes wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's supposed to be nuts about that? The surgery costs the same no matter whether you want me to do it to a dog or a person. The pills cost the same whether you want to feed them to a dog or a person. That's exactly what you'd expect.

Drug costs are mostly a function of development and marketing (there are exceptions where production dominates). Development cost is dominated by cost of human trials. It is not clear that drugs (particularly for non animals not destined for human consumption) should be as expensive as human drugs. And that is before getting to to unusual gap between US drug prices and international drug prices.

> It is not clear that drugs (particularly for non animals not destined for human consumption) should be as expensive as human drugs.

Are they different drugs?

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

#280

Post by romwell »

gruez wrote: post #93
romwell wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. Food and shelter are essentially "required" for everyone. Should those be provided by the state, to avoid it being "an income-generating scheme for private part…

>Food and shelter are essentially "required" for everyone. Should those be provided by the state, to avoid it being "an income-generating scheme for private parties"?

The answer is: yes, absolutely, and we essentially do that to some extent with food stamps and homeless shelters; but, of course, not nearly to the extend that we can and should.

Shelter isn't just "required" in scare quotes, though; it's illegal to be homeless (you can get charged with loitering, trespassing, etc. if you try living pretty much anywhere where you're not paying for it some way).

We all know that the rental market is a scam, since mortgage payments (i.e. what you pay to own the property, plus profit for the bank) is lower than the rent in most markets (sometimes even after adding property taxes on top).

We also know how zoning restrictions on construction of residential properties and high-rises artificially restricts the supply of housing precisely where it's needed: i.e. where the jobs are (Example #1: San Francisco Bay Area).

So yes, the housing market here is an incoming-generating scheme for landlords. To the extent that people joke that Silicon Valley is a machine to transfer money from venture capitalists to landlords through engineers' pockets.

Note that I am not saying that the state should be the only supplier of shelter, food, healthcare, transportation, and education. Just that it should be one of the players on the free market, with a cost of 0 (or barely above nominal).

That's how Europe does healthcare and education, and at the very least it shows that we can afford this on a grand scale.

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