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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

charleshughsmith.substack.com

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Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#161

Post by nerdponx »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #143
Sabinus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the market is allowed to price insurance correctly then we can motivate building designs to be more disaster resist. If the McMansion can't get insurance but disaster resistant, modest homes do, then people will adapt.

Resistant homes will pay nearly the same prices as everyone else. So the cinder block home owner is subsidizing the sticks houses. Same happens in autos. Monitored safe driving nets at most 10-20% discounts. Biggest factor is age, and even then, difference between 20yo and 35yo driver is 38%. There are no tricks or deals to insurance.

> Biggest factor is age, and even then, difference between 20yo and 35yo driver is 38%.

That's because age is both observable and strongly predictive of risk.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#162

Post by pkaye »

apsec112 wrote: post #50
greenthrow wrote: post #25

An hour in and nobody in these comments is addressing climate change? The risks of drought and the resulting fire or hurricanes and floods is much higher than it has been in recorded history in these areas because of climate change. Should people be forced to abandon their homes because the fossil fuel companies lied and misled the public and bought out our governments for the last 50 years? IMHO we should be seizing…

If you ask Americans to vote to make gas more expensive to stop climate change (eg. the Washington carbon tax referenda), they say no. America burns lots of fossil fuels because it's what the voters want. If every private fossil fuel company shut down tomorrow, there would be riots in the streets, and then oil and gas would be imported from abroad.

Makes sense since even the French people protested a carbon tax back in 2019.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46460445

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#163

Post by typewithrhythm »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #143
Sabinus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the market is allowed to price insurance correctly then we can motivate building designs to be more disaster resist. If the McMansion can't get insurance but disaster resistant, modest homes do, then people will adapt.

Resistant homes will pay nearly the same prices as everyone else. So the cinder block home owner is subsidizing the sticks houses. Same happens in autos. Monitored safe driving nets at most 10-20% discounts. Biggest factor is age, and even then, difference between 20yo and 35yo driver is 38%. There are no tricks or deals to insurance.

This is more a matter of market rules than an inherent property of insurance; currently we do not let insurers get sufficiently granular due to some assumptions about wider social benefits of a less individualised system.

This might be reworked to allow for fire resistant designs to be a factor.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#164

Post by Sabinus »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #103
datavirtue wrote: post #7

Part of this is that homes are too fancy and large. All of that translates into elevated costs and risks.

Also, they are not building small homes anyway. Developers here in the Midwaste aren't going to put a cheap house on a lot if they can instead put a 3500 sq. ft. home and get triple the profit.

And if the developers can't sell that house because it's uninsurable, then they will stop.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#165

Post by BeetleB »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #137
owlbite wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? Many companies seem to be stopping offering insurance in the state just fine! The most recent moves seem to be relaxing the pricing rules to allow major disaster pricing and recharging reinsurance rates in exchange for insurers offering more policies in high risk areas.

https://www.clydeco.com/en/insights/2025/01/california-wildf... > The Bulletin was issued pursuant to California Insurance Code section 675.1(b)(1), which states that an insurer “shall not cancel or refuse to renew a policy of residential property insurance for a property located in any zip code within or adjacent to the fire perimeter, for one year after the declaration of a state of emergency . . . based solely on…

I imagine this won't apply if the insurer just leaves the state.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#166

Post by brailsafe »

Arainach wrote: post #52
atleastoptimal wrote: post #29

Every year, humanity grows richer, more resilient to natural disasters, and more capable of predicting natural disasters and their negative outcomes. The point of insurance is to spread the expected burden of calamities that will affect a minority of a population to the entire population, so that those affected will have a financial safety net. This principle works regardless of how disastrous or prone to calamity a…

>We don't live in a world like in 1905 where an earthquake would lead to a fire that burns down an entire city I'm not convinced that that's true, and even if it is a huge chunk of population (world, US, pick your area, it applies broadly) keep fighting to regress us to these periods. People complaining about rules they don't understand is in some sense as old as the existence of rules, but the internet has dramatica…

Plenty of things were built just fine or better and hold up with regular maintenance or modifications, and many are proving to have only been practical to build during a time that had a lower floor for better or worse depending on the thing.

Would some places have become what they are today had they not built their subway system when it was opportune or hilariously less expensive than it is now? The good things we can iterate on or refactor now would have way more overhead to build from scratch at todays standards, not all of which are inherently useful or justified. Sometimes a whole city burns down or all the labor was forced, which sucks and we don't want, but sometimes you're having to get shadow studies done to build anything higher than a bungalow

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#167

Post by typewithrhythm »

urhmbutwait wrote: post #113
orange_joe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

worse, you’ll be paying to bail them out in the name of solidarity.

That’s insurance? Change the euphemism from government to private insurance to satisfy capitalism gods and keep their giant foot from squishing us… still “on the books” as a co-mingled pool of funds to shift around to solve problems. Aw …sad… other people exist and need resources too. Not just about your first world skin suit playing temp host to a run of the mill electromagnetic field effect.

People choose where they live, and should bear the cost relative to the amount of risk they chose to take. Government funding is not a magical blanket that somehow makes it moral to take from someone who made good decisions and give to another who made poor ones.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#169

Post by fsloth »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #114
Daz1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Plenty of places have had catastrophic droughts, famines, and plagues. Nearly half of Europe died a few times from plagues. Most natives in America were absolutely wiped out from disease and other issues. Tens of millions died of famine in China last century. Tsunamis washed away and killed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Japan this current century. Conveniently you selected pre-technology examples. How curio…

??? Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. What are you defining as "technology"? Software as a service chatbots? Because those aren't saving anyone. And 227000 people died 20 years ago in a tsunami in Indonesia. They had cell phones and the internet. Is that pre-technology? 50 million died in famines in China in the 1950s. They had TV, radio, and computers. Is that pre-technology? Technology…

> Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years

Vernacular methods of doing things have been around - without science or rapid innovation. Key point in time was invention of printing press combined with lutheran zeal to read and the western alphabet that allowed unprecedented platform for knowledge transfer. After that it's been pure acceleration.

Before literacy was a major thing (which it has not been historically) knowledge transfer and preservation was based on human to human contact. You could not literally just crank the machine to print out out going edges in a knowledge graph.

I'm not meaning just a few literate people. I mean an entire society capable of reading and eager to create and learn new information.

> Technology is just tools that humans make to solve a problem.

According to a dictionary it's "the branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences" / "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry" and I would argue it's this sort of technology that enables novel, rapid adaptation.

Applied sciences need science before application. Now - knowledge seeking that sure looks likes science even though it was not called that has been around few millenia - Thales of Miletus, Ibn al-Haytham etc etc.

What is novel in our time is application of science to every goddamn problem on an industrial scale. And the understanding that things can improve. This requires a literate society (imo but arguable maybe), eager to adapt, and pragmatic recognition of what works and what does not.

There are areas that are lacking in literacy and capital. While people in those areas sure enough are able as anybody else to individually use technology developed and manufactured elsewhere, the societies in which they live simply lack the means to apply industrial level technological innovations.

With industrial level technology adaptation it's a whole different ballgame.

Many places in US would be uninhabitable without technology and are thus testaments to the idea that MODERN technology allows survival in unprecedented places. For example Colorado. The place was so arid and unhospitable no one could or would want to live there. But then there came railroads, industrial engineering to implement water reservoirs etc etc and visit Denver today and it's very hard for an outsider to realize they are visiting a modern goddamn miracle.

I'm fairly sure if people can live in Colorado they can live anywhere given sufficient capital is applied (capital being the enabler of applied science and technology).

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#170

Post by chii »

iandanforth wrote: post #133
Sabinus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the market is allowed to price insurance correctly then we can motivate building designs to be more disaster resist. If the McMansion can't get insurance but disaster resistant, modest homes do, then people will adapt.

"Correctly" is doing a lot of work here. Some readers might miss that this is double edged. Insurance is a mandated product . You don't have a choice if you want a mortgage, or want to run a business. So while it is true that the sustainable price for insurance in many areas is higher than what current regulations allow, let's not forget what happens in an unregulated insurance market; price gouging.

> unregulated insurance market; price gouging.

with sufficient competition, it is impossible to price gouge.

So if there is supposed price gouging, then there must be insufficient competition. Therefore, the source of the lack of competition would need to be removed (ostensibly, by gov't - such as increasing business loans so that new insurance companies can be started).

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