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In My Opinion
There’s Something Funny Going On
by Paul E. LackoThe Actuarial Review began publication thirty years ago next January, and the AR staff would like to celebrate this milestone by doing something outrageous, scandalous, unheard of, and entirely inappropriate. And you are invited—nay, encouraged—to join the party by writing an article or an opinion piece for a issue of The Actuarial Review, which will be published on-line only in January. We need outlandish and outrageous articles of all kinds: discussion and analysis of events that never occurred, news and reports from CAS committees that may or may not exist, interviews that never took place, reviews of books never written. The parody version needs a name, and so we invite you to submit your best ideas. The AR staff editors will select a name from all the submissions, and we will award a small prize to the first person who sent that name in. All decisions by the AR editorial staff will be final. We need your real name with every article you submit, but we will publish a nom de plume if you so request. If you have questions, please direct them to me at paul.lacko@SNCC.com. If you have parody names or articles, please submit them to AR@casact.org.
Thirty Years…
The masthead in that first AR issue thirty years ago lists a staff of three: Editor Matthew Rodermund and Associate Editors George Morison and Luther Tarbell Jr. These gentlemen had to do everything by hand, and it took immense effort to inscribe those clay tablets with a stone stylus. Nowadays we have computers, so it takes only thirteen volunteer CAS members and two paid staff at the CAS office to produce the AR. If that’s not progress, then I don’t know what is. (There is no truth to the rumors you may have heard about the CAS Board of Directors outsourcing AR production to India. Not for this issue, at any rate.)After all these years, accounting issues still confront the insurance industry and the actuarial profession. A letter to the editor from Thomas J. Hummel, commenting on accounting issues of the day, appears in the first AR issue. Mr. Hummel ends with a comment that seems equally apropos today with respect to Fair Value Accounting, in light of the analysis recently published by Tillinghast: “Only time, during which megaenergy and megabucks will be expended, will determine if the eaten pudding proves out.” The Tillinghast report can be downloaded free of charge from their Web site. For additional observations about Fair Value, or the lack thereof, Accounting, see the article by Philip Heckman.
Humor is a problem we’ve had at the AR from the beginning. Let me re-phrase that. We have not had much success in establishing and maintaining a regular humor feature, especially items of actuarial humor. Maybe the problem is that normal actuarial work products—rate filings, reserve analyses for self-insured clients, profitability reports for senior management, feasibility studies, and the like—do not lend themselves to honing one’s innate comedic talents. But the fact is that at least some actuaries do have a finely honed sense of humor.
One brave soul stepped forward recently, and we accepted his offer to help the cause, and we promptly showed our appreciation by… misspelling his name. My profuse apologies to Michael Ersevim; I promise it won’t happen again. Check out Michael’s newest bit of wit.
If your creative abilities occasionally take a humorous turn, we would love to provide you an audience. We want to publish jokes, one-liners, and other bits of good, clean fun directed to, for, and at readers who are property-casualty actuaries. We would also love to publish cartoons, especially single frame. Do you have artistic talent straining at the leash, desperate to be set loose? Are you skilled in penning zippy cartoon captions? If so, please step forward, figuratively speaking, and send your e-mail address to us at AR@casact.org. All verbal humorists, cartoonists, and caption writers will be gratefully acknowledged in each issue. And we will try—really, really, hard—to spell your name correctly.
If you would rather read than write something entertaining, I suggest Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, published in paperback by Broadway Books. Bryson, a nonscientist, decided to learn something about the natural sciences by reading and consulting experts in fields such as astronomy, geology, paleontology, genetics, and particle physics. This book describes what he learned, how he learned it, and what it might mean to the rest of us. Bryson has an eight-year-old boy’s fascination with disaster scenarios, and catastrophe modelers are sure to pick up some new areas for research. For instance, Yellowstone National Park would more properly be named “Yellowstone National Volcano,” because that’s what it is—a huge volcano that erupts, on average, every 600,000 years. The last eruption was about 650,000 years ago.
I should mention that the word “eruption” does not do justice here. Bryson explains it this way: “The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico)—nearly the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi. This, bear in mind, is the breadbasket of America, an area that produces roughly half the world’s cereals...It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tons of debris from the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site in New York. Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas.”
The experts admit that they can’t predict when the next eruption will occur, but they are pretty sure that it won’t happen in the immediate future. According to an article in the July 2004 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, a 2,100-foot-wide, 100-foot-high swelling on the bed of Yellowstone Lake looks promising, but the rocks and debris probably won’t bother you if you’re more than four or five miles away when (if?) it blows.
Volcanoes are one of many sources of risk to our well-being that catch Bryson’s attention. Whatever the subject that Bryson examines, it seems he can’t help but imagine the end of life as we know it. Earthquakes, radical climate changes, errant asteroids, pandemic diseases, and reversals of Earth’s magnetic field all come up for discussion.
Bill Bryson writes with such a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that I wish his books contained twice as many words as they do. Despite what I’ve said above, I found A Short History of Nearly Everything to be extremely informative and entertaining. Maybe I don’t fall asleep at night quite as easily as I used to, but, hey, it’s a small price to pay.
In closing, I wish to express my thanks to Steve Groeschen, who is leaving The Actuarial Review staff. As headline editor, Steve’s primary task in recent years has been to reduce each article to a short, pithy phrase that will attract your attention and summarize the content and tone of an article for you. Steve has a rare talent: to be able to discern a key point of an article and state it succinctly. We won’t find a replacement, but we are hanging up the “Help Wanted—Worthy Successor” sign.
