The math of insurance suggests that, if it needs to be widely carried (either due to things like mortgage requirements, or the simple realization most people don't have enough resources to absorb a major catastrophe themselves), the most economical way to go is to have a single risk pool that's as broad and diverse as possible, so it can swallow a large clustered crisis more easily. Yes, this is a bit of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
I always found it funny when insurance marketing talks about "personalized rates", when the goal is to DE-PERSONALIZE the risk. If you have 10,000 customers in Los Angeles, and 5 million elsewhere, you can either isolate the LA customers and charge them the "real" price of the risk, which will be unviable as a business and probably politically touchy too, or you can include them in the broad pool, and the people with a full-cinderblock home in a non-flammable state pay $20 more a year so the entire endeavour can work.
The concept probably works better if you have some concept of social cohesion to lean on-- you might not get the best possible outcome personally, but the system itself is more robust for everyone.
What if Paul built his house somewhere less flammable? I see options here where Peter doesn't need to be robbed, he could pay a fair rate and Paul could make less risky decisions.
If one pool of people are taking a bad deal vs the market rate when buying insurance then it isn't really insurance any more. It is a transfer payment a.k.a. welfare. Which is cool and all in the sense that welfare is a social tool that exists. But calling it 'insurance' is needlessly polluting the language. If people expect to hoover money off others then they should be charged more until the expected return of everyone in the insured pool is equal. If the payouts are going to be held equal in the event of a disaster then that means the price of insurance has to vary depending on the risk profile of the customers.
> It is a transfer payment a.k.a. welfare
Its called solidarity and yes, it means some people NOT have to pay more but others recieve more. Paul AND Peter get the security of disaster coverage in exchange. This is what you pay for. A big risk pool and not your individual disaster recovery.
If you want "solidarity" you need a government service. Private insurance has every incentive to price things accurately and not subsidize higher-risk people. If you tell insurance companies what they have to charge, they have every reason to say "nope, I don't want to offer that service at that price, that doesn't make economic sense".
Insurance that is able to quantify risks precisely and set prices individually based on that is useless. If it has to make any profits - or at least pay salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone. Whereas solidarity can bring a better society - which even those who have to occasionally pay more benefit from in the end.
> Insurance that is able to quantify risks precisely and set prices individually based on that is useless.
This is simply untrue.
This may be true for health insurance, because there is a strong moral case to be made that is unfair and illiberal to make people pay more for genetics or simple bad luck that result in them being likely to need more health care.
It is not true for home insurance, where people can choose where to live and choose what kind of housing to live in.
The purpose of home insurance is to reduce time-based variance for disaster, not for people in low-risk properties to subsidize people in high-risk properties.
It is not "solidarity" for someone in a steel-and-concrete house with a metal roof who clears brush and trees from around their house to subsidize someone who lives in wooden mansion who doesn't take any fire precautions. It is a perverse incentive.
> If it has to make any profits - or at least pay salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone.
Again, it is not the purpose of insurance for it to be positive expected value for people in high risk homes! It is expected for insurance to be negative expected value. The point is to reduce variance.
Surely you don’t want your taxes to go into rebuilding other people’s beachfront houses as many times as needed. Show a little empathy!
https://reason.com/2024/01/10/the-feds-shouldnt-subsidize-fa...
> Again, it is not the purpose of insurance for it to be positive expected value for people in high risk homes!
Insurance should not be positive expected value for anyone; if it is, either the actuaries are doing a poor job, or the product is a loss leader, or there's some regulatory reason the company can't pull out of the market. (Or, you are in a very rare circumstance where you actually know better than the actuary.)
> If it has to make any profits - or at least pay salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone.
It is insurance. You pay money, the company takes away the risk. That doesn't make it a bad deal, that makes it a service. That is like complaining about a hypothetical garbage company that charges for taking away trash even though the trash might have some notional value.
Insurance isn't an investment scheme. If you want to pay money for a positive-expected-value deal, go buy stocks and bonds.
whole point of insurance is that you pay for avoiding risk
in other words, you pay more than you would on average loss from bad events - but you avoid catastrophic losses that would break your life
that is why insuring your phone is likely a bad idea (as you can pay for a new one) but liability insurance or insuring your home/flat may make sense
> If it has to make any profits - or at least pay salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone.
paying 3k per year, to avoid 1% risk of 250k losses may be a good idea, especially if 3k loss is survivable without trouble and 250k loss would be more than 90 times worse.
> paying 3k per year, to avoid 1% risk of 250k losses may be a good idea
You are basically guaranteed to pay 3k to avoid financial risk with a mean value of 2,5k. That sounds like a fallacy to me (isn't it the same as saying that paying 3k for 1% chance of winning 250k is a good idea?), may make sense psychologically though.
That logic is reasonable if you can trivially afford 250k; in that case, you might choose to self-insure. However, that logic does not hold if the 1% event is not something you can afford.
Every dollar does not have the same incremental value. Going from $1B to $1B-$250k is not the same as going from $300k to $50k, and definitely not the same as going from $50k to -$200k.
Incentivizing people to build homes that are likely enough to burn down as to be economically uninsurable is an absolutely wild abuse of the term "solidarity". Solidarity is the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all, not the idea that choices should have no consequences and the environment shouldn't constrain humans; the only way you can possibly sustain a world in which people actually treat an injury to one as an injury to all, is together with some effort to avoid people from gratuitously exposing themselves to injury.
The tricky thing about global climate change is the "global" part. Funny how that works.
The LA fires aren't a climate fire though.
For other disasters, while climate change is "global", the effects are pretty much localized and to various degrees. Some places have had adapted construction to those kinds of blue moon disasters since centuries, so why should they part with more money?
> If you have 10,000 customers in Los Angeles, and 5 million elsewhere, you can either isolate the LA customers and charge them the "real" price
That's the only way.
> which will be unviable as a business and probably politically touchy too
Why would it be? If you live in Los Angeles - doesn't mean you don't need insurance (even if it several times the cost of insurance in the safer areas).
> or you can include them in the broad pool
No, you can't. Your competitor who doesn't do this will offer cheaper insurance - because they doesn't distribute high risk of small group to everybody else.
> the people with a full-cinderblock home in a non-flammable state pay $20 more a year so the entire endeavour can work.
Why would they do that? 20 bucks is 20 bucks.
> The concept probably works better if you have some concept of social cohesion to lean on
You mean if you with totalitarian governance deprive people of the ability to choose? Yeah, that could work. I mean, that's how the gulags were justified.
I'm trying to understand how what you're suggesting is different from mandating everyone just get a personal savings account, where they must pay some specified minimum calculated to cover them in the event of a loss of their personal property?
Are you saying that we should only pool risk between people in the same risk bucket?
How do you aim to determine the resolution of that risk? Not to mention calculating it accurately?
> Are you saying that we should only pool risk between people in the same risk bucket?
People should be free to make that choice even though it increases net costs for higher-risk or less-affluent individuals.
> How do you aim to determine the resolution of that risk? Not to mention calculating it accurately?
By allowing private actuaries to make these pricing decisions: skilled organizations will succeed, others will fail.
I'm trying to work out how what you're describing works, first I have to understand you before I can form an opinion on it :)...
Ok, I get how you want to value risk, independent actuaries. I suppose, there's some bias there as insurers might lean on them to adjust the risk to be more favourable to them and as they'll be repeat business, they're likely to comply, but let's assume we find some really honest ones.
So given say a pool of people with similar risk profiles, say young professionals in high earning careers, and you calculate that they're effective risk is the same so you pool them together.
Now, what do you believe an insurer would insure them against? And of the things, what would not take them out of the pool they've been placed in and put them into a different, perhaps smaller pool?
I'm not quite sure you understand what insurance are. You have risk, you don't want to have it, so you pay other people to took that risk away (to some extent). How those people are expected to assess risk? Somehow. That's their problem.
It's like how a hair salon owner evaluates the difficulty of a haircut. And generally, when you want to have simple haircut, but they are gonna charge you extra because Jason Statham is their client, and he has very sensitive and delicate hair ends, each of which requires a careful individual approach... You naturally start wondering what Jason Statham's hair situation has to do with your haircut.
> I'm trying to understand how what you're suggesting is different from mandating everyone just get a personal savings account
Because insurance will cover you even if your house burns down in the first year of coverage, whereas a personal savings account will have only a very small amount of money in it in the first year of home ownership.
That's the whole point of insurance.
I don't know where the idea came from that the purpose of home insurance is for people in low-risk homes to subsidize people in high-risk homes, but it's a very strange idea.
Right, that is the purpose of insurance, to take risk and spread it across a population.
Now the simplest way of doing that is you decide whether someone is "insurable" or "uninsurable" and then for everyone insurable, you define payout criteria and a fair pay in rate (premiums) which is based on your ability to calculate their risk and taking some extra on top for providing the service.
Your skill at:
1. assessing risk correctly as to whether you take them on as clients
2. calculating their risk correctly and mapping it to a price to charge them (premiums)
3. defining payouts in a way that allows you to pay out when things happen to your clients so others trust you to pay out, but not so often that you have no working capital
broadly determine how well you'll do.
You can do all kinds of other complicated things on top of that, but from what I can tell, the fundamental idea seems to be that given those considerations, the insurer pays out, so the fact that someone has a high risk home should be priced into their premiums or they should not have been taken on in the first place.
Now you appear to dislike that people who have different risk profiles are grouped together, what I'm trying to understand is how that works.
For example, in the case of the house burning down:
1. The insurer pays the homeowner out and increases their premiums
2. The insurer pays the homeowner out and places them into a different risk category of people who own similar homes, but have had their house burn down, works out their new premiums, which are now likely much higher as they're in a riskier category and it's likely that population is smaller.
I assume you're arguing for something like 2 to happen?
Or is it something else?
> Now you appear to dislike that people who have different risk profiles are grouped together
There is no problem with pooling properties with different risk profiles so long as each property pays premiums that adequately represent that property's risk profile.
Don't people who live in higher risk homes already pay higher premiums?
Do you believe that's not the case? Or that insurers are giving them discounts? Or are the risks miscalculated?
I'm in the industry: regarding California,the answer is that they aren't paying high enough premiums. Regulators have refused to allow catastrophe modeling to set rates, so fire prone areas are effectively getting a discount.
> I'm trying to understand how what you're suggesting
Nothing. It's definition of insurance - selling your risk.
> Are you saying that we should only pool risk between people in the same risk bucket?
I mean, why would people want to be in a bucket with people with higher risk?
> How do you aim to determine the resolution of that risk? Not to mention calculating it accurately?
These are the problems of insurance companies. At the end of the day, the consumer simply chooses the best price for his risk.
Except if insurance company A does that, insurance company B will call the full-cinderblock home and say "hey, we can save you $20".
If it's a product you actually want everyone to carry (like health insurance) it should probably be the government offering it.
Which implicitly means: "everyone must always pay into the government pool."
If low-risk individuals are allowed to make their own choices, they will choose an insurer that caters to their group, thus depriving the government "option" of "premiums."
Just like with school property tax vouchers: if people are allowed to directly appropriate the benefits of their funds, less "desirable" schools would receive less funding.
Mandated government "insurance" is a form of welfare.
>>>Mandated government "insurance" is a form of welfare.
Yes? Of course? That doesn't make it a bad idea.
you can either isolate the LA customers and charge them the "real" price of the risk, which will be unviable as a business
NOT lining up the premium with the actual risk is what's non-viable.
> or you can include them in the broad pool, and the people with a full-cinderblock home in a non-flammable state pay $20 more a year so the entire endeavour can work
And you immediately start loosing customers to insurers that either did the former or left LA alltogether. This changes $20 surcharge into $25 surcharge, causing more customers to leave, causing surcharge to increase and so on.
> I always found it funny when insurance marketing talks about "personalized rates", when the goal is to DE-PERSONALIZE the risk.
Actuarial science is not often associated with “fun” but they have been partying for centuries.
“In 1662, a London draper named John Graunt showed that there were predictable patterns of longevity and death in a defined group, or cohort, of people, despite the uncertainty about the future longevity or mortality of any one individual. This study became the basis for the original life table. Combining this idea with that of compound interest and annuity valuation, it became possible to set up an insurance scheme to provide life insurance or pensions for a group of people, and to calculate with some degree of accuracy each member's necessary contributions to a common fund, assuming a fixed rate of interest.”
> you can either isolate the LA customers and charge them the "real" price of the risk […] or you can include them in the broad pool
Maybe you don’t understand that the insurance business is based on including everyone in one pool (so it can swallow a large clustered crisis more easily) AND charge them (more than) the real price of the risk.
I understand. The goal is to make the biggest possible pool, which means a single, preferrably government-run carrier (to limit profit-maximization on a service that's more or less essential)
This completely ignores incentives. If insurance isn't allowed to charge people more who live in fireprone or floodprone areas, more people will live in such areas, and overall society will have to spend more money rebuilding when disasters inevitably hit those areas. Personalised insurance pricing would allow insurers to charge much more to people living in such areas, which incentivises people not to live there. It's also a moral issue: if everyone pays the same rate, then people who did the right thing and chose to live in an area that wasn't fire or flood prone are subsidising people who did the risky thing.
> This completely ignores incentives.
For socialists this is a goal, not an obstacle.
What about the people who drive cars, vote for more suburban sprawl, and actively work against reducing CO2 emissions? When are we going to charge them THEIR fair share?
By eliminating personalization you’re doing the same thing - removing price as a signal.
It’s good when insurers personalize! Install screens to prevents embers from entering roof vents? Great. You should get a discount!
It’s a win-win. Consumers are incentivized to take measures to reduce risk.
A lot of the "big boy" insurance on ships etc actually have inspectors - they'll come and inspect your ship (or industrial plant etc) periodically to confirm it meets the agreed safety standards. And if it doesn't, no insurance! That really aligns incentives.
This is a good point.
You also have insurance companies that will incentivize risk reduction by subsidizing alterations - if you clear any trees within X ft of home, they will give you $1000 towards it.
But yes on the inspections. I’ve had home insurance inspections around electrical and plumbing. They wanted to make sure it was at code as it was an older home.