Description: This article contains responses from five actuaries to a request for an explanation of how the 15% figure is calculated in the contention by unisex-pricing advocates that 15% of women live longer than men, but 100% of women are penalized.

Description: This article by the editor discusses responses from readers to The Actuary’s September 1981 Supplement on Universal Life, much of it critical in nature. One responder noted that Universal Life is ‘a symptom of an economy in convulsion,’ and had serious doubts that this product will successfully provided consumers with long term life insurance protection.

Description: This is an editorial warning about the escalating costs of Medicare as outlined in the 1983 Annual Report of The Board of Trustees of The Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. The editorial ends with a question asking what the actuarial profession, and its members individually, ought to be doing that they aren’t already doing?

Description: This article is a brief review of the Society of Actuaries 1981 monograph ‘Adverse Deviation,’ by John C. Wooddy et. al. The author of this review notes that the monograph describes the approach - devised by the Committee on Theory of Risk - to ‘the problem of providing appropriately for the risks of adverse deviation in a GAAP valuation under the specifications of the ‘Audit Guide for Stock Life Insurance Companies.’

Description: This article discusses key excerpts from testimony in June and July 1981 by James R.Swenson, Chairman of the Academy’s Committee on Social Insurance, to the Senate Special Committee on Aging, and to the Senate Subcommittee on Social Security. The testimony recommended that the long term problems of Social Security be addressed at the same time as the short term imbalances, that benefits be adjusted to affordable levels e.g. gradual increase in retirement age, that more attention be paid to pessimistic actuarial projections, that the actuaries be given more latitude in selecting assumptions, and that the law be amended to require actuarial certifications for Social Security.

Description: “We all understand the statement that the probability of ruin for a young man's family is 1 in 1000. Most if not all would agree that he should insure against this risk. . . . ‘We all know why the risk is insurable even if we do not say so explicitly because there are a large number of broadly similar risks and the law of averages can he relied on. From The Actuary VOL. 16, No.8

Description: A description of the election process within the SOA, the role of the Board of Governors, and how the process has evolved from an on-the-spot balloting process to a mail-in process.

Description: This is an article about the education provided for actuaries highlighting a paper presented to the Institute in London in January 1982 by W. W. Truckle, F.I.A., Director of that body's Actuarial Tuition Service. Written to provide a framework for oral and written discussion, it features questions rather than opinions.

Description: Reviews Elmer R. Benedict's book entitled Protecting Retirement Against Inflation, which present a broad program for equitable sharing of the inflation burden. The kingpin is an income adjustment, utilizing income taxes, designed to restore the purchasing power of the retired, disabled and surviving spouses.

Description: The author of this article, The Actuary’s editor, notes that this article is a capsule of what may be called “the Angle/Bladen theme.” John C. Angle spoke at Hartford in April 1980 see the Record for that meeting, pp. 188-193. His investment colleague, Ashby Bladen, addressed our Annual Meeting in Montreal last October 1980. Their observations were about mutual life insurance in the United States. The article notes that the current economic environment, with interest rates “far outside the familiar 3% to 6% range,” is a difficult one for life insurers and their traditional products, that we are becoming less conservative when the risk of serious economic trouble is rising, and “a satisfactory future depends on restoring stability, not upon trying to learn how to cope with instability.”