Description: This paper traces the background of the surgeon general's 1979 report on smoking, highlights its principle conclusions with respect to mortality, and summarizes its findings regarding socioeconomic and demographic differences between smokers and nonsmokers. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1980, Vol. 32.

Description: This session at the SOA 1981 New York Regional Meeting examines the practice of life insurance risk classification, societal changes in their view of the practice and the industry's response to those pressures.

Description: This article provides comments from leading health actuaries on Clinton's health care proposal.

Description: An article from the editor regarding results of the survey on the content found in 'The Actuary'.

Description: The primary focus of this newsletter is devoted to articles regarding the future of retirement plans.

Description: Discusses the need for actuaries to evolve with the needs of the marketplace in order to continue to be relevant and to feel we are successful in our careers.

Description: The author attempts to weave together biological and environmental explanations into the mathematical approaches developed over the past two centuries so as to, in the words of two earlier authors from the actuarial profession, reground the relationship of actuarial science with cellular biology and gerontology. Also examined is the extent to which increasing wealth and higher standards of education and health contribute to happiness.

Description: This issue of the newsletter will address the future of retirement plans.

Description: The panel discussed actuarial opportunities in the 1980's and 1990's. Questions discussed included: 1. Will traditional opportunities be reduced? 2. What nontraditional opportunities are available? 3. What changes are needed in our educational process? 4. How do we make nontraditional employers aware of actuarial skills and their value? 5. What will actuarial work be like? From Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 8, No. 3.

Description: Scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory, working with their counterparts at Oxford University, probing the future, have explored proton decay to estimate that the universe will last for many years, by which time there will be no heat, no light, no matter, no anything time itself will have ceased to exist. This helpful information puts a new cast on such notions as “infinity” and “forever.”