Description: This editorial mentions four issues from the recent Social Security Trustee's Report that will each be covered in more depth in future editorials.

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: Franklin B. Dana's query at the close of his article in this issue prompted us to turn to several members who were active in Society affairs in the 1950s. We asked them what they recall of past efforts to promote the idea of having a Government Actuary in Washington, and how they see today’s prospects.

Description: Article The U.S. Government Cost Disclosure Report by Moorhead in The Actuary, June 1979, Volume 13, Number 6

Description: The article highlights the Northampton Table which is the earliest mortality table to be constructed especially for life insurance premiums. It contrasts the life expectancies of the Northampton Table with those of population tables one and two centuries later.

Description: JAMES L. COWEN’S figures in this issue, juxtaposed with a tabulation of present Fellows furnished by the Society office, permit constructing-for the first time, we believe-an abridged survival table recognizing the major decrement death from our professional ranks as well as the consistently minor one withdrawals. In the past ten years, net losses by Fellowships being dropped were only 25 out of 32,000 exposed. From The Actuary VOL. 16, No. 7

Description: The Actuary’s editor, using the example of an actuary appointed to an NAIC Advisory Group, and an analogy with Jeane Kirkpatrick’s comment as U.S. delegate-designate to the United Nations, raises questions of professionalism and conflict of interest.

Description: This article shows a comparison of the growth rates of the S&P 500 common stock index vs. the U.S. Consumer Price Index over various 5 and 10 year periods.

Description: This article is a summary of responses to a questionnaire from Benjamin I. Gottlieb in Washington that had been sent to a random sample of 500 Society Fellows in the U.S. The questionnaire dealt with the anticipated long-term economic and demographic assumptions for social security.

Description: a review of a paper by R. H. Daw, F.I.A. entitled “Smallpox and the Double Decrement Table: a piece of actuarial prehistory.”