Afleveringen
-
I’ve got five decades on me now, and five pieces of advice/themes to share:
* Be a good animal
* The universe is stranger and more wonderful than you can imagine
* Never pay retail!
* You can try anything once OR Risk is Opportunity
* It’s not about you (or me)
Episode Links
Be a Good Animal
2015 LinkedIn: Best Advice: Be a Good Animal
Battling Cognitive Bias, reprint in 2018
Thank you for reading STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more. This post is public so feel free to share it.
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
In this episode, I look at the most recent revelations re: Francesca Gino’s academia malfeasance, but other tales of academic malpractice. Such as: filling in missing values in datasets with Excel’s autofill functionality, and not sharing data in chemistry/material science or cancer research in what may be fraudulent research. How can we depend on the data and results from what is supposedly hard science research?
Episode Links
Francesca Gino
Science, 9 Apr 2024: Embattled Harvard honesty professor accused of plagiarism by Cathleen O’Grady
Harvard University honesty researcher Francesca Gino, whose work has come under fire for suspected data falsification, may also have plagiarized passages in some of her high-profile publications.
A book chapter co-authored by Gino, who was found by a 2023 Harvard Business School (HBS) investigation to have committed research misconduct, contains numerous passages of text with striking similarities to 10 earlier sources. The sources include published papers and student theses, according to an analysis shared with Science by University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland.
Science has confirmed Acland’s findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Gino’s two books, Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life and Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan. Some passages duplicate text from news reports or blogs. Others contain phrasing identical to passages from academic literature. The extent of duplication varies between passages, but all contain multiple identical phrases, as well as clear paraphrases and significant structural similarity.…Debora Weber-Wulff, a plagiarism expert at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, says Science’s findings are “quite serious” and warrant further investigation by the publishers and universities. HBS and Harvard Business Review Press, which published Sidetracked, declined to comment. Dey Street Books, a HarperCollins imprint that published Rebel Talent, and Guilford Press, publisher of the edited book The Social Psychology of Good and Evil that includes the co-authored chapter, did not respond to a request for comment.
Acland says she decided to “poke around” into Gino’s work in September 2023, after the researcher filed a $25 million lawsuit against HBS and the data sleuths who uncovered the misconduct. Acland focused on plagiarism, rather than data issues, because of her experience detecting it in student work. She searched phrases from Gino’s work on Google Scholar to see whether they matched content from other works.
She says she found apparent plagiarism in the very first sentence of the first work she assessed, the 2016 chapter “Dishonesty explained: What leads moral people to act immorally.” The sentence—“The accounting scandals and the collapse of billion-dollar companies at the beginning of the 21st century have forever changed the business landscape”—is word for word the same as a passage in a 2010 paper by the University of Washington management researcher Elizabeth Umphress and colleagues.
I didn’t talk about the person who found the plagiarism in this case.
This is what gets me so often — the tenured profs just assume nobody will ever check.
For various reasons, perhaps all the top profs shouldn’t assume that anymore. And maybe they should start crediting all their research assistants with the real work…. but that’s for another time.
Prior Gino posts/episodes:
Material Science/Chemistry Non-Replicable Experiment
Chemistry World, 11 April 2024: Holes in the ‘holey graphyne’ story
Recently, the journal Matter published a paper describing a novel form of carbon.2 This purported allotrope, ‘holey graphyne’, is comprised mainly of cyclooctadiyne rings. Moreover, the synthesis was supposedly accomplished using a simple copper catalyst. Typically, the C–C bond-forming reactions of the kind claimed in the Matter paper require expensive palladium.
The unusual structure and the unprecedented chemistry should have raised eyebrows during peer review, and ideally before this review commenced. Eight-membered rings with even a single triple bond are highly reactive (harnessing that reactivity has brought a Nobel prize to Carolyn Bertozzi). A material containing that many two-triple-bond rings would be more energetic than TNT, and likely quite prone to rapid unscheduled disassembly. Contrary to these expectations, the paper asserted perfect stability of the ‘holey’ material up to 700°C. While the reported spectroscopy was demonstrably mismatched with the claimed structure, the authors simply declared that everything fits.
….
Our replication is now published.4 We are grateful to the editor of Matter, as I know from experience that not every editor would even acknowledge the problem.
Regrettably, this story doesn’t qualify as a decisive win for post-publication review. Following their policy, Matter allowed the authors to publish a response, which doubled down on the original dubious conclusions. For now, the ‘holey’ paper remains unretracted, though I remain hopeful.
You may have come across equally troubling papers in your field. Don’t remain silent. Share your concerns on platforms like PubPeer or social media, reach out to journal editors and inform research compliance offices. This may end up being some of your most important work.
Matter, 6 March 2024: The purported synthesis of “holey graphyne” fails replication
A recent article by Ryu, Lee, and co-workers claims synthesis of “holey graphyne,” a strained sp2/sp1 carbon lattice featuring a repeating dibenzo-1,5-cyclooctadiene-3,7-diyne motif. Here, we describe the replication of the key experiments from this article. We did not observe the formation of holey graphyne under the reported conditions. Furthermore, we show that the claimed copper-mediated sp2/sp1 cross-coupling chemistry fails even for undemanding model substrates.
The Saga of the Iffy Excel Autofill & “Just Copy the Next Country” Imputation
Retraction Watch, 5 Feb 2024: No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper
Last year, a new study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries left one reader slack-jawed. The findings were no surprise. What was baffling was how the authors, two professors of economics in Europe, had pulled off the research in the first place.
The reader, a PhD student in economics, was working with the same data described in the paper. He knew they were riddled with holes – sometimes big ones: For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent. The authors made no mention of how they dealt with this problem. On the contrary, they wrote they had “balanced panel data,” which in economic parlance means a dataset with no gaps.
“I was dumbstruck for a week,” said the student, who requested anonymity for fear of harming his career. (His identity is known to Retraction Watch.)
22 Feb 2024: Exclusive: Elsevier to retract paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering
A paper on green innovation that drew sharp rebuke for using questionable and undisclosed methods to replace missing data will be retracted, its publisher told Retraction Watch.
Previous work by one of the authors, a professor of economics in Sweden, is also facing scrutiny, according to another publisher.
As we reported earlier this month, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University mended a dataset full of gaps by liberally applying Excel’s autofill function and copying data between countries – operations other experts described as “horrendous” and “beyond concern.”
21 Feb 2024, by Gary Smith: How (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study
For example, a student in my introductory statistics class once surveyed 54 classmates and was disappointed that the P-value was 0.114. This student’s creative solution was to multiply the original data by three by assuming each survey response had been given by three people instead of one: “I assumed I originally picked a perfect random sample, and that if I were to poll 3 times as many people, my data would be greater in magnitude, but still distributed in the same way.” This ingenious solution reduced the P-value to 0.011, well below Fisher’s magic threshold.
Ingenious, yes. Sensible, no. If this procedure were legitimate, every researcher could multiply their data by whatever number is necessary to get a P-value below 0.05. The only valid way to get more data is, well, to get more data. This student should have surveyed more people instead of fabricating data.
….
Joelving also found that Excel’s autofill function sometimes generated negative values, which were, in theory, impossible for some data. For example, Korea is missing R&Dinv (green R&D investments) data for 1990-1998. Heshmati and Tsionas used Excel’s autofill with three years of data (1999, 2000, and 2001) to create data for the nine missing years. The imputed values for 1990-1996 were negative, so the authors set these equal to the positive 1997 value.
Cancer Research Fraud
The Free Press, February 2024: We’re Not Curing Cancer Here, Guys
These concerns have been brewing for a while and they are reaching a tipping point. The fact that there’s been so much plagiarism at Harvard and there’s been all this image manipulation shows that the most venerable institutions are no safeguard against malfeasance.
What punishment have any of these researchers actually faced? Claudine Gay resigned, although was shuffled into a role that paid her very well. All of the authors of these disputed papers have, to my knowledge, faced no sanction. Their paper gets withdrawn, but they still get promoted. There’s no punishment.
A few years ago, there was a proposal by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors arguing that every paper published in the top journals should make the raw data available. That proposal was shot down because people were worried about their careers, and that other researchers would take their data and use it to make breakthroughs before them. Sharing is the solution. You should have to make all the data available whenever you publish medical research.
Research Fraud, etc. thread at GoActuary
Contains links to these and other stories
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
Let’s look at the condition of Minnesota Teachers, Connecticut state funds, and Chicago pensions, and three different (actually more) proposals to fix what ails these systems.
While Chicago is actually in the worst situation, the proposals for Chicago sound the most realistic in terms of fixing its problems.
Edward Siedle’s links
Mar 2024: Minnesota Teachers Fundraise Forensic Audit of State Pension System
Apr 2024: Minnesota Teacher Pension Forensic Investigation Invites Whistleblower, Expert And Public Participation
Minnesota Teachers in Public Plans Database
Minnesota Teachers Retirement Association - contains two plans in the database: Duluth Teachers and Minnesota Teachers. Duluth is small in terms of participants, so I will just link Minnesota Teachers plan.
Minnesota Teachers pension plan.
Some selected graphs:
Connecticut pension links
Hartford Courant op-ed
10 Ways to reform public pension funds
Improvements in the state's historical investment underperformance can alleviate the crushing income tax burden of transferring $7.7 billion in surplus contributions from state tax revenues to pay down the pension burden, and relieve state public employees and teachers from being docked an additional 2% of their wages each year to cover the investments hole. With even average performance in the past, Connecticut's income tax might have been sliced in half or more.
Given the scale of this challenge, it is remarkable that decades of underperformance of Connecticut's pension funds escaped public notice and scrutiny for as long as it did, until last year, when we revealed in a 113-page research report how Connecticut's pension funds have had one of the worst investment track records of all 50 peer states, across all timeframes, which garnered significant attention and calls to action from across the state. Given the asset management and endowment investing expertise in Connecticut, this was a tragic paradox.
Yale Business Report
113-slide version: The Investment Challenges Facing Connecticut’s Pension Funds - Jan 2023.pdf
Shorter version: Why Connecticut’s Investments Are Underperforming
Pie charts w/ the Excel defaults:
They actually cleaned it up a little bit from the originals.
Washington Pensions
Connecticut Pensions
As you can see, there is a very salient different between the two states.
And here we go:
Chicago pension links
Press Release, 5 Apr 2024: Harris School of Public Policy Announces Policy Innovation Challenge's Winning Student-Led Pension Proposal
Op-eds from the finalists
Read each team's op-ed via the links below:
The winning team: Opinion: Here's a roadmap to financial stability with Chicago's pensions
By Syed Ahmad , Anthony Beaupre , Liam Gluck , James Karsten , Greg Rudd
Opinion: To fix Chicago's pensions, consider a change in public opinion
By Eddie Andujar , Andy Fan , Andre Oviedo , Alberto Saldarriaga
Opinion: Two paths to funding Chicago's pension future
By Anna Weiss , Purva Sarkango , Devyanshi Dubey
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
That life expectancy was around 64 when Social Security was started is misleading. That is also irrelevant for making decisions for making Social Security sustainable now. The parameters involved are more complex: we need to look at life expectancy age 65, the size of the working population compared to the retired population, and how many children are coming to add to that working population. Decisions must be made within the next decade — raise taxes, cut benefits, or some combination. People will not be happy.
Episode Links
Prior STUMP posts related:
On Life Expectancy
That was the claim.
Here are the facts.
2023 OASDI Trustees Report — Table V.A4.—Period Life Expectancy: Historical Data
First, while period life expectancy from birth increased about 15-16 years from 1940 to 2019 (ignore the pandemic for now), the key life expectancy - from age 65 - didn’t extend quite so much — only 5-6 years. That’s because you have to survive to age 65 in the first place.
A chart from the American Academy of Actuaries based on the historical, plus projected, from the report:
Social Security History
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1: When did Social Security start?
A: The Social Security Act was signed by FDR on 8/14/35. Taxes were collected for the first time in January 1937 and the first one-time, lump-sum payments were made that same month. Regular ongoing monthly benefits started in January 1940.
American Academy of Actuaries
An Actuarial Perspective on the 2023 Social Security Trustees Report
Social Security Committee issue brief on 2023 Social Security Trustees Report examining the latest detailed annual assessment by the federal government of the program’s solvency.
(February 02, 2024)
Issue Brief: Reforming Social Security Sooner Rather Than Later
Social Security’s combined trust fund reserves are projected to become depleted around 2034,1 at which time its income would be able to pay only 80% of the benefits scheduled for its 80 million beneficiaries. It is important that Congress immediately focus on this issue because delay makes the solution more difficult, as it gradually limits the viable options to those relying on increasing taxes.
(October 31, 2023)
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
Looking at a recent sumo world scandal, but also looking at it from the point of view of self-regulation. Can self-regulation work? Looking at professional sumo in Japan, Equitable Life Assurance Society in the UK, and actuarial practice in public pensions in the United States.
[Gyoji photo: By Eckhard Pecher (Arcimboldo) - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3381695]
Episode Links
Hokuseiho/Miyagino Bullying Scandal
BBC News: Hakuho: Top sumo champion demoted due to protege's violence
Tachiai Blog: Hokuseiho is out; Miyagino Hangs On By a Thread
Japan Times, by John Gunning: How a rethink of supervision at stables could curtail bullying in sumo
Who Will Watch the Watchmen?
Wikipedia article
... nouiconsilia et ueteres quaecumque monetis amici,"pone seram, cohibes." sed quis custodiet ipsoscustodes? qui nunc lasciuae furta puellaehac mercede silent crimen commune tacetur.
... I knowthe plan that my friends always advise me to adopt:"Bolt her in, constrain her!" But who can watchthe watchmen? They keep quiet about the girl'ssecrets and get her as their payment; everyone hushes it up.
Equitable Life Assurance Society
Wikipedia article
European Parliament document on the fiasco: REPORT on the crisis of the Equitable Life Assurance Society
Equitable Life: A Decade of Regulatory Failure
Public Pension Segment
American Academy of Actuaries Public Discipline
Notice on Jonathan Schwartz’s public discipline from the Academy
Actuarial Board for Counseling and Discipline
STUMP Nov 2018: Actuarial History... Which is Not Really History
While the “voodoo” remark pissed off a lot of actuaries (and thus many complained to the ABCD), he also got dinged for this shoddy work. FWIW, he already did what the Academy required of him as part of his discipline, and while he’s listed as officially retired in the Actuarial Directory, he’s still a member of the SOA and Academy, as far as I can tell.
….
Schwartz was there to say that defined benefit pensions aren’t obsolete, and they are affordable.
And he “persuaded” that these were affordable… by fudging the numbers. Actuarial “voodoo” if you will.
He actually undermined the DB plans by lowballing the cost. Only in the short run do those in the unions get their payouts, but if it turns out the costs (which are ongoing – people who retired at age 50 back in 2008 have a high probability of still being alive, for instance) are too high….
dun dun DUN….
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
I reach back to a two-parter I wrote in 2012 for the Stepping Stone, the newsletter for the Leadership and Personal Development interest section of the Society of Actuaries. My argument: read the classics — they’re chock full of stories relevant to leadership.
Episode Links
The original articles:
Part 1: Leadership Books - the Classics
Part 2: The Classics, Part 2
Project Gutenberg Links
Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans by Plutarch
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete by Suetonius
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The Iliad by Homer
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
Let’s look at the 2024 Financial State of the Cities, the annual report from Truth in Accounting. This one is based on the reports coming from FY2022, so there is a lag, as you can tell. I focus specifically on New York City, the city coming in dead last, as well as a coming development in “machine-readable” data for state and local financial reporting.
Episode Links
Truth in Accounting’s FSOC 2024
PDF: https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/Financial-State-of-the-Cities-2024.pdf
A few graphs
A couple “random” towns I didn’t talk about:
In accounting terms, black is good, red is bad
Webinar:
Financial Data Transparency Act
Liz Farmer: 3 issues to watch in a landmark year for government financial data
DebtBook: Get the FDTA Playbook
Related Links
2020: Taxing Tuesday Special: State of the Cities from Truth in Accounting
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
Three tales of accountability… or lack thereof. I start with a “heartwarming” tale of a supposed Excel error - $92 million error - that becomes an opportunity to strengthen the corporate team… yay! (That’s not exactly what happened, FWIW.) The second one is from Liz Farmer and involves a Virginia town with finances in a mess. And the third… is really big. But shouldn’t surprise anybody.
Episode Links
Liz Farmer’s substack
I was not realizing this story is free to all:
Here is a quote from this free story:
A commonality with all the fiscal distress laws I’ve reviewed is that decisions are to be made for the sake of the health, safety and well-being of residents. When a locality is chronically unable to manage its finances, it endangers vital public services and puts residents at risk.
But state takeovers can go horribly wrong. In Michigan, studies have shown that the wide-ranging authority of the emergency manager law and the resulting lack of accountability of the manager in place in 2014 contributed directly to Flint’s devastating water crisis.
This is a worst-case scenario, but it shouldn’t be dismissed as an extreme. The fear that an outsider will strong-arm duly elected local officials and subvert the will of the people is a legitimate one. The key here is accountability. Virginia’s law requires an emergency manager to submit regular reports to state and local entities, which is one mechanism for accountability.
Sadly, the more common scenario is that residents suffer harm due to local officials’ inability (or unwillingness) to make the tough decisions that a fiscal crisis requires. Emergency response times tick upward, garbage litters the streets because trash pickup is unreliable, libraries and community centers operate on shortened hours—you get the point. I haven’t done a deep dive into Hopewell’s long-term financial trends, but I did stumble upon one datapoint that suggests residents here have increasingly been paying for the city’s fiscal woes.
I highly recommend Liz Farmer’s work.
The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund Story
Financial Times: The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fund’s $92 million error [paywall]
ResearchGate: Anthropological gaze, stories, and reflections on NBIM culture
Last year (spring 2022) we had an off-site. One of our workshops was on “Mistakes and how to deal with them”. We wrote post-it notes, classifying them into different categories from harmless to no-goes. One of my post-it notes, I remember it vividly, read: Miscalculation of the Ministry of Finance benchmark. I placed it in the category unforgivable. When I wrote that note, I honestly couldn’t even dare to think about the consequences . . . And less than a year later, I did exactly that. My worst nightmare. It was a manual mistake. My mistake. I used the wrong date, December 1st instead of November 1st which is clearly stated in our mandate. The mistake was not revealed until months later, by the Ministry of Finance. They reported back that the numbers did not add up. I did all the numbers once more, and the cause of the mistake was identified. I immediately reported to Patrick [Global Head] and Dag [Chief]. I openly express that this was my mistake, and mine alone. I felt miserable and was ready to take the consequences — whatever they might be.
Federal Debt and Entitlement Issue
Babylon Bee: Senators Say They're Not Super Worried About Running Up National Debt As Most Of Them Will Die Of Natural Causes In The Next Year Or So
Charles Blahous in Discourse Magazine: Americans Should Be Less Complacent About Social Security
STUMP Related Posts
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
I cover how some people live to a grand old age — by lying about it! And why do they do that? For the money, of course! The sentinel effect, though, can prevent this from occurring. Looking at the case of the oldest man in Japan who had been dead for 30 years and more.
Episode links
Secret of Supercentenarians?
2009, NewScientist: Secrets of the centenarians: Life begins at 100
Dying of old age"There is one, and only one, cause of death at older ages. And that is old age." So said Leonard Hayflick, one of the most influential gerontologists of all time. But dying of old age isn't just a case of peacefully losing the will to live - it is an accumulation of diseases and injuries different to those that tend to kill people at younger ages.For a start, the oldest old have very low rates of chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and stroke. The trend is particularly apparent for cancer. The odds of developing it increase sharply as people age, but they fall from the age of 84, and plummet from 90 onwards. Only 4 per cent of centenarians die of cancer, compared with 40 per cent of people that die in their fifties and sixties.Many centenarians even manage to ward off chronic diseases after indulging in a lifetime of serious health risks. Many people in the New England Centenarian Study experienced a century free of cancer or heart disease despite smoking as many as 60 cigarettes a day for 50 years. The same story applies to people from Japan's longevity hotspot, Okinawa, where around half of the local supercentenarians had a history of smoking and one-third were regular alcohol drinkers. These people may well have genes that protect them from the dangers of carcinogens or the random mutations that crop up naturally when cells divide.So what does kill off the oldest old? Pneumonia is the biggest culprit, with other respiratory infections, accidents and intestinal problems trailing behind. "Dying of old age involves total systems failure," says Craig Willcox of the Okinawa Centenarian Study in Japan. "Centenarians avoid age-associated diseases, but you see a lot of systemic wear and tear. Almost all of them have had some problems with cataracts, they can't hear very well and have osteoarthritis. Our most recently deceased centenarian in Okinawa caught a cold and died in her sleep."
2019, Vox: Study: many of the “oldest” people in the world may not be as old as we think
We’ve long been obsessed with the super-elderly. How do some people make it to 100 or even 110 years old? Why do some regions — say, Sardinia, Italy, or Okinawa, Japan —produce dozens of these “supercentenarians” while other regions produce none? Is it genetics? Diet? Environmental factors? Long walks at dawn?
A new working paper released on bioRxiv, the open access site for prepublication biology papers, appears to have cleared up the mystery once and for all: It’s none of the above.
Instead, it looks like the majority of the supercentenarians (people who’ve reached the age of 110) in the United States are engaged in — intentional or unintentional — exaggeration.
….
The paper also looks at the phenomenon in Italy and Japan, where something different seems to be happening.
Italy keeps better vital statistics than the United States does, and has had reliable vital statistics across the country for hundreds of years — yet in Italy, too, there are clusters of the country where lots of supercentenarians pop up. Maybe the Italian supercentenarians are for real?
Newman’s analysis suggests not. He starts out by noticing something fishy: The parts of Italy that claim the most supercentenarians overall have high crime rates and low life expectancy. Isn’t that weird? Why would an area generally have low life expectancy but also produce an extremely disproportionate share of the world’s oldest people?
The same pattern repeats itself in Japan: Okinawa has the greatest density of super-old people, despite having one of the lowest life expectancies in the country and generally poor health outcomes.
The paper puts forward a controversial proposal. It seems unlikely that living in high-crime, low-life-expectancy areas is the thing that makes it likeliest to reach age 110. It seems likelier, the paper concludes, that many — perhaps even most — of the people claiming to reach age 110 are engaged in fraud or at least exaggeration. The paper gives a couple of examples of how this might come about; some of it might be reporting error, and some of the supercentenarians might be produced by pension fraud (someone might be claiming a dead person is still alive for pension benefits, or claiming the identity of a parent or older sibling).
bioRXiV: Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans
Abstract: The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
PDF: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1.full.pdf
Japan Pension Fraud
July 2010, BBC News: Tokyo's 'oldest man' had been dead for 30 years
He was thought to be the oldest man in Tokyo - but when officials went to congratulate Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday, they uncovered mummified skeletal remains lying in his bed.
Mr Kato may have been dead for 30 years according to Japanese authorities.
They grew suspicious when they went to honour Mr Kato at his address in Adachi ward, but his granddaughter told them he "doesn't want to see anybody".
Police are now investigating the family on possible fraud charges.
Wikipedia: Sogen Kato, Aftermath
After the discovery of Kato's mummified corpse, other checks into elderly centenarians across Japan produced reports of missing centenarians and faulty recordkeeping. Tokyo officials attempted to find the oldest woman in the city, 113-year-old Fusa Furuya, who was registered as living with her daughter. Furuya's daughter said she had not seen her mother for over 25 years.[12] The revelations about the disappearance of Furuya and the death of Kato prompted a nationwide investigation, which concluded that police did not know if 234,354 people older than 100 were still alive.[13] More than 77,000 of these people, officials said, would have been older than 120 years old if they were still alive. Poor record keeping was blamed for many of the cases,[13] and officials said that many may have died during World War II. One register claimed a man was still alive at age 186.[14]
Following the revelations about Kato and Furuya, analysts investigated why recordkeeping by Japanese authorities was poor. Many seniors have, it has been reported, moved away from their family homes. Statistics show that divorce is becoming increasingly common among the elderly. Dementia, which afflicts more than two million Japanese, is also a contributing factor. "Many of those gone missing are men who left their hometowns to look for work in Japan's big cities during the country's pre-1990s boom years. Many of them worked obsessively long hours and never built a social network in their new homes. Others found less economic success than they'd hoped. Ashamed of that failure, they didn't feel they could return home,"[13] a Canadian newspaper reported several months after the discovery of Kato's body.[13]
New York State Pension Fraud
July 2023:
DiNapoli: Texas Woman Charged with Stealing Over $65,000 in NYS Pension Payments
State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli announced the indictment of a 53-year-old Texas woman for allegedly stealing more than $65,000 in New York state pension payments meant for a deceased acquaintance. Christy Gibson, of Smith County, Texas, was indicted by Texas prosecutors and charged with one count of theft after an investigation by DiNapoli’s office.
“Christy Gibson went to great lengths to cover up the death of an acquaintance to line her own pockets,” DiNapoli said. “Thanks to the work of my investigators and law enforcement in Texas, she will be held accountable. We will continue to partner with law enforcement from across the country to protect the New York State Retirement System.”
William H. Walsh Jr. retired from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in November 1986. He elected to receive a reduced monthly retirement benefit so his wife, Mary L. Walsh, would continue to receive payments if he died before her. William Walsh died in October 2005. Mary Walsh died in December 2012 and at the time of death the pension payments should have stopped. Instead, her death was never reported to the New York state retirement system.
In May 2013, the retirement system received information indicating that Walsh may have died, and pension payments were halted. In June of that year, the retirement system sought verification that Mary Walsh was still alive and subsequently received notarized verification, purportedly from Mary Walsh. As a result, the pension payments were reinstated.
A later investigation by the State Comptroller’s Office found that Mary Walsh was in fact deceased, and the verification was fraudulent.
In total, 70 pension payments were paid after date of death, amounting to $65,102.28.
The pension payments went into a joint account in the name of Mary Walsh and Gibson that was opened in 2011. Gibson never informed the bank of Walsh’s death or removed Walsh’s name from the account. It appears that Gibson was an acquaintance of Mary Walsh through her sister-in-law and also worked at the nursing home where Walsh eventually lived.
DiNapoli’s investigators determined that Gibson used the joint account to pay for entertainment and food. Gibson also made electronic transfers and cash withdrawals.
The Value of the Sentinel Effect
Product Development News, October 1998, Richard L. Bergstrom, The Underwriter’s Corner, “The Value of the Sentinel Effect (Revisited)” https://www.soa.org/globalassets/assets/library/newsletters/product-development-news/1998/october/pdn-1998-iss47-bergstrom.pdf
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
In the brou-ha-ha over Chris Rufo’s masters degree from Harvard (Extension School), people expose that Harvard education is not particularly special, but that the brand comes from selectivity more than the education. I talk about the distinction between education and credentials, and my preference for separating the two.
Episode Links
Harvard
About Harvard Extension School
Since our founding in 1910, we have extended Harvard University to the world — to adult learners who have the curiosity and drive to be challenged. Part of the Harvard Division of Continuing Education, we serve students seeking part-time online courses and programs to advance their careers or pursue an academic passion.
We are a fully accredited Harvard school. Our degrees and certificates are adorned with the Harvard University insignia. They carry the weight of that lineage. Our graduates walk at University Commencement and become members of the Harvard Alumni Association.
Prof Hochschild statements
https://twitter.com/sfmcguire79/status/1745999107569631290
https://twitter.com/sfmcguire79/status/1745983162381987930
https://twitter.com/Jenniferhochsc2/status/1745912823689973880
Chris Rufo statements
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1746301145004613819
https://twitter.com/BarneyFlames/status/1745928845167821101
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1745922978553155749
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1745924111652806981
Personal MBA
Personal MBA website
Personal MBA Manifesto
The Personal MBA is a project designed to help you educate yourself about advanced business concepts. This manifesto will show you how to substantially increase your knowledge of business on your own time and with little cost, all without setting foot inside a classroom.
The Personal MBA is more flexible than a traditional MBA program, doesn’t involve going into massive debt, and won’t interrupt your income stream for two years. Just pick up one of these business books, learn as much as you can, discuss what you learn with others, then go out into the real world and make great things happen.
If you’re interested in educating yourself about business, The Personal MBA is the best place to start.
“Get Your Personal MBA!” by Mary Pat Campbell, July 2009
The Personal MBA concept revolves around a booklist, organized into categories such as communication, project management, entrepreneurship, leadership and personal development. Titles include familiar business classics:
Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and
Influence People Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
There are also newer books on the list, such as Seth Godin’s Tribes, published in October 2008, which looks at the impact of new communication channels (e.g. Twitter or Facebook) on the concept of effective leadership.
….
My own recommendation regarding use of the PMBA reading list is to prioritize reading the older books on the list over the newer ones. Many of the newer titles (such as the previously mentioned Tribes) are faddish and will probably not have lasting relevance.
….
A personal recommendation from the PMBA reading list is Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics. Originally published in 1954, this book is a short and gentle introduction to popular distortions and misuses of statistics (and some of the numbers he quotes are good for a laugh). I read this book when I first learned statistics, and I’ve used it in my teaching of the subject since then. A good followup to this book (not on the PMBA list) are Edward Tufte’s books1 on graphical presentation of numerical data, which may help you think of effective graphical presentations in your own work.
“Quit Paying For Business Education!” by Mary Pat Campbell, October 2008
I come not to praise the business book, but to bury it.
There is much crystallized wisdom and information in the many books in the business section of stores like Barnes & Noble (especially if “Drucker” is on the spine). However, too often I find I’ve put down good money for something that is outdated (given long publication cycles), full of lightweight prescriptions that aren’t actionable, or is based on a metaphor extended far beyond any reasonable application. I get tired of the books churned out by CEOs boosting their egos, or consultants using the books as vehicles to drum up business or speaking engagements.
The book sits lifeless in my hand, its story unfolding in a linear manner, with no interaction between me and the material except a reflective one. I’ve written comments in the margins of books: “What did he mean by that?”, “Where can I learn more about this?”, “What a crock!”.
But no one answers.
My “No Child’s Ass Left Unkicked” Idea
Jan 2007: Charles Murray response: teaching wisdom
Again, all these lessons are important for everybody, but one likely has to make special provisions for those who are extremely intelligent as they're the least likely to run into these lessons in a standard classroom. It's hard to learn humility when you're constantly lauded as the best. It's hard to learn that hard work is needed when everything is easy for you. It's hard to give others their proper respect when others are always praising your results more than others.So, in short, all kids need to have their asses kicked, but the intellectually gifted are least likely to have that done. So we've got to make sure they get what's coming to them, too.I call this plan the No Child's Ass Left Unkicked plan.
Archive of my education-related posts on livejournal - oldest post on that list is 2001
First Things Podcast
In this episode, Andrew Youngblood joins Mark Bauerlein to discuss his new book “Know Thyself: Catholic Classical Education and the Discovery of Self.”
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
In which I give some advice as to what composition teachers should do, given that students can just go to chatGPT and ask it to generate an essay on whatever. The tool is being used, and I think there are intelligent ways to use it for composition.
Episode Links
Prior episode in referring to ChatGPT use in academic papers
Guillaume Cabanac
Twitter feed: Guillaume Cabanac ⟨here and elsewhere⟩
He retweeted:
https://twitter.com/clementFFF/status/1745193183988871357
https://twitter.com/gcabanac/status/1689334454798491648
Cabanac also has a suite of tools to discover academic papers in STEM with tortured language as an indicator that something may be suspect with the method or results.
Meep’s rant on calculator use in math class
25 Aug 2000: Here is my tirade on calculators.
In 1988, when I took trigonometry in high school, graphing calculators were an expensive new tool and calculators hadn't really been integrated into the mathematics curriculum. We mainly used calculators to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and sometimes even take a square root. However, even these most rudimentary calculators were forbidden my first quarter in trig. ....Fast forward to 1996, in which very sophisticated calculators and computer programs have been incorporated into the math curriculum, from pre-algebra to trigonometry to calculus and beyond. I spent four years as a computer consultant for the math department at North Carolina State University, which had fully incorporated the symbolic math program Maple into its Calculus curriculum. I saw many of the students doing the same thing as my fellow students from so many years before: taking the functions they had and applying all sorts of things from example Maple worksheets to it, hoping they would recognize the answer when they saw it. If they were lucky, the homework problem exactly paralleled the examples. Usually, they were not lucky, and they, like Cinderella's step-sisters trying on the dainty slipper, would hack at the problem given trying to make it fit one of the examples that had previously been done. This, obviously, is a stupid way to apply technology to math problems. Much has been made of the use of calculators and computers in math, and they are indeed very useful, powerful, and even necessary tools in modern math research. However, I feel that the focus of the use of these tools has been misplaced. Too often they are seen as something that can remove the tedium from math, as opposed to tools that remove tedious calculations that one understands very well and can do by hand one's self. People claim that many students are turned off by math early on due to excessive rote memorization of addition tables, multiplication tables, and the like. Math is about recognizing patterns, not simply arithmetic, they enthusiastically proclaim, and let us use calculators to cut through the tedium of practicing long division and graphing lines. I would agree with them -- mathematics has very little to do with arithmetic and has everything to do with finding patterns and relations and using these things to solve problems. Indeed, I rarely do long division by hand, or even integrate by hand anymore. However, I do not agree with the reasons as to why students are getting turned off from math. They get turned off because they do not understand it.
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
In which I discuss the recent brou-ha-ha over ex-President of Harvard Claudine Gay’s plagiarism in her published papers (and dissertation), the likelihood of widespread plagiarism (in certain fields), and the incentives to plagiarism and faked data in academia.
Episode Links
Tom Lehrer: Lobachevsky
Tom Lehrer songs page for Lobachevsky
Lyrics
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!
Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes.
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize --
Only be sure always to call it please "research".
Harvard, Claudine Gay, and Bill Ackman
NY Post: Revealed: Harvard cleared Claudine Gay of plagiarism BEFORE investigating her — and its lawyers falsely claimed her work was ‘properly cited’
Harvard cleared its president Claudine Gay of plagiarism before it even investigated whether her academic work was copied, The Post reveals today.
In a threatening legal letter to The Post in late October, the college called allegations that she lifted other academics’ work “demonstrably false,” and said all her works were “cited and properly credited.”
Days later Gay herself asked for an investigation and Harvard tore up its own rules to ask outside experts to review her work, saying it had to avoid a conflict of interest.
CNN: Business Insider stands by reporting on Bill Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, says stories ‘are accurate’ with ‘no unfair bias’
Business Insider and its parent company, Axel Springer, said Sunday that they stood by the outlet’s reporting that Neri Oxman, a prominent former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, had plagiarized in her doctoral dissertation.
In a note Sunday morning, Barbara Peng, chief executive of Business Insider, said the outlet had spent several days reviewing its reporting after public complaints made by Ackman. The review, Peng said, found that “there was no unfair bias” and that the “process we went through to report, edit, and review the stories was sound.”
Peng said a pair of stories the outlet published earlier this month reporting that Oxman had plagiarized other scholars’ work and lifted more than a dozen sections from Wikipedia “are accurate.” She described Oxman as a “fair subject” and “has a public profile as a prominent intellectual and has been a subject of and participant in media coverage,” rebutting Ackman’s complaints that she should have been immune to coverage tied to Ackman’s recent activism.
Fortune: Bill Ackman vows plagiarism checks on MIT president and faculty after wife pulled into fray: ‘We will share our findings in the public domain’
Bill Ackman ramped up his campaign against Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth, saying he will begin checks on the work of all of the school’s current faculty members for plagiarism.
The move, announced Friday in a post on X, comes after Business Insider expanded its allegations of plagiarism against Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor. The billionaire investor said that faculty members, including Kornbluth and MIT board members, will be subject to checks using MIT’s own plagiarism standards.
“We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency,” Ackman said, adding that “it is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.”
Data Colada and faked data
17 Aug 2021: [98] Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty
17 June 2023: [109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): "Clusterfake"
20 June 2023: [110] Data Falsificada (Part 2): "My Class Year Is Harvard"
23 June 2023: [111] Data Falsificada (Part 3): "The Cheaters Are Out of Order"
30 June 2023: [112] Data Falsificada (Part 4): "Forgetting The Words"
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
Let’s look back on the year that was 2023 at STUMP: growth in subscriptions, my top four posts from 2023, my spin-off substack in sumo statistics, and some Catholic recommendations for the new year.
Episode Links
STUMP growth
(hmmm, kind of oxymoronic)
That vertical leap in midyear is thanks to the substack network. I did not do any promotional drive myself.
Top 4 Posts
1. Top Causes of Death by Age Group, 2021: Finalized U.S. Stats
2. Geeking Out: Replicating Nate Silver's COVID & Partisanship "Work"
Anyway, of all the things people hold against Nate Silver, the thing I hold against him is this sloppy kind of approach to modeling, but seriously, I don’t even know why anybody is going to political affiliation if you can JUST GO TO VAX STATUS TO BEGIN WITH!
Isn’t that supposed to be what this argument is about? That those stupid Republicans aren’t vaccinated and thus dying of COVID? If you had the vax info, just start with that!
And why are all these people allergic to drawing graphs? There are plenty of free options if you are so cheap you can’t afford the Excel license (jeez, I mean.. what?)
3. Who will bail out Chicago?
Chicago is deep in debt.
As the Little Red Hen might ask: Who Will Help Chicago Get Out Of That Hole?
I am not going to make the mistake of Meredith Whitney — Chicago, for now, has cash flow, which to politicians means it’s not bankrupt!
Anybody who looks at Truth in Accounting’s 2023 Financial State of the Cities, seeing Chicago sitting at number 74 out of 75 [and yeah, I know NYC is sitting at 75 - I will treat with NYC in time], could say: “Oh, but that’s just a balance sheet! All those debts aren’t due all at once!”
But the problem is this: unlike with NYC, Chicago’s largest debt is unfunded pensions. And that debt just keeps getting larger.
4. Deaths from Heat and Cold: Deception and Update for U.S. 1999-2022
Sumo Spin-Off
Insurance Collaboration to Save Lives
Catholic Recommendations
Catechism in a Year Podcast
Bible in a Year Podcast
The Pillar — Catholic Journalism
Examples from The Pillar:
Meet Mr. Mincione - very long interview with one of the people recently convicted in the Vatican financial scandal (before convicted & sentenced).
Where in the world are permanent deacons? - an example of one of their data-driven pieces:
Is it still Christmas? The octave, the 12 days, and what you need to know - an example of one of their explainers. In this case - the Christmas octave vs. the 12 Days of Christmas
(I joke that the Christmas decorations don’t come down until Candelmas …. but that’s because I like the lights… and I’m lazy)
For a little extra, here’s me & my son Diarmuid singing the 12 Days of Christmas in 2018:
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
I look at an opinion piece by fellow actuary Larry Pollack, on the new low-default pension obligation measure that is to be added to actuarial reports for public pensions in the U.S. These should start coming out in 2024.
Episode Links
Larry Pollack: New Disclosure Rules Expose Bad Actuarial Finance; Obscures Trillions of Public Pension Debt
Actuarial finance assumes away the cost of the guarantee, but real finance doesn’t work that way.
….
The Actuarial Standards Board, which defines professional standards for actuaries, finally acknowledged the criticisms and adopted a requirement for actuaries to calculate and disclose – starting with funding reports to be published (mostly) in 2024 – a liability measure more consistent with finance principles. The new measure provides valuable information not previously available, although it is not perfect, and, importantly, it will not affect actuarially-determined contributions or financial accounting.
Further, many prominent and influential public pension actuaries are rejecting this opportunity to educate their clients and the public about how much worse the funding of public pensions is versus what’s commonly reported. Instead, these actuaries have aligned with major public pension advocacy groups in developing a toolkit as part of a campaign to help actuaries and public officials divert attention from the significance and implications of the new figure. Among other things, the toolkit provides model explanatory language for actuarial reports, including the misleading assertion that the difference between the new measure and the current one represents “expected taxpayer savings” from investing in risky assets, rather than heretofore hidden public debt.
John Bury: New Disclosure Rules Expose Bad Actuarial Finance; Obscures Trillions of Public Pension Debt
So what is it the ASB wants actuaries to disclose? Slides from a recent Conference of Consulting Actuaries webinar provide a good overview. Excerpts below:
New required calculation and disclosure when performing a funding valuation: Low-Default-Risk Obligation Measure (LDROM) (page 9)
If the actuary concludes, based on the assessment required that the Contribution Allocation Procedure (CAP) or plan’s funding policy is significantly inconsistent with the plan accumulating adequate assets to make benefit payments when due, disclose that conclusion as well as an estimate of the approximate time until assets are depleted. (page 24) – wondering where they could have gotten this idea.
John Bury November 2010: RNSP (2) – Drop-Dead Dates for State Pensions
Earlier this year Joshua D. Rauh of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University released a paper that set drop-dead dates for selected state pension plans to which the government-plans community objected. I too had my doubts about Professor Rauh’s methodology and assumptions and, having recently done my own study of 110 public pension plans, decided to embark on a similar study.
Here are the numbers.
Conference of Consulting Actuaries: ASOP 4 Updated Guidance
ASOP 4: MEASURING PENSION OBLIGATIONS AND DETERMINING PENSION PLAN COSTS OR CONTRIBUTIONS
3.11 LOW-DEFAULT-RISK OBLIGATION MEASURE
When performing a funding valuation, the actuary should calculate and disclose a low-default-risk obligation measure of the benefits earned (or costs accrued if appropriate under the actuarial cost method used for this purpose) as of the measurement date. The actuary need not calculate and disclose this obligation measure more than once per year.
When calculating this measure, the actuary should use an immediate gain actuarial cost method.
When calculating this measure, the actuary should select a discount rate or discount rates derived from low-default-risk fixed income securities whose cash flows are reasonably consistent with the pattern of benefits expected to be paid in the future. Examples of discount rates that may meet these requirements include, but are not limited to, the following:
* US Treasury yields;
* rates implicit in settlement of pension obligations including payment of lump sums and purchases of annuities from insurance companies;
* yields on corporate or tax-exempt general obligation municipal bonds that receive one of the two highest ratings given by a recognized ratings agency;
* non-stabilized ERISA funding rates for single employer plans; and
* multiemployer current liability rates.
When plan provisions create pension obligations that are difficult to appropriately measure using traditional valuation procedures, such as benefits affected by actual investment returns, movements in a market index, or other similar factors, the actuary should consider using alternative valuation procedures such as those described under section 3.5.3 to calculate the low-default-risk obligation measure of those benefits earned or costs accrued as of the measurement date.
For purposes of this obligation measure, the actuary should consider reflecting the impact, if any, of investing plan assets in low-default-risk fixed income securities on the pattern of benefits expected to be paid in the future, such as in a variable annuity plan.
When calculating this measure, the actuary should not reflect benefit payment default risk or the financial health of the plan sponsor.
Other than the discount rate or discount rates, the actuary may use the same assumptions used in the funding valuation for this measure. Alternatively, the actuary may select other assumptions that are consistent with the discount rate or discount rates and reasonable for the purpose of the measurement, in accordance with ASOP Nos. 27 and 35.
The actuary should provide commentary to help the intended user understand the significance of the low-default-risk obligation measure with respect to the funded status of the plan, plan contributions, and the security of participant benefits. The actuary should use professional judgment to determine the appropriate commentary for the intended user.
Related posts
Jan 2020: Revisiting Actuarial Standards: ASOP 4 Has Second Exposure Draft
April 2018: Around the Pension-o-Sphere: Actuaries Testifying, New Standards, Actuary Bloggers, Pew Report, and Connecticut
Jan 2018: Actuarial Standards of Practice on Pensions: ASOP 4 - a Call for Comments
Feb 2017: Public Pensions: Actuarial Assumptions and Professional Ethics
July 2014: Public Pensions Watch: Tell the Actuaries What You Want To Know
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
In which I thank all the 2023 Movember donors, and I encourage spreading the love.
Episode links
Movember 2023
Here are the places you can donate to the Movember Foundation, which supports men’s health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health:
* Mary Pat Campbell’s MoSpace – a place to donate at Movember itself
* My Movember Facebook fundraiser – my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you
And here’s a QR code if that works better for you:
Literary References
Dante: Building a Modern Hell - something I wrote in 1995, re: Niven & Pournelle’s Inferno vs. Dante’s
Mrs. Jellyby - Mrs. Jellyby and the Domination of Causes, essay by Jim Forest
While few in the peace movement so radically neglect those in their care, unfortunately I cannot think of Mrs. Jellyby merely as a gross caricature. When my wife and I talked about her recently, we could think of several people, of both sexes, resembling her in many details: people with a certain legitimate concerns and noble goals who engage themselves so fully that their fixation wrecks havoc in the lives of those around them, driving many people they intended to influence, even their own sons and daughters, in the opposite direction.
Milton, On His Blindness
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Works of Mercy
Corporal Works of Mercy - examples from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
* Feed the hungry
* Give drink to the thirsty
* Shelter the homeless
* Visit the sick
* Visit prisoners and ransom the hostage
* Bury the dead
* Give alms to the poor
Spiritual Works of Mercy
* Instructing the ignorant
* Counseling the doubtful
* Admonishing the sinner
* Comforting the sorrowful
* Forgiving injuries
* Bearing wrongs patiently
* Praying for the living and the dead
Educational charities I support
BEAM — Bridge to Enter Advanced Math
My post on BEAM:
Donors Choose: I often find small projects in local communities to support here
Once I bought ALL of the Dr. Seuss books for kids to populate a classroom.
I often pick special needs classrooms in New York.
Learning Ally: I used to record math and computer science textbooks for them when I worked in NYC.
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
Looking at my Movember 2023 fundraiser, its current progress, and concerns over how cancer screening and treatment may have been interrupted during the pandemic.
Episode Links
Movember Fundraiser
Here are the places you can donate to the Movember Foundation, which supports men’s health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health:
* Mary Pat Campbell’s MoSpace – a place to donate at Movember itself
* My Movember Facebook fundraiser – my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you
And here’s a QR code if that works better for you:
Movember 2023 Posts
Top Death Rate — Cancer by Sex
Spreadsheet
Support men’s health!
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
Spurred on the untimely death of Matthew Perry (from the cast of Friends, not the 19th century U.S. naval commander), I look back at the history of U.S. mortality trends in a longer trend and how much they’ve improved, and how middle-aged men dying (possibly) of a heart attack would have been very common in the 1950s… but then I end on a happy note. Seriously.
Episode Links
Mortality Trends in the United States, 1900–2018
Childhood death rates
Children's Death Rates Prior Posts
* 2023: Toddler and Teen Terror 2022 U.S. Mortality: Large Increases Over 2019
* 2022: Childhood Mortality Trends, 1999-2021 (provisional), Ages 1-17 Revisited: Teen Mortality Increased 30% 2019 to 2021
The Nasty Old Days
The Good Old Days -- They Were Terrible!
by Otto L. Bettman
The disgusting old days is more like it
Jan 2001
This book is absolutely harrowing and makes one wonder how America lasted until the 20th century -- learn the 19th century origins of the U.S. drug problem (children got hooked on the morphine and the opium in the patent medicines given to them to calm them down, for example) and why the Prohibition might not actually have been an over-reaction to alcohol; learn how our public school system originated as a rote memorization factory in which children ill-fed, ill-taught, and ill-washed crammed onto benches while an ignorant man or woman, not paid enough for even room and board, tried to keep some semblance of order (for which endeavor one schoolteacher got stoned to death for her pains); learn how common were the transportation accidents of the day, in which railroad tracks went through towns without regard to the usual traffic and a propensity for cutting the maintenance costs meant dangerous conditions for those on and off the train.
This book does not go into exhaustive detail (even if it exhausts the reader), and is illustrated with clippings from magazines and newspapers of the time. One other reviewer complained that photographs weren't used, but truthfully I don't =want= to see the photographs of the conditions. The drawings and the text provide enough horror, and I think Dr. Bettman did not want to put readers off =too= much. Also, the drawings from the press give one information that photographs would not have -- the perspective of the people at the time. Many of the drawings come with captions or some doggerel poetry, indicating how well people knew what disgusting things they were getting into.
BEETHOVEN! (4th movement of 5th Symphony)
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
In which I use the example of a valuation model gone awry from “Power Failure”, reviewed by Paul Conlin in an April 2023 Society of Actuaries podcast (linked in show notes). The book was about the failure of GE when it switched from being an electricity-related company to a financial services company. This episode is really about professionalism in modeling - and how all modeling professionals should have standards.
Episode Links
Society of Actuaries Podcast
https://soapodcasts.libsyn.com/2023/04
Dave Dillon discussed with Paul Conlin, FSA, MAAA, the recently-published book “Power Failure” by William Cohan, on the 2001-2018 unraveling of General Electric. One of the business events which led to the near-failure of GE was an under-reserving of Long Term Care reserves by 16 billion dollars, discovered in 2018 just as various other problems were emerging for the company. There are lessons for actuaries in the series of events which led to the LTC reserve “accident”.
Actuarial Standards of Practice
ASOP 56: Modeling
History of the Standard
The ASB first began work on a standard for modeling in the late 1990s. Motivated primarily to address the role catastrophe modeling of earthquakes and hurricanes played in casualty ratemaking, this work was focused on the use of specialized models where actuaries would have to rely on a model that was developed by professionals other than actuaries. As a result of this work, ASOP No. 38, Using Models Outside the Actuary’s Area of Expertise, was approved by the ASB in June of 2000 with the scope of the standard limited to the Property/Casualty area of practice. Historically, ASOP No. 38 had been the only ASOP that specifically addressed modeling.
Recently, the number and importance of modeling applications in actuarial science have increased, with the results of actuarial models sometimes being reflected in financial statements.
Recognizing this trend, the ASB asked the Life Committee in 2010 to begin work on an ASOP focused on modeling. The Life Committee formed a task force to address this issue and, in February of 2012, a discussion draft titled Modeling in Life Insurance and Annuities was released and nineteen comment letters were received. The transmittal letter also mentioned that the scope might be expanded to all practice areas and asked for comments on this idea.
Based upon the feedback received, and numerous other discussions on the topic of modeling, in December of 2012 the ASB created two multi-disciplinary task forces under the direction of the General Committee: i) a general Modeling Task Force, charged with developing an ASOP to address modeling applications in all practice areas, and ii) a Catastrophe Modeling Task Force to consider expanding ASOP No. 38 to all practice areas while focusing exclusively on using catastrophe models. The membership of these task forces has experience in all actuarial practice areas, including enterprise risk management.
First Exposure Draft
The first exposure draft was released in June 2013 with a comment deadline of September 30, 2013. Forty-eight comment letters were received and considered in making changes that were reflected in the second exposure draft.
Second Exposure Draft
A second exposure draft was released in November 2014 with a comment deadline of March 1, 2015. Thirty-seven comment letters were received and considered in making changes that were reflected in the third exposure draft.
Third Exposure Draft
A third exposure draft was released in June 2016 with a comment deadline of October 31, 2016. Twenty-eight comment letters were received and considered in making changes that were reflected in the fourth exposure draft.
Fourth Exposure Draft
A fourth exposure draft was released in December 2018 with a comment deadline of May 15, 2019. Twenty-six comment letters were received and considered in making changes that were reflected in this final ASOP. For a summary of the issues contained in these comment letters, please see appendix 2.
Related STUMP posts
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
In which I look at data issues generated via spreadsheet use (specifically how Excel changes data when are imported into Excel) in genomics research. I reference the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (I’m a member!), ASOP 23 on data quality, and give some unsolicited advice to the genomics research community. There will be a part two on other spreadsheet issues, and other actuarial standards. (Professionalism credit! For free!)
Episode Links
Retraction Watch guest post: Genomics has a spreadsheet problem by Mandhri Abeysooriya and Mark Ziemann
Excerpt:
Gene-name errors were discovered by Barry R. Zeeberg and his team at the National Institutes of Health in 2004. Their study first showed that when genomic data is handled in Excel, the program automatically corrects gene names to dates. What’s more, Riken clone identifiers – unique name tags given to pieces of DNA – can be misinterpreted as numbers with decimal points.
In 2016, we conducted a more extensive search, showing that in more than 3,500 articles published between 2005 and 2015, 20% of Excel gene lists contained errors in their supplementary files.
….
The widespread adoption of these new names is a lengthy process: Our latest study, of more than 11,000 articles published between 2014 and 2020, found that 31% of supplementary files that included gene lists in Excel contained errors. This percentage is higher than in our previous 2016 study.
My comment:
The “helpful” way Excel automatically changes text it imports into numerals or dates can screw up my mortality tables I import, where the “1-4” (intended to mean ages 1 years to 4 years) gets transformed to January 4 of the current year.
Ed Cruz (from EuSpRIG) comment:
I believe the primary issue lies in Data Validation. Here’s a proven data management approach that has yielded success for clients in the banking and securities industry:Rather than directly managing raw data within an Excel spreadsheet, create custom database application to handle data effectively:1. Data Validation and Exception Reporting: The application initiates by uploading raw Genomics data into a database. Here, data validation rules are applied before the upload, ensuring data integrity, and promptly generating Exception reports in the event of any issues.2. Excel Template Integration: Afterward, application can query data and publish into a Genomics Excel template, enabling researchers to work with clean data and significantly enhancing accuracy and efficiency.This method not only addresses the data validation concern but also optimizes the entire Genomics data management process.
Cruz links to this 2-minute video:
Please pay particular attention to:1. 0:40, Validation rules are applied and generates an Excel Exceptions report.2. 1:10, Excel Template is populated with clean and processed data.
Video in which I mention Excel importation issue:
European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group
Main website:
https://eusprig.org/
Horror stories page: https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/
Example stories:
Identifier:POB2001
Title:Data not controlled, 16000 UK Covid-19 test results lost for a week
Source:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
Release Date:08 October 2020
Risk:Lives put at risk because the contact-tracing process had been delayed
Discrepancy:16,000 test cases in a week
Excel: Why using Microsoft’s tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost“The badly thought-out use of Microsoft’s Excel software was the reason nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases went unreported in England. [The labs] filed their [result logs] results in the form of text-based lists – known as CSV files – without issue. PHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system. The problem is that [Public Health England] PHE’s own developers picked an old file format to do this – known as XLS. As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of. And since each test result created several rows of data, in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases. When that total was reached, further cases were simply left off. To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates.”
[POB] I can correct the headline to:Why a lack of basic data controls caused Covid-19 results to be lostOf course they should not have chosen a file format with a size limit to process results. Nonetheless, whatever technology they used, anywhere data is exchanged between systems there must be checks and controls that reconcile the output of a transformation stage to its input, such as record counts and hash totals. Even if the upload process would only accept XLS files, batch total controls could have been imposed there too.
Identifier:POB2003
Title:Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates
Source:https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates
Release Date:06/08/2020
Risk:Inconvenience
Discrepancy:none
The bioinformatics community decided it was easier to change gene symbols than changing peoples’ habits.’Módos, whose job involves analyzing freshly sequenced genetic data, says Excel errors happen all the time, simply because the software is often the first thing to hand when scientists process numerical data. “It’s a widespread tool and if you are a bit computationally illiterate you will use it,” he says.’
My Slides for EuSpRIG 2010 meeting: I’ve Got 99 Problems but a Spreadsheet ain’t One
A lot of the links in that presentation are now dead. Alas.
Bonus MPC presentation: Think Outside the Parallelopiped - 2008
Podcasts?! Wha?
[and I brought my iPod with me, I think, to demonstrate the business podcasts I listened to then]
Actuarial Standards of Practice
Actuarial Standards of Practice: https://www.actuarialstandardsboard.org/standards-of-practice/
ASOP 23: Data Quality
1.1 PURPOSE
The purpose of this actuarial standard of practice (ASOP) is to provide guidance to the actuary when performing actuarial services involving data.
….
SECTION 3. ANALYSIS OF ISSUES AND RECOMMENDED PRACTICES
3.1 OVERVIEW
Appropriate data that are accurate and complete may not be available. The actuary should use available data that, in the actuary’s professional judgment, allow the actuary to perform the desired analysis. However, if significant data limitations are known to the actuary, the actuary should disclose those limitations and their implications in accordance with section 4.1(b). The following sections discuss such considerations in more detail.
etc.
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe -
In which I take Amit Varma’s podcast The Seen and the Unseen’s episode 347: India’s Pension Crisis, which he talks with guests Ajay Shah and Renuka Sane. In 2004, India switched from a traditional defined benefit plan for its public pensions to a defined contribution plan… and opened it up to the general population as well. In theory, at least. Evidently, in recent years, it has been running into political trouble. The issues in India’s retirement system woes are similar to the ones seen internationally.
Episode Links
The Seen and the Unseen with Amit Varma
Episode 347: India’s Massive Pensions Crisis
It might seem to be a subject that would interest only wonks and retirees, but “pensions can reshape an entire society.” Ajay Shah and Renuka Sane join Amit Varma in episode 347 of The Seen and the Unseen to explain why — and to take a deep dive into the crisis India is facing right now.
Ajay Shah
Ajay Shah’s home page
Ajay Shah c.v.
Ajay Shah, 2006: Pension guarantees are subtle
Ajay Shah, 2018: Stay the course on the NPS
Choices Have Consequences
* Retirement Policy
* Retirement Age
* Retirement Benefit Design – COLAs, Replacement Rate, Indexing, and More
* Funding (or, rather NOT funding) Public Pensions
* Pension Obligation Bonds
* Public Pension Investments in Alternative Assets
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe - Laat meer zien
