Afleveringen
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This one is dark, so youâve been warned. In my post last week on drug overdoses, I noted the great increase in drug overdose deaths during the pandemic, and I address the issue of drug addiction and its relationship with physical pain. Sometimes, there are no good choices.
Episode Links (Updated)
Matt Bivens, M.D. piece:
Drug Overdose Death Stats
Dashboard of U.S. Population Mortality â Opioid Deaths
SOA Research page: U.S. Population Mortality Observations â Updated with 2021 Experience
Historical Items
Laudanum: is a tincture of opium containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight (the equivalent of 1% morphine).[1] Laudanum is prepared by dissolving extracts from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) in alcohol (ethanol).
Innumerable Victorian women were prescribed the drug for relief of menstrual cramps and vague aches. Nurses also spoon-fed laudanum to infants. The Romantic and Victorian eras were marked by the widespread use of laudanum in Europe and the United States. Mary Todd Lincoln, for example, the wife of the US president Abraham Lincoln, was a laudanum addict, as was the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was famously interrupted in the middle of an opium-induced writing session of Kubla Khan by "a person on business from Porlock".[14] Initially a working class drug, laudanum was cheaper than a bottle of gin or wine, because it was treated as a medication for legal purposes and not taxed as an alcoholic beverage.
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Ohio State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) is having some drama, as a consulting firm has resigned due to power struggles between competing interests. The plan participants, whether current teachers or retirees, are angry about STRS investment staff getting bonuses while they do not get cost-of-living adjustments for retirement benefits. All of this while in an economic environment of high inflation⊠they arenât the first and will not be the last.
Episode Links
Ohio STRS media coverage
1 May 2024, Pensions & Investment: Ohio State Teachers loses Aon as consultant amid board turmoil
Ohio State Teachersâ Retirement System, Columbus, has lost Aon as a governance consultant after the firm resigned from the assignment, according to people familiar with the matter.
The $94 billion pension fundâs board recently tilted to a majority of self-proclaimed reformers who want to gut investment staff and move the pension fund to all index funds, citing a desire to restore a permanent 3% cost-of-living adjustment.
At the April 18 board meeting, Trustee Wade Steen reclaimed his seat after the 10th District Court of Appeals earlier that day ruled that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine did not have the authority in May 2023 to remove Steen as his appointed investment expert on the STRS board before the completion of his four-year term.
5 May 2024, Toledo Blade: Editorial: STRS got fired
The State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio needs a new fiduciary governance adviser. The $92 billion retirement fund for 500,000 Ohio teachers was effectively fired by Aon Fiduciary Services over the chaos on the STRS board.
When the 10th District Court of Appeals ruled that Gov. Mike DeWine acted outside his constitutional authority in firing his appointed investment expert Wade Steen, there suddenly was a 6-5 board majority in support of reforms first advocated by Mr. Steen.
STRS Board Chairman Dale Price, a Toledo Public School teacher, abruptly ended the April 18 meeting without the procedural norms of a motion to adjourn and a vote that supports the motion. The reform majority on the STRS Board was left to sputter in outrage as Mr. Price raced out of STRS headquarters.
April 2024: Ousted STRS member makes dramatic return to board, armed with court ruling
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) â The governor overstepped his authority when he removed a member of the state teacher pension board, a court has ruled.
Ohioâs 10th District Court of Appeals sided with ousted State Teachers Retirement System investment expert Wade Steen on Thursday, ruling that Gov. Mike DeWine did not have the constitutional authority to remove Steen from his position on the pension board. The decision cements a magistrateâs recommendation that Steen be reinstated to the board to complete his term.
âŠ.
Steenâs presence on the board gave a faction of reformers a majority, allowing them to make desired changes to the stateâs teacher retirement fund. But the board chairman called a sudden adjournment of the meeting and left, effectively ending it.
December 2023: Math doesnât add up â Retired teachers denied 3% COLA increases while some STRS staff get huge bonuses
The images of smiling retired teachers on the screen painted a different picture than the reality faced by Kathy Foster, who retired after teaching 32 years in Findlay.
Despite promises from the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, Foster said she has received only one 3% raise since retiring 10 years ago.
âI got one cost of living wage,â said Foster, who lives in Wayne.
Meanwhile, the STRS investment staff has been handsomely rewarded for their work, she said.
âThey have gotten millions of dollars in bonuses,â Foster said. âThey lost billions of dollars last year, and they are still getting bonuses.â
âWe havenât gotten the money we were promised. I just want the 3% that I was promised,â she said.
STRS is not being good fiduciaries, said Foster, who in retirement has taken on a part-time job at the Wayne Public Library to make ends meet. âIâm not going to be able to work forever,â she said.
âThey keep asking the members and the employers for even more,â while the system is spending money on the slick public relations blitz showing teachers seemingly thrilled with their retirement benefits, Foster said, shaking her head.
Public Plans Database: Ohio Teachers
All graphs sourced from the Public Plans Database
STRS 2022 Actuarial Valuation Report
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Back in December, somebody asked me how many people alive now would be alive in 75 years. The answer: about 15% (for the U.S.). This is not a trivial question â it relates to questions of political decision-making for the long-term, such as public finance. In this episode, I look at the survivorship for 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, and 75 years, and think through what this means.
Graphs and spreadsheet below.
Episode Links, Graphs, and More
Data and Assumptions
Population Estimate
Released 11 April 2024: 2023 Population Estimates by Age and Sex
Social Security Mortality Cohort Projections
2023 Social Security Trustees Report Life Tables, Cohort by Age and Sex, based on the Alternative 2 mortality probabilities used in the 2023 Trustees Report.
Survivorship Projections
First, here are the graphs of the original population in 2023, and how many of them survive to 2033 (10 years), 2048 (25 years), 2073 (50 years), and 2098 (75 years).
This is ignoring any new immigrants or births, just focusing on the current U.S. population and projecting into the future, looking at survivorship.
You can see all the weird peaks, and especially, the steep drops in old age.
But let me simplify the survivorship understanding with this table:
While 15% of the overall population of 2023 makes it to 2098, you can see that is primarily those currently age 20 and younger.
Letâs make it even more apparent:
Again, this is just projecting the current population. In 75 years, of the current population still around, 93% will be those currently 20 and younger, 7% will be 21-40 years old now, and those of us over 40 will have been long gone.
Spreadsheet
Related Posts
May 2015: Illinois Pensions: How Did We Get Here? The 1970 Constitution
This is the relevant section of the 1970 Illinois State Constitution:
SECTION 5. PENSION AND RETIREMENT RIGHTS
Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.
That section has not been amended since 1970.
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Iâve 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
* Itâs 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
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In this episode, I look at the most recent revelations re: Francesca Ginoâs academia malfeasance, but other tales of academic malpractice. Such as: filling in missing values in datasets with Excelâs 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 OâGrady
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 Aclandâs findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Ginoâs 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.âŠDebora Weber-Wulff, a plagiarism expert at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, says Scienceâs findings are âquite seriousâ 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 âpoke aroundâ into Ginoâs 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 Ginoâs 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 âDishonesty explained: What leads moral people to act immorally.â The sentenceââThe accounting scandals and the collapse of billion-dollar companies at the beginning of the 21st century have forever changed the business landscapeââis word for word the same as a passage in a 2010 paper by the University of Washington management researcher Elizabeth Umphress and colleagues.
I didnât talk about the person who found the plagiarism in this case.
This is what gets me so often â the tenured profs just assume nobody will ever check.
For various reasons, perhaps all the top profs shouldnât assume that anymore. And maybe they should start crediting all their research assistants with the real workâŠ. but thatâs for another time.
Prior Gino posts/episodes:
Material Science/Chemistry Non-Replicable Experiment
Chemistry World, 11 April 2024: Holes in the âholey graphyneâ story
Recently, the journal Matter published a paper describing a novel form of carbon.2 This purported allotrope, âholey graphyneâ, is comprised mainly of cyclooctadiyne rings. Moreover, the synthesis was supposedly accomplished using a simple copper catalyst. Typically, the CâC 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 âholeyâ material up to 700°C. While the reported spectroscopy was demonstrably mismatched with the claimed structure, the authors simply declared that everything fits.
âŠ.
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 doesnât 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 âholeyâ paper remains unretracted, though I remain hopeful.
You may have come across equally troubling papers in your field. Donât 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 âholey graphyneâ fails replication
A recent article by Ryu, Lee, and co-workers claims synthesis of âholey graphyne,â 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 & âJust Copy the Next Countryâ 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 â 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 âbalanced panel data,â which in economic parlance means a dataset with no gaps.
âI was dumbstruck for a week,â 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 Excelâs autofill function and copying data between countries â operations other experts described as âhorrendousâ and âbeyond concern.â
21 Feb 2024, by Gary Smith: How (not) to deal with missing data: An economistâs 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 studentâs creative solution was to multiply the original data by three by assuming each survey response had been given by three people instead of one: âI 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.â This ingenious solution reduced the P-value to 0.011, well below Fisherâs 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.
âŠ.
Joelving also found that Excelâs 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 Excelâs 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: Weâre Not Curing Cancer Here, Guys
These concerns have been brewing for a while and they are reaching a tipping point. The fact that thereâs been so much plagiarism at Harvard and thereâs 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. Thereâs 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
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Letâs 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 Siedleâs 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 Connecticutâs Pension Funds - Jan 2023.pdf
Shorter version: Why Connecticutâs 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
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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 â 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 â Table V.A4.âPeriod 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 - didnât extend quite so much â only 5-6 years. Thatâs 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 programâs solvency.
(February 02, 2024)
Issue Brief: Reforming Social Security Sooner Rather Than Later
Social Securityâs 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)
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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 Schwartzâs public discipline from the Academy
Actuarial Board for Counseling and Discipline
STUMP Nov 2018: Actuarial History... Which is Not Really History
While the âvoodooâ 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 heâs listed as officially retired in the Actuarial Directory, heâs still a member of the SOA and Academy, as far as I can tell.
âŠ.
Schwartz was there to say that defined benefit pensions arenât obsolete, and they are affordable.
And he âpersuadedâ that these were affordable⊠by fudging the numbers. Actuarial âvoodooâ 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 â people who retired at age 50 back in 2008 have a high probability of still being alive, for instance) are too highâŠ.
dun dun DUNâŠ.
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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 â theyâre 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
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Letâs 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 âmachine-readableâ data for state and local financial reporting.
Episode Links
Truth in Accountingâs FSOC 2024
PDF: https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/Financial-State-of-the-Cities-2024.pdf
A few graphs
A couple ârandomâ towns I didnât 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
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Three tales of accountability⊠or lack thereof. I start with a âheartwarmingâ tale of a supposed Excel error - $92 million error - that becomes an opportunity to strengthen the corporate team⊠yay! (Thatâs 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 shouldnât surprise anybody.
Episode Links
Liz Farmerâs 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 Iâve 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 Flintâs devastating water crisis.
This is a worst-case scenario, but it shouldnât 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. Virginiaâs 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 officialsâ 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 hoursâyou get the point. I havenât done a deep dive into Hopewellâs long-term financial trends, but I did stumble upon one datapoint that suggests residents here have increasingly been paying for the cityâs fiscal woes.
I highly recommend Liz Farmerâs work.
The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund Story
Financial Times: The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fundâs $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 âMistakes and how to deal with themâ. 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 couldnât 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 â 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
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I cover how some people live to a grand old age â 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 âoldestâ people in the world may not be as old as we think
Weâve long been obsessed with the super-elderly. How do some people make it to 100 or even 110 years old? Why do some regions â say, Sardinia, Italy, or Okinawa, Japan âproduce dozens of these âsupercentenariansâ 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: Itâs none of the above.
Instead, it looks like the majority of the supercentenarians (people whoâve reached the age of 110) in the United States are engaged in â intentional or unintentional â exaggeration.
âŠ.
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 â yet in Italy, too, there are clusters of the country where lots of supercentenarians pop up. Maybe the Italian supercentenarians are for real?
Newmanâs 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. Isnât that weird? Why would an area generally have low life expectancy but also produce an extremely disproportionate share of the worldâs 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 â perhaps even most â 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 âblue zonesâ, 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 âsupercentenarianâ 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 âblue zonesâ 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 DiNapoliâs office.
âChristy Gibson went to great lengths to cover up the death of an acquaintance to line her own pockets,â DiNapoli said. âThanks 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.â
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 Comptrollerâs 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 Walshâs death or removed Walshâs 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.
DiNapoliâs 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 Underwriterâs Corner, âThe Value of the Sentinel Effect (Revisited)â https://www.soa.org/globalassets/assets/library/newsletters/product-development-news/1998/october/pdn-1998-iss47-bergstrom.pdf
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In the brou-ha-ha over Chris Rufoâs 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 â 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, doesnât involve going into massive debt, and wonât 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 youâre interested in educating yourself about business, The Personal MBA is the best place to start.
âGet Your Personal MBA!â 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 Carnegieâs How to Win Friends and
Influence People Robert Cialdiniâs Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
There are also newer books on the list, such as Seth Godinâs 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.
âŠ.
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.
âŠ.
A personal recommendation from the PMBA reading list is Darrell Huffâs 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 Iâve used it in my teaching of the subject since then. A good followup to this book (not on the PMBA list) are Edward Tufteâs books1 on graphical presentation of numerical data, which may help you think of effective graphical presentations in your own work.
âQuit Paying For Business Education!â 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 âDruckerâ is on the spine). However, too often I find Iâve put down good money for something that is outdated (given long publication cycles), full of lightweight prescriptions that arenât 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. Iâve written comments in the margins of books: âWhat did he mean by that?â, âWhere can I learn more about this?â, âWhat a crock!â.
But no one answers.
My âNo Childâs Ass Left Unkickedâ 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 âKnow Thyself: Catholic Classical Education and the Discovery of Selfââ.â
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.
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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 âšhere and elsewhereâ©
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.
Meepâs 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.
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In which I discuss the recent brou-ha-ha over ex-President of Harvard Claudine Gayâs 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 â and its lawyers falsely claimed her work was âproperly citedâ
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 academicsâ work âdemonstrably false,â and said all her works were âcited and properly credited.â
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 Ackmanâs wife, Neri Oxman, says stories âare accurateâ with âno unfair biasâ
Business Insider and its parent company, Axel Springer, said Sunday that they stood by the outletâs 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 âthere was no unfair biasâ and that the âprocess we went through to report, edit, and review the stories was sound.â
Peng said a pair of stories the outlet published earlier this month reporting that Oxman had plagiarized other scholarsâ work and lifted more than a dozen sections from Wikipedia âare accurate.â She described Oxman as a âfair subjectâ and âhas a public profile as a prominent intellectual and has been a subject of and participant in media coverage,â rebutting Ackmanâs complaints that she should have been immune to coverage tied to Ackmanâs recent activism.
Fortune: Bill Ackman vows plagiarism checks on MIT president and faculty after wife pulled into fray: âWe will share our findings in the public domainâ
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 schoolâs current faculty members for plagiarism.
The move, announced Friday in a post on X, comes after Business Insider expanded its allegations of plagiarism against Ackmanâs 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 MITâs own plagiarism standards.
âWe will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency,â Ackman said, adding that âit is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.â
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.
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Letâs 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 donât even know why anybody is going to political affiliation if you can JUST GO TO VAX STATUS TO BEGIN WITH!
Isnât that supposed to be what this argument is about? That those stupid Republicans arenât 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 canât 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 â Chicago, for now, has cash flow, which to politicians means itâs not bankrupt!
Anybody who looks at Truth in Accountingâs 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: âOh, but thatâs just a balance sheet! All those debts arenât due all at once!â
But the problem is this: unlike with NYC, Chicagoâs 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 â 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 donât come down until Candelmas âŠ. but thatâs because I like the lights⊠and Iâm lazy)
For a little extra, hereâs 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.
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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 doesnât work that way.
âŠ.
The Actuarial Standards Board, which defines professional standards for actuaries, finally acknowledged the criticisms and adopted a requirement for actuaries to calculate and disclose â starting with funding reports to be published (mostly) in 2024 â 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 whatâs 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 âexpected taxpayer savingsâ 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 planâs 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) â wondering where they could have gotten this idea.
John Bury November 2010: RNSP (2) â 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 Rauhâs 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 menâs health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and menâs mental health:
* Mary Pat Campbellâs MoSpace â a place to donate at Movember itself
* My Movember Facebook fundraiser â my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you
And hereâs a QR code if that works better for you:
Literary References
Dante: Building a Modern Hell - something I wrote in 1995, re: Niven & Pournelleâs Inferno vs. Danteâs
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;
âDoth God exact day-labour, light denied?â
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, âGod doth not need
Either manâs 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 oâer Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.â
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 â 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.
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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 menâs health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and menâs mental health:
* Mary Pat Campbellâs MoSpace â a place to donate at Movember itself
* My Movember Facebook fundraiser â my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you
And hereâs a QR code if that works better for you:
Movember 2023 Posts
Top Death Rate â Cancer by Sex
Spreadsheet
Support menâs health!
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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 theyâve 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, 1900â2018
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)
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