Experian sells insurers a score that identifies customers who will not make unreasonable future claims. It contributes nothing to CUE and so draws nothing from it, and no claims department has ever typed an adjective into a field that does not exist. The signal is real; the sentence cannot be.
Aviva has asked the government to make the black box compulsory for every driver aged 17 to 24, with a tax exemption attached. The case for the box is stated here at its strongest, and then followed up through five layers of trade bodies to a lobbying register that records none of it.
Insurers audit their pricing models with inquisitorial zeal on one side and never look at the other: the thing they have chosen to predict. On a comparison website Derek does not convert, he scrolls — and a method perfected over thirty years turns out to be a marksman with superb aim at the wrong target.
Earn a young driver’s premium in equal daily slices and the loss ratio prints hot in month one and angelic in month twelve — even while every policy is performing exactly to plan. The convention measures a growing book’s growth and calls it bad underwriting, and the capacity that flees at month nine leaves at the precise moment the arithmetic turns friendly.
A pipe bursts on a Sunday morning and does £6,200 of damage. The cheque is for £3,425, and the missing forty-five per cent is a clause Parliament believed it had abolished in 2012.
Nineteen years of premiums end on the Kingston bypass, under a bin lorry, in a single afternoon. What arrives is not the value of the car but the lowest number the insurer can defend, reached by a process Derek has no standing to inspect.
Tick the box marked “monthly” and the price rises by more than any credit agreement can account for. Derek has paid the loading for fifteen years without being told it exists, and the day he works it out is the day the industry should dread.
Derek shops around, which is precisely where the market would like him to be. The four great oracles of British consumer life are paid by the firms they rank, and the ranking is a game whose rules he was never shown.
Thirty-five million motorists renew each year believing their no-claims discount is a reward for careful driving. It is a discount off a number the insurer chose, and the most durable frauds are the ones the victims defend.
·Derek · part 1·8 min read
Flood & the Price of Risk 8
One government scheme, one fictional village, and the £4,083 that went missing from the price of a wet house in 2016.
The Hendersons paid the full asking price for a cottage that has been under water twice since the war, and not one person in the chain lied to them. It takes a government scheme to arrange a swindle in which everybody is honest.
The flood risk of a house is priced by its council tax band, and council tax bands were fixed when John Major was newly in office. Marsham Hall, which floods in six figures, pays £1,613 and has never been asked to explain itself.
Ninety-four homes have gone up on the field the village always knew the water goes to, named — with the industry’s gift for accidental confession — Willow Rise. Homes built after 2009 are barred from the scheme by design, so Plot 41 gets to meet the actuarial price of the ground it stands on.
A flood insurance renewal notice arrives from outside Baton Rouge, annotated in furious ballpoint, and causes more discussion at the village book club than the book. America’s temporary scheme is fifty-eight years old, tens of billions in debt, and entirely legible from Norfolk.
Mr Bryce’s cottage has flooded three times since 2016 and been restored three times, identically — same skirting, same floor, same sockets thirty centimetres off the same screed. After the first £70,000, why did nobody move the sockets up the wall?
The scheme’s expiry is not a press release but primary legislation, which is a genuinely strong safeguard and the whole case for optimism. Every number that ought to be falling as 2039 approaches is rising instead, and this episode ends with a prediction the author intends to be held to.
Six essays of demolition earn the reader a proposal, and a critic who withholds one past this point is merely decorating his objections. The problem was real, the subsidy may even be justified, and the honest version fits on a single page.
In the spring of 2016 something remarkable happened to the price of a wet house: the discount vanished, and so did the information it carried. The full argument in one sitting — and the American programme that has been running the same experiment since 1968.
·Lower Marsham · companion·11 min read
Compliance & Control 4
How the rulebook became a rule of its own, and what it is like to be on the wrong side of it.
A comedian on Desert Island Discs introduced Brel’s “Madeleine” — a song about a man waiting in the rain for a woman who never comes — as a burst of pure joy, and nobody in the chain said anything. Every one of them was doing their job correctly. None of their jobs was the truth.
It is the settled fate of the broker to pass his whole working life acting on behalf of other people — a professional middle, a sort of human preposition. Then came the afternoon he had to put on a lender’s coat and answer to a lender’s name in order to buy a number he wanted for himself.
Every insurance broker in Britain knows the joke about the compliance department, and nobody laughs. This is an attempt to find out where the phantom rules actually come from, given that a good number of them are not in the Handbook at all.
Financial compliance was built to stop terrorists and launderers, and has become the machinery that decides who may hold a bank account and therefore who may take part in modern life. Arendt’s right to have rights, applied to a man whose account was closed for reasons nobody is permitted to tell him.
·23 min read
Machines & Language 4
Machines that do not work, machines that work too well, and the vocabulary hired to speak for both.
Aware that their products emit all the aural drama of a filing cabinet, the makers of electric cars have taken to piping synthesised growls through the loudspeakers. A movement that must counterfeit the voice of its enemy has already conceded the argument — and the roar, it turns out, was never noise. It was biography.
For once nobody is trying to take Derek’s money; they simply cannot work out how to accept it. The fare engine prices his room flawlessly across ninety subsystems, and then the page shows him a small rotating glyph — the truest thing these companies publish.
Two letters have become the most dishonestly deployed acronym in the history of human communication, and the competition includes WMD and the PATRIOT Act. The .ai suffix, incidentally, belongs to Anguilla: eighteen thousand people, nine miles wide, coral reefs and rum.
A platform whose entire reason for existing is the manipulation of vast datasets, described here as it behaves rather than as it advertises. On memory management, caching, adaptive query execution, and the particular indignity of being outsmarted by something that is not clever.
·7 min read
Belief & Evidence 3
What we do with a finding that flatters us, what $120 trillion did with one, and a conviction that turned out to be answering to the probate register.
A paternity kit sits on a low shelf between the plasters and the pregnancy tests, and answers for pocket money the single question around which several thousand years of law, theology and domestic violence were organised. Nothing whatever has been dismantled in response.
A paper reported that authoritarians are worse at correcting their own factual errors, and the finding pleased the author considerably — which is exactly when he should have become suspicious. An essay that spends seven sections trying to take its most flattering conclusion away from itself.
Some $120 trillion was gathered behind the proposition that a committee with a spreadsheet can look at a company and divine its standing before the future. Six rating agencies looked at the same firms and returned six different answers, and the bill for the difference arrives by tanker.
·18 min read
Elsewhere 2
Off the usual subjects, and not in the usual language. A letter, and a note on a poem.
A.G. Visser locked a joke into an iambic grip a century ago and it has never come loose. Written in Afrikaans: on the poem every Afrikaans speaker over forty can recite without thinking, why it dies rather than offends in translation, and the patent slimming remedy in the first stanza that turns out to be the Ozempic of its day.
In 1960 a child was shot by police at Nyanga during the pass-law protests; Ingrid Jonker wrote die kind is nie dood nie, and five years later walked into the sea at Three Anchor Bay. This is a letter back — written in Afrikaans, because some grief has a first language.
