We Know Zero

The Time Has Come For Lecturers To Decide What They Want

17. March 2018 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Defined Ambition, Pensions, Regulation, Risk, Uncategorized

Since my last post on the strike, where I set out my reasons for not joining it, a lot has happened. The strike has forced UUK back to the negotiating table, overseen by ACAS, on a deal originally presented as done. The consultation period on the new arrangements has been postponed. University Vice Chancellors are scurrying to distance themselves from the UUK negotiating position and side with their own striking lecturers. As most observers admit, including most recently the Head of Public Sector Pensions at KPMG in the tweet below, the UCU have won the communications battle. Victory appears to be total.

However there remains a problem, which we seem to be facing increasingly in recent years from Trump to Brexit, and that is this: what to do when the victory you have won is based on campaign arguments which are fundamentally untrue, not backed by evidence or existing pensions legislation, and ultimately undeliverable? Just keep saying no to any workable option which is put to you?

How untrue? Well let’s go back to the now famous letter to the FT signed by many famous lecturers across the UK, including David Spiegelhalter, Ben Goldacre and Steven Haberman (notable as he is deputy director of the Actuarial Research Centre). This was itself a response to a FT story based on the audited accounts, where the pension deficits were merely being updated in line with what had previously been agreed and bore no relation to the negotiations about the March 2017 valuation. As the audited accounts state quite clearly:

The trustee regularly monitors the scheme’s funding position as part of the overall monitoring of FMP introduced followed the 2014 valuation. The monitoring is based on the assumptions used for the 2014 actuarial valuation (updated for changes in gilt yields and inflation expectations). The monitoring does not involve the same detailed review of the underlying assumptions (including the financial, economic, sectoral assumptions for example) that takes place as part of the full actuarial valuation, the next full actuarial valuation being due as at 31 March 2017. Therefore the amounts shown for liabilities in the funding position below are not indicative of the results of the 2017 valuation.

So arguing about these assumptions was futile. The letter also showed an unexpected lack of understanding (particularly from Steven Haberman, who must have spent enough time in the company of pensions actuaries who carry out these kinds of negotiations all the time to know better) about what the assumptions shown in the accounts meant. In particular, there is a note saying that the general salary assumption is only being used for the recovery plan contributions rather than to calculate the scheme deficit. That means that, if you think the assumption is too large, it will be overstating the value of future contributions and therefore understating how large those contributions need to be. So rather than making the scheme seem more unaffordable, it would be making it seem less.

Then there is the mortality point – a massive misunderstanding. The assumptions do not say that life expectancy is increasing by 1.5% pa which would clearly be absurd. They are saying that mortality improvements (ie the percentage by which the expected probability of death of a 70 year old in 2020 is less than that of a 70 year old in 2019) are assumed to be 1.5% pa. Stuart McDonald gently put Ben Goldacre right on this point here.

However the bigger overall point is that individual assumptions are not the thing to focus on here anyway, but the overall level of prudence or otherwise in a basis. And the facts around this are considerably clearer.

We know that the initial valuation proposed by the USS Trustee to the Pensions Regulator and the covenant assessment on which it was based (ie the willingness and ability of the employers in UUK to continue paying contributions) were both rejected. As this initial valuation disclosed a deficit of just over £5 billion, then the proposal resulting in a £7.5 billion deficit which was finally presented to the Joint Negotiating Committee would appear to be as low as the Trustee could reasonably go and still get the valuation past the Regulator.
The S179 valuation of the scheme (this is the valuation all occupational pension schemes who pay levies to the Pension Protection Fund as insurance against the failure of their employer(s), which is done on the same valuation basis for all schemes) at the last valuation as at 31 March 2014 showed a deficit of £8.95 billion (compared to the £5.3 billion funding deficit disclosed). The latest “more prudent” valuation proposed is therefore still unlikely to be proposing a target which goes anywhere near 100% funding on this basis (the scheme was only 82% funded in March 2014 when, as you can see below, nearly 40% of schemes were in surplus on this measure). There is therefore no justification for the repeated assertion by the UCU that the scheme is not under-funded.

Source: Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee report on defined benefit pension schemes 20 December 2016

One last point on the campaign. Some of it seems to have been directed personally at the USS Trustee. This is the body with no other job than to protect the security of the pensions that lecturers have already built up. Why would anyone want to turn on them? Bill Galvin, the Group CEO at USS Ltd, the Trustee company, has set out responses to some of the other misconceptions here. I would urge anyone with an interest in this dispute to read them.

So, if the deficit is what it is and there is no scope for weakening the funding assumptions any further and maintaining current benefits on these funding assumptions involves contribution increases which are unacceptable to both scheme members and the employers, what is this dispute about now? The time has come for lecturers to decide what they want. Of course the basic premises of pension scheme funding can be argued about (and I direct anyone interested in the long history of actuarial debate in this area to read chapter 6 of Craig Turnbull’s A History of British Actuarial Thought which traces this from 1875 to 1997), and perhaps ultimately legislative change might be brought about if a new argument could be won in this area. But that is a long term objective and the funding of this scheme needs to be agreed now. If a £42,000 cap for 3 years while negotiations continue on a long term structure of the scheme which doesn’t leave all risk with scheme members is not acceptable, then we need to decide pretty quickly what is. Because once we move to a DC arrangement, the chances of us moving back to any form of risk sharing subsequently are in my view remote. There will always be other uses for that money.

However there are many possible alternative structures and many ways of sharing the risks between employers and scheme members. In particular let’s not get too obsessed with Collective Defined Contribution schemes, the enabling legislation for which has yet to materialise. Consider all the alternatives and let proper negotiations commence!

Bring Two Brains’ Hammer Inside the Tent

13. March 2018 · Write a comment · Categories: Cartoons, Economics, Pensions

While the NHS has been asked to find £22 billion in savings by 2020, the latest figures from the Student Loans Company show that over £13 billion has been found to fund student loans for 2016/17 alone, without increasing the Government’s deficit and without appearing in the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement until some time in the 2040s. How is this possible?

The key difference is that the money the Government provides in student loans are seen as just that: loans. However, unlike any other kind of loan (and the reason that commercial banks declined to join the SLC – which was the original plan and the reason it was set up with a company structure), only between 40 and 45% is expected ever to be repaid, the repayment term is limited to a maximum of 30 years and the payments limited to a percentage of earnings above a minimum earnings threshold (which is about to increase to £25,000 pa). It is in reality a graduate tax masquerading as a loan, with the “sticker price” of £9,250 pa (which is of course a real price for overseas students) just used to ensure students don’t feel like they are paying this tax on someone else’s behalf. However the payments made by the Government since 2011 as “loans” have not led to any outcry about uncosted commitments, or passing the bill onto future generations which you might expect. Which is surprising, as it has meant that Higher Education has effectively been allowed to sidestep the austerity policies applied to just about every other Government department completely.

One might think that the architect of such a scheme would be quite popular within the Higher Education space. Far from it. Since the announcement of his appointment as the new Chancellor at the University of Leicester, the Leicester branch of the UCU has widened the campaign it is already running against the Joint Negotiating Council’s decision to close the USS pension scheme to further defined benefit accrual to embrace a #WillettsOut position. The students who occupied the corridor outside the Leicester VC’s office for two days similarly had Willetts’ removal on their list.

Apart from elements of his voting record (he was strongly in favour of an elected House of Lords and was strongly against the ban on fox-hunting. TheyWorkForYou additionally records that, amongst other things, he was strongly in favour of the Iraq War, strongly in favour of an investigation into it, moderately against equal gay rights, and very strongly for replacing Trident), the main charges against him seemed to date from an article about him in the Guardian from 2011.

Now without minimising the differences of opinion which I and many of my colleagues will clearly have with David Willetts on a wide range of issues, I do think we are in danger of surrounding ourselves with the comfortable cushions of like-minded individuals all equally in the dark about the regulatory changes in store for us and at risk of all the worst consequences of Group Think. I would therefore like to put forward an alternative view.

The University of Leicester is facing, along with the rest of the Higher Education sector, serious challenges over the coming decades in response to an expansion of the proportion of young people going to university which no political party is going to want to reverse (and which I, for one, would not want them to). David Willetts was the chief driver of much of these reforms and has a clear vision of what they are trying to achieve, set out in his book A University Education. He is currently a visiting professor at King’s College London where he works with the Policy Institute at King’s, a visiting professor at the Cass Business School, Chair of the British Science Association, a member of the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and an Honorary Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. However his real passion is around social mobility, something which I believe is important to many of us here at Leicester, and which has led him to a role as Executive Chair of the Resolution Foundation. As a former cabinet minister and shadow cabinet minister from 1996 until 2014, Willetts is very well connected, a formidable debater and would make a fierce friend of the University, fighting Leicester’s corner in what is likely to be an increasingly challenging period.

David Willetts would undoubtedly bring significant challenge with him. Arguing with him (I watched him in debate with Stefan Collini and a variably outraged university audience at the Senate House last year) can sometimes feel like doing battle with a hammer. But it may be that this is what we need to respond successfully to the new world which is coming rather than yet another comfortable cushion to make us feel better. Let’s welcome him inside the tent.

CAct: the future may be highly uncertain but I am very confident that this is a good idea

23. February 2018 · 2 comments · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Regulation

Sometimes an idea comes along that seems so obviously good that you wonder why it hasn’t been done a long time ago.

The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) are currently consulting on just such an idea in my view: the Chartered Actuary (CAct). Currently someone is a qualified actuary when they get to the associate level, however you wouldn’t know it. There are very few qualified roles available for associates and most firms assume hardly anyone will stay at that point but instead continue to fellowship. Indeed many actuaries leave the CA3 subject (soon to become CP3 under Curriculum 2019) in Communications until last currently, and therefore qualify at both levels simultaneously.

This will happen no more. CAct will be a distinct qualification, and a required qualification point for all student actuaries to reach before going any further. It will be globally recognised as the generalist actuarial qualification from the IFoA, as well as also possibly the final purely actuarial stage of an actuary’s qualification journey in future. The specialisation in actuarial subjects, via the specialist principles and specialist advanced modules, will still be taken by many, particularly those aiming for practising certificates, but there will be time and space for other specialisations: in data science, business management and many other areas. The hope (and I think this is a realistic hope) is that this will massively expand the range of areas where actuaries will be able to make a difference in the future.

Why do we need to? Well, as Derek Cribb, the IFoA’s Chief Executive wrote in the December issue of The Actuary:

Globally, there are around 70,000 qualified actuaries, but more than five million qualified accountants and a similar number of lawyers…Why is this relevant? Bluntly, numbers matter. Whether we are concerned about operational economies of scale, and the consequent impact on membership costs, or whether it’s about building external awareness of the value the profession brings, there is strength in numbers.

Now of course it can be argued that this is what every corporate leader always wants, and that some not-for-profit organisations could usefully benefit from considering alternative structures (particularly relevant currently in the university sector which I inhabit), but in this case, when our regulatory body the Financial Reporting Council is primarily concerned with another, much larger, profession, the existential threat is real. If you believe as I do that actuaries have a unique skill set, which is likely to be lost to a wide range of businesses and other sectors if it is unable to meet the demand for those skills due to a simple lack of numbers, then the need to take any perceived barrier to practise away from our emerging young professionals is clear.

Whatever your views on this idea, please respond to the consultation, which is open until Wednesday (28 February) and can be found here. I have found widespread support amongst the students I speak to as an actuary working in higher education, both in the UK and also notably in my discussions with Mumbai students earlier this month. I feel it is our responsibility as Fellows not to stand in their way as we in turn hand them the responsibility of taking our profession into a new generation.

The future may be highly uncertain, but I am very confident that this is a good idea.

Why I Won’t Strike

20. February 2018 · 7 comments · Categories: Actuarial, Pensions

This is a piece largely written as a rebuttal to Waseem Yaqoob’s recent article on the LRB blog, entitled Why We Strike. Let me start by clearly stating that I support the University and College Union’s (UCU’s) right to strike from Thursday, and think it is ludicrous that 7 of the 68 ‘pre-92’ universities’ UCU groups need to reballot their members before they are allowed to carry out what is clearly the majority view of their members. I just think they are wrong this time.

The Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC – apologies there are lots of acronyms in this) of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) is the body tasked with negotiating the pension deal struck every 3 years. It has equal numbers of members from Universities UK (UUK – representing the employers (over 390 of them)) and the UCU, with an independent chair who gets to cast the deciding vote on matters when the other JNC members are in deadlock. Just such a deadlock occurred over the future of the USS. The UCU representatives wanted to continue with some sort of defined benefit (DB) arrangement, where benefits are guaranteed, and the UUK representatives wanted to switch to defined contribution (DC), where contributions are instead paid into an invested fund for the member to secure benefits with as best they can at retirement. The chair went with the UUK position.

As a member of the USS as a result of working as a lecturer at the University of Leicester, I fervently hoped for a different outcome for purely selfish reasons. However I could not justify why I should have a DB pension (which I agree is a vastly superior option to the DC alternative being offered) when the vast majority of DB schemes are already closed, including let’s not forget the University of Leicester Pension and Assurance Scheme, which has been closed to new entrants since 2003 and to future accrual since 31 March 2016. Is it realistic or reasonable to assume that Grades 6 and above will continue to enjoy DB accrual indefinitely while Grades 5 and below don’t?

You will hear a lot about how something which is personally disadvantageous to one lecturer after another is therefore suddenly going to damage higher education irrevocably, depicting academic life as so uniquely risky that only the safety blanket of a DB pension will persuade people to do it. This is despite them not being seen as necessary in many other top global universities. For
example, the top universities in the United States mainly have DC pension schemes.

The rationale for the changes is not dubious. The vast majority of DB pension schemes follow the same funding approach as the one used by the USS which has revealed such large deficits, as was recently confirmed by research carried out by Punter Southall. Most research points to a gilts plus basis being the most appropriate for a scheme still open to future accrual.

Neither do I agree that the funding approach proposed is unduly prudent. The Government has produced a green paper, which was largely based on the report from the Commons Select Committee for Work and Pensions in December 2016, which was itself in response to what happened at Tata Steel and BHS in particular. The Select Committee report suggested legislation was needed to:

Agree changes to the indexation of pension benefits in instances where such changes are needed to make a scheme sustainable
Allow scheme members greater flexibility to take their pension as lump sums
Make recovery plans of more than 10 years exceptional (the USS currently have a recovery plan of 17 years, 14 of which are still outstanding – reducing this to 10 would considerably increase the contributions required into the scheme).

It did not focus on valuation methods particularly.

However the resultant green paper, which launched a consultation which ended in February 2017, considered 6 questions, the first of which was focused on whether current valuation measures were the right ones. Unfortunately the detailed discussion (eg in paragraph 213) was hardly encouraging to the view that the USS funding basis is too prudent and the contribution requirements too high, as it suggested that stricter interim funding targets be set for schemes which were severely underfunded and gave an example of what they meant by this as being less than 100% funded on the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) basis (this is the pensions lifeboat for schemes with insolvent employers – USS was 82% funded on the PPF basis at the last valuation).

One point where I am in agreement with Yaqoob is that the success of the strike will depend to a large extent on how students respond. I was amused by the admission that “Students have expressed solidarity with striking staff while at the same time demanding refunds for their disrupted education”. I believe that the solidarity with striking staff is due to misinformation, whereas the demand from students for refunds for their disrupted education are likely to be more long-lasting.

I have resigned my membership of the UCU as a result of this ill-conceived strike action. I urge other members who feel a similar discomfort about what they are being asked to do to consider whether they need to do the same.

Is reasonable and appropriate good enough?

15. January 2018 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Regulation

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
https://xkcd.com/927/

Actuaries who are members of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) have a code. Yes, one or two clients might say, it is the language which they use to deliver all of their advice in. However, the Actuaries’ Code is supposed to set out what principles govern the way actuaries (and all other members of the IFoA) conduct themselves. Launched originally in 2009 with 5 key principles, it had a light touch review in 2013 before the current consultation on a more substantive review (including a new principle). Anyone who has a view about how actuaries should behave in future can take part in this consultation, which officially closes on 17 January (although I understand that responses will be accepted for a few days after this). You don’t need to answer all of the 48 questions, in fact you can just email individual comments to code@actuaries.org.uk if you prefer. I would urge anyone with an interest to do so.

Overall it is clearly a very considered piece of work, which has caused me to think more deeply about some elements of my professional practice. The Code itself is considerably clearer than it was, removing unnecessary detail, improving the visibility of other key regulatory requirements (eg continuing professional development (CPD) obligations and the disclosure requirements under the disciplinary scheme) and structured well with very short pithy principles supplemented by amplifications (and, if necessary, further explanations in an accompanying Guide). The Actuaries’ Code Guide is a completely new document designed to explain the Code in more detail. It is currently 48 pages long, which has caused some to feel that the advantages of having a Code short enough for everyone to read may have been lost. Then again, moving the 22 pages of it which cover conflicts of interest to a separate document (which I understand is under consideration) would leave a fairly focused document. I think a Guide of some description is necessary, if only to bridge the gap between the Code and other regulations. I do however agree with those who have said the Guide should not be an IFoA document at all, to avoid any perception of a regulatory authority it does not seek.

So, all in all, a good attempt to join up the various regulations governing actuaries’ professional practice.

And yet…it may not be a light touch review, but it’s not exactly heavy touch either.

The first thing that concerns me is what is not here. Both the Code and the Guide appear to be almost entirely concerned with actuarial advice, when there is an increasingly significant body of work carried out by actuaries, particularly in non-traditional areas, which is not advice to clients at all. I work in education, where I am making judgements based at least in part on my actuarial training all the time, but I have to work quite hard to cudgel some of this wording into phrases relevant to me (I think my favourite line is Where Members identify that a user of their work has, or is reasonably likely to have, misunderstood or misinterpreted their advice, Members should draw their attention to any adverse impact, which describes an almost constant state of affairs within a university environment).

There is also nothing here about responding to the impact of automation on the profession. There are many concerns which flow from this, but consider one scenario: increasingly capable artificial intelligence systems, with access to far more data than any individual doctor could possibly take into consideration in making a diagnosis, will be able to offer advice and treatments to patients with better outcomes than even the top practitioners in a given field, and with far more reliable outcomes. According to Daniel Susskind, this is already starting to happen. However, as Cathy O’Neill points out, this increased reliability has immediate outcomes in a health insurance environment:

Just imagine, though, what insurance companies will do with the ability to better predict people’s health care costs. If the law allows, they will increase prices for the riskiest customers to the point where they can’t afford it and drop out, leaving lots of relatively healthy people paying more than they’re expected to cost. This is fine from the perspective of the insurer, but it defeats the risk-pooling purpose of insurance. And in a world of increasingly good predictive tools, it will get progressively worse.

If we do not have any principles in our Code which require us to take account of such considerations, and a direction of travel of increased privatisation of the NHS, what is to stop us actively conniving in such an outcome?

A principle like run your business or carry out your role in the business in a way that encourages equality of opportunity and respect for diversity would be one possibility (courtesy of the code of conduct from the Solicitors Regulation Authority). Another possible approach would be to require individual members to take account of the public interest, using the same professional judgement required to interpret the rest of the Code. It is therefore unfortunate that the IFoA should also have taken this opportunity to point out to members that they have no individual responsibility for such considerations. I strongly disagree with this, a move which was initially a response to the appeal against the ruling against the Phoenix Four. An appeal tribunal that overturned eight of the charges levied against Deloitte criticised the ICAEW for the lack of clarity in its guidance about how accountants should act in the public interest. It seems appalling to me that we would retreat from taking individual responsibility in this area altogether on the back of this.

But what about the new principle that has been added: Speaking Up? There has been some discussion about whether the requirement to speak up has been widened by the phrase Members should challenge others on their non-compliance with relevant legal, regulatory and professional requirements. I am not sure that this will lead to a large increase in whistleblowing in the profession, but I do think that the principle expresses expectations of members much more clearly now and this may have an impact on behaviour. What it doesn’t do is broaden the considerations under which speaking up can take place.

However I think the biggest weakness of the new Code, which undoes a lot of the clarity found elsewhere, may turn out to be the extensive use of just two words. “Appropriate” or “appropriately” turn up four times and the words “reasonable” or “reasonably” nine times. This suggests a shared view of the meaning of these words which I would question exists in a Code which “has no geographic restrictions and applies to Members in all locations and in relation to work carried out in respect of any part of the world”. The IFoA feels it knows what these words mean and doesn’t need to explain them. I think that individual professional judgement would be better applied to interpreting on a daily basis a clear description of what the IFoA means by appropriate and reasonable. That would certainly lead to a narrower range of outcomes, which ultimately has to be the point of any Code.

We are paying too much attention to the wrong actuaries’ index

03. September 2017 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Climate Change, Economics, Prediction, Risk

The FTSE All-Share Index, originally known as the FTSE Actuaries All Share Index, along with the FTSE 100, represent nearly all of the market capitalisation and the top 100 companies by size listed on the London Stock Exchange respectively. They are mentioned in all BBC news bulletins. When they go up, we all feel better. When they go down, they are seen as portents of doom.

Let me show you a different actuaries’ index instead:

Figure 1 shows the ACI and each of the components. The composite ACI represents the average of the six components (with sign of change in cool/cold temperatures reversed). The ACI is increased by reduction in cold extremes, consistent with increased melting of permafrost and increased propagation of diseases, pests, and insects previously less likely to survive in lower temperatures. A positive value in the ACI represents an increase in climate-related extremes relative to the reference period.

The threat of climate change is real, independent of speculative trading and the news media cycle, and increasing with each degree of warming we are unable to stop. Alongside this are the increasing risks of extreme weather events, which is most neatly described for North America currently by the Actuaries Climate Index. This focuses on six components in particular which have the most impact on human societies:

Frequency of temperatures above the 90th percentile (T90);
Frequency of temperatures below the 10th percentile (T10);
Maximum rainfall per month in five consecutive days (P);
Annual maximum consecutive dry days (D);
Frequency of wind speed above the 90th percentile (W); and
Sea level changes (S).

It then tracks them all over time, as shown in the graph above.

It seems clear to me that we should be reacting much less to the booms and busts of economic cycles and much more to climate-related threats. This is for two main reasons:

1. More people are at threat of death or injury as a result of climate change than even the 2008 crash in our financial systems. The World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts that, between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress. However, the additional deaths are already here. Taking just two examples from the WHO:

In the heat wave of summer 2003 in Europe for example, more than 70,000 excess deaths were recorded, with the frequency of such events steadily increasing.
Globally, the number of reported weather-related natural disasters has more than tripled since the 1960s. Every year, these disasters result in over 60,000 deaths, mainly in developing countries, which means that 40,000 of those deaths pa can already be directly attributed to climate change.

On the other hand, the 500,000 additional cancer deaths and 10,000 additional suicide deaths since 2008 cannot be attributed directly to the 2008 crash, as the analysis shows. These are more a result of the austerity policies which have been applied since 2008. Unnecessarily.

Climate change on the other hand does not care whether we react to it or not. It will relentlessly change the chemistry and biology of everything around us as the Earth and the inhabitants of the Earth adapt. We may survive it, in reduced numbers, or we may not. The Earth does not care. Responding to the threat will not make more climate-related events happen unless our response is to, by and large, ignore it.

2. One depends on the other. We cannot base our economies on a FTSE-led GDP-growth-at-all-costs model because it is not physically possible to maintain it without losing the environment from which our growth originates. As Finbarr Livesey points out in his excellent From Global to Local, the circular economy which the overwhelming consensus of studies show would increase employment and contribute to economic growth is taking a long time to arrive. In Europe, where we consume around 16 tonnes of stuff each per year, figures from Siemens in 2016 suggest that 95% of it and its energy value is lost through the life cycle of the products themselves. As Kate Raworth and others have pointed out, we need to focus on different measures of success if we are going to direct our economies in a more sustainable, less volatile and doom-laden direction.

There are plans to extend the Actuaries Climate Index to Europe (including the UK in this instance!), with a recent feasibility study concluding “that the prospects for constructing an analogue to the Canada-US ACI over the European region are promising”. I hope we see such an index soon, because, as Randall Munroe illustrates here, we have not been here before.

I look forward to the day when a new global actuaries’ climate index is on every news bulletin, making us feel better when it goes down and seeing any rise as a portent of doom. Because this time it really would be.

Global Warming Scenarios

21. August 2017 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, Prediction, Risk

Great infographic from futurism.com summarising the likely impacts of each additional degree in warming which I thought was definitely worth sharing!

https://futurism.com/?p=92586&post_type=image

What if we made the State Pension Age irrelevant?

19. August 2017 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Pensions, Regulation

There has been a lot written about the State Pension Age (SPA) in the UK in the last year. This was primarily because the UK Government has been carrying out its first periodic review of the SPA. John Cridland was asked to carry out an independent review of the State Pension Age, which reported in March this year with over 150 responses received and 12 recommendations made plus a proposal for an auto enrolment review. This was followed by the Secretary of State for Work and Pension’s report on the first Government review of State Pension age, as required under the Pensions Act 2014 last month, in which Cridland’s central recommendations on the timetable for SPA change were accepted, ie:

The State Pension age should continue to be universal across the UK, increasing over time to reflect improvements in life expectancy.
The State Pension age should increase to age 68 between 2037 and 2039.
The State Pension age should not increase by more than one year in any 10-year period (assuming there are
no exceptional changes to the data used).
Individuals should get 10 years’ notice of any new changes to State Pension age.

However the report was noticeably silent about Cridland’s other recommendations, including:

that means-tested access to some pension income will remain at 67 and will continue to lag a year behind for rises thereafter.
that the conditionality under Universal Credit should be adjusted for people approaching State Pension age, to enable a smoother transition into retirement.
supporting working past State Pension age
to do more to help carers in the workplace:
the provision of a Mid-life MOT
support for the use of older workers as trainers

Other commentators have given their analysis, some, like the Work and Pensions Parliamentary Select Committee, have pointed out that many people will not live to see the new SPA, something rather lost in the massive groupings Cridland referred to where the lowest average was across a group titled “Routine”. These were described as socio-economic groupings but seemed in reality to be more occupational. There is some reference to healthy life expectancy, but no attempt to quantify how this varies by population. It therefore gives the rather misleading average of around 10 years of healthy life expectancy at age 65 for both men and women.

Contrast this with the Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) rather more comprehensive look at the subject and, in particular, these graphs:

The graphs are more encouraging for women in terms of life expectancy, but no more encouraging for healthy life expectancy.

Other commentators such as the OECD have suggested that the top 5-10% wealthiest stop receiving it altogether to allow it to be more generous for everyone else. The most prominent actuarial view so far has probably come from Paul Sweeting, who proposes a means tested approach to paying state pension which allows the pace of SPA increase to be slower but at the same cost. While I share most of Paul’s analysis of the problem, I do not share his conclusion that the only solutions are faster increases to the State Pension Age, or means testing. My problems with means testing as opposed to universal benefits boil down to two main objections:

People will not contribute to other savings vehicles if they think these will just reduce benefits elsewhere. This was how the Minimum Income Guarantee killed the Stakeholder Pension.
Many people do not claim means tested benefits which they are entitled to. Whether through pride or fear of the dauntingly long forms the DWP produce for any claimed benefit or a combination of the two, a study in 2003 indicated that 1 in 6 people did not claim benefits representing over 10% of their total income.

I therefore think there has to be another way, and I think it might be a form of universal basic income (UBI). Compass have produced one of the more recent reports on the feasibility of this, and there are many different forms, with full schemes or pilots now running mainly at a regional level at present in the United States, Canada and India amongst other countries.

The basic features of most of these schemes are that the personal allowance is abolished in favour of a regular income paid to everyone, perhaps with different rates at different ages but not means tested. Different schemes make different adjustments to existing taxes and maintain different combinations of existing benefits, both means tested and universal. Compass have modelled five possible schemes, and believe that paying a lower UBI but leaving in place the current means-tested benefits system while reducing households’ dependence on means testing by taking into account their UBI when calculating them may be a feasible way forward.

The main arguments for a UBI approach are:

it would directly address most of the inequality of outcomes discussed above, particularly the decile likely to be condemned to 18 years of work in ill health and a retirement of 4 years by 2037 unless both their life expectancy and healthy life expectancy increase, at exactly the time when both appear to be slowing (at the 0.4 months pa rate of improvements since 2011, these expectancies would only have increased by 8 months by 2037)
by providing a guaranteed minimum income, the safety net we provide as a society would be much more robust, and that reducing the reliance on means testing would tackle the problems of take up and the inevitable poverty traps which means testing creates
people could choose to work less and have more time for other things (although previous experiments suggest this number would be small), alternatively it would make retraining much easier
people would have more bargaining power in the labour market, which is clearly problematic in the UK in particular, with the stagnation of real wages for a considerable period now

Many people think their jobs are useless and that they are trapped in them with no marginal income to let them transition to something more meaningful. Neither does it seem as if getting everyone into work is good for us physically, further exacerbating the healthy life expectancy problem at lower deciles.

I am therefore surprised that there is not more research into feasible UBI schemes. The reference section at the back of the Compass report was shorter than that in many of my 3rd year undergraduate dissertations, and yet it is clearly an area in urgent need of some modelling. Anyone out there fancy joining me in a working party to look at this?

If providing risk information is ineffective in changing behaviour, why do we do so much of it?

22. July 2017 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Regulation, Risk

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11:13, July 22, 2017
from https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oceanic_whitetip_shark&oldid=4875771.

Changing people’s behaviour is hard. Even if we have agreed that it needs to change, actually acting on this new knowledge is hard enough, but getting that agreement in the first place by shifting our beliefs is even harder.

It gets worse. The research suggests that providing risk information is ineffective in changing behaviour. You might need to read that again before it sinks in: risk information is ineffective in changing behaviour.

Professor Theresa Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge, and her team have been looking at the four behaviours responsible for the majority of premature deaths worldwide: smoking, eating too much, drinking too much (alcohol) and moving too little. The original focus of their work concerned how people responded to genetic test results indicating a greater predisposition to diabetes, cancer and other diseases. What they found is that the genetic test may get someone past the first barrier, ie agreeing that they need to change their behaviour, but not the second part, ie actually doing it.

As Marteau says: Few of us would swim in waters signed as shark-infested. On the other hand, when the risk of future disease is up against the pleasures of current consumption, it doesn’t tend to compete very well. Marteau summarises their findings as follows:

Put simply, we overestimate how much our behaviour is under intentional control and underestimate how much is cued by environment.

In my view, this research is directly applicable to the financial services industry and explains a lot of behaviours which have up until now often been considered as separate rather than related problems, eg:

The failure of consumers to shop around adequately in the annuities and investment markets (we know we should but get easily discouraged by the difficulty of the process);
The stampede to take transfer values out of defined benefit pension schemes (the possibility of immediate consumption trumping deferred gains); and
The surge in the tax take at HMRC caused by people removing all of their cash from defined contribution pension schemes (same again).

Turning to my own profession for a moment, and looking on the Become an actuary part of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries website, we find: Actuaries use their skills to help measure the probability and risk of future events. A little further on we find: It is essential that actuaries have excellent communication skills to enable them to communicate actuarial ideas to non-specialists in a way that meets the needs of the audience.

So, in a nutshell, producing risk information and then communicating it.

As a pensions actuary, I spent most of my time overseeing calculations which underpinned reports to clients which I would then summarise in presentations in order to get them to move a little bit further towards fully funding their pension schemes than where they were starting from. And then we had to condense the whole of that process into a single meeting where we tried to persuade the people who were actually doing the funding as part of the negotiation of the final deal. While, unconsciously, I am sure that just my presence was having some kind of placebo or nocebo effect, all of my conscious effort was directed on providing risk information and communicating it.

And actuaries are not alone in focusing on the provision of risk information as the most important element in guiding consumer behaviour. From the Financial Conduct Authority’s Retail Distribution Review, to the Pensions Advisory Service and Pension Wise, we are obsessed with it.

However if we are going to really change behaviour in response to the many risks these consumers face, we need to be spending much less time on producing risk information (which coincidentally may be done for us in the future by increasing capable machines anyway)and much more time focusing on the design of the financial environment we all operate within.

But if changing the environment is so much more effective for changing behaviour, perhaps what we need is a framework of standardised definitions to characterise any interventions we make. Fortunately the social scientists are way ahead of us on this and have produced just such a framework. TIPPME (typology of interventions in proximal physical micro-environments) has been developed and demonstrated by applying it to the selection, purchase and consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco. As the authors state: This provides a framework to reliably classify and describe, and enable more systematic design, reporting and analysis of, an important class of interventions. This then allows evidence to be collected into what works and what doesn’t in changing behaviour across populations.

Our physical health and what interventions cause us to look after it better are thought sufficiently important for a coordinated approach to designing the risk environment, rather than the piecemeal legislation and partial solutions offered by commercial providers we have had to date, to be worthwhile. I would suggest that our financial health needs to be given similar consideration. This looks like a promising way forward that could result in truly evidence-based financial regulation, with the prospect of lasting change to the way we help consumers navigate a path through the financial seas. Far away from the sharks.

The future for actuaries

20. May 2017 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Prediction, Regulation

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Daniel and Richard Susskind in their book “The Future of the Professions” set out two possible futures for the professions. Either:
• They carry on much as they have since the mid 19th century, but with the use of technology to streamline and optimise the way they work
• Increasingly capable machines will displace the work of current professionals

Their research suggests that, while these two futures will exist in parallel for some time, in the long run the second future will dominate. The actuarial profession is particularly vulnerable. As the Susskinds write:

Accountants and consultants, for example, are particularly effective at encroaching on the business of lawyers and actuaries.

Actuaries both here and in other countries are waking up to what is coming, but the response of the profession is a whole has been quite slow.

For the actuarial profession, we will see the extension of some trends which have already begun, eg:

Automation of processes not just leading to greater efficiencies but reconfiguring both what work is done and how it is done, eg propensity pricing and pensions valuations
Para professionalization, like CAA Global for instance
Globalisation
Specialisation
Mergers of businesses as markets consolidate
Flexible self employment

And the emergence of trends that have hardly started at all yet, eg:

The end of reserved roles for actuaries
Different ways of communicating advice (Richard Susskind got into trouble with the Law Society in the mid 1990s for suggesting that most legal communication between lawyers and their clients would be delivered via email in the future, which would strike us as an obvious observation now)
Online self-help for users of actuarial advice (ask discussed by the Pensions Policy Institute in their report last year)
The advance of roboactuaries and their assistants

Focusing on the last of these, a paper produced by Dodzi Attimu and Bryon Robidoux for the Society of Actuaries in July 2016 explored the theme of robo actuaries, by which they meant software that can perform the role of an actuary. They went on to elaborate as follows:

Though many actuaries would agree certain tasks can and should be automated, we are talking about more than that here. We mean a software system that can more or less autonomously perform the following activities: develop products, set assumptions, build models based on product and general risk specifications, develop and recommend investment and hedging strategies, generate memos to senior management, etc.

They then went on to define a robo actuarial analyst as:

A system that has limited cognitive abilities but can undertake specialized activities, e.g. perform the heavy lifting in model building (once the specification/configuration is created), perform portfolio optimization, generate reports including narratives (e.g. memos) based on data analysis, etc. When it comes to introducing AI to the actuarial profession, we believe the robo actuarial analyst would constitute the first wave and the robo actuary the second wave

They estimate that the first wave is 5 to 10 years away and the second 15 to 20 years away. We have been warned.

One of the implications of this would be far fewer actuarial students required and, in my view, a much smaller appetite amongst actuarial firms for employing students while they were sitting actuarial examinations, particularly the core rather than specialist ones. This in turn would suggest an expansion of the role of universities in supporting students through these stages of their actuarial education, massively increasing the IT and data analysis skills of the next generation of actuarial students and developing far more opportunities for students to develop skills more traditionally seen as “work-based”, such as presentation, project management and negotiation skills. Some universities, such as my own at the University of Leicester, are using the preparatory work in anticipation of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ launch of Curriculum 2019 to do all of these things.

But universities and the education professionals in general face their own challenges from the rise of technology and increasingly capable machines:

The development of learning labs offering personalised learning systems
Online education networks, like Moodle, once used just to support traditional university teaching activities, but now starting to actively supplant them
Other online education platforms, like the Khan Academy
The rise of Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. For instance, more people have signed up to Harvard University’s MOOCs in one year than have enrolled at the University in its 377 year history

The actuarial profession and the higher education sector therefore need each other. We need to develop actuaries of the future coming into your firms to have:

great team working skills
highly developed presentation skills, both in writing and in speech
strong IT skills
clarity about why they are there and the desire to use their skills to solve problems

All within a system which is possible to regulate in a meaningful way. Developing such people for the actuarial profession will need to be a priority in the next few years.

Of course it is still possible to laugh at what Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (here and here) have not managed to do yet, despite their vast ambitions. But it should not blind us to the fact that those ambitions will be realised in our working lifetimes in many cases. And we need to start preparing now.