Dear Blog

Sorry I neglected you. I needed to do some soul searching.

I wish that I would just be happy to have a job, but I’m constantly inundated with feelings of pointlessness.

Insurance is a social good. That’s what an executive said at a prior company I worked at (during a presentation to justify his $1m salary). I believed this was true. I also believe in capitalism. Insurance seemed like the bandage for capitalism’s failures.

I still believe in capitalism, mostly. But not for the insurance industry. Competition isn’t a good thing when there can be so little product differentiation. The major innovations in insurance have all been on the pricing side. Companies come out with more and more elaborate rating plans, and if they don’t, they are adversely selected against.

Shareholders demand the use of fancy analytics because it’s all the rage. The executives try to please the shareholders and/or have realized that it’s extremely unpopular to be in the anti-analytics camp. The analysts and data scientists are just people who love to solve puzzles.

What value comes out of this? Like our own version of chaos monkeys, we’re just increasing expense ratios. We can’t still be using lobbying for seat belt laws as the justification for burning through ginormous sums of money.

I’d like to blame the regulators. And politics. But the system is probably too complicated to pinpoint blame.

I work in commercial lines now, where there is very little regulation and a lot of politics. The problems are similar but on a different scale. Commercial lines has been doing price optimization before personal lines. The difference is that the premium in commercial lines is optimized manually by people instead of by computers.

I want to be doing something that I believe has social value. I enjoyed working at a restaurant and I think serving food has social value. I’m not sure that I can stomach that salary differential though.

Do I just need to accept that my job is a job and given the current environment, it’s just something that someone has to do? Is there something else I could be doing that is engaging, valuable to society and does not involve a tremendous pay cut?

I guess while I continue to try to figure this out, there’s a ton of stuff that I would like to learn more about and improve. I might as well work on those.

Thank you for being there Blog.