mortalityexperience

The Mortality Experience of Life Assurance Companies
(C) 1869
Compiled by the Institute of Actuaries

I picked up this book more due to it’s factual/research interest than it’s historical social value. And what I mean by that is that it’s not a book for reading and chuckling about how life insurance was 100 years ago; it’s a book suitable for someone looking for original mortality tables from 100+ years ago. The book is a compendium of a mortality study, with some background on how the data was collected and how the results were tabulated.

Funnily enough, both the data collection and the tabulation have changed little over the intervening 140 years since this book was published. The book mentions data being collected originally from 17 insurance companies, then being compiled by the UK institute of actuaries. Today the various actuarial societies do the same thing – insurance companies provide their raw mortality data to the actuarial societies, the societies then compile the data and publish it out to the actuaries for use in pricing life insurance. The only two things that I can think of that have changed since then are that there would be probably hundreds of companies participating instead of a dozen or so, and likely many millions if not 10’s of millions of lives. And secondly the advent of computers allows the societies to analyze the data in a much more comprehensive fashion, more frequently.