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On the Methods of deducing the Rate of Mortality from the Experience of Assured Lives; with some mention of a method adopted in investigating the experience of the Clerical, Medical and General Life Assurance Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2016

William J. H. Whittall
William J. H. Whittall
Affiliation:
Medical and General Life Assurance Society
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Extract

In venturing to bring this subject before the Institute to-night, I am conscious of inviting attention to a matter which has been frequently treated before and by far abler hands than mine. I at once confess that I have little original matter to bring forward; indeed, the main object of this paper is to endeavour to bring into one focus and to a common standard of criticism the various formulas for ascertaining the rate of mortality, which have already been so often discussed in this room. The expression “rate of mortality” is advisedly used here instead of “exposed to risk”, because it would seem that attention has hitherto been unduly centred in the latter.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Institute of Actuaries , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , April 1894 , pp. 161 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Institute and Faculty of Actuaries 1895

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References

page 162 note * This statement occurs in a Report by the Council of the Faculty of Actuaries. Mr. J. J. Downes himself, in a foot note to his pamphlet (p. 4), states that the suggestion for employing cards originated with Mr. O. G. Downes.

page 164 note * In speaking of the “curtate duration”, I adopt the expressive phrase used by Messrs. , Hardy and , Rothery (J.I.A., xxvii, 165),Google Scholar It represents, of course, the integer of the ascertained duration of the policy.

page 165 note * I use the term “mean age” at entry, as previous writers have used it, to signify the age obtained by deducting the calendar year of birth from the calendar year of entry. Similarly, the “mean duration” is the calendar year of exit minus the calendar year of entry.

page 178 note * Mr. W. Oscar Nash has since suggested to me that for “ages at entry” it would be clearer to substitute here “assumed ages at the assumed date of entry.” He adds, “there are two assumptions both varying from the truth in individual” cases—(1) that entrants are aged exactly x–½ at entry; and (2) that all enter “in the middle of the calendar year; and it is only by taking the sum of the “errors here possible that a variation of ‘a year either way’ arises.”

page 183 note * The authors also call this a mean age, but in the sense in which they themselves apply this term in regard to the ages at entry and discontinuance, and in which I have also used the term, they appear to he wrong in using it so.