DeletedUser
As an actuary I feel compelled to tell you this comment is completely wrong. I'll leave the proof as an exercise for the reader.
I am not questioning the mathematics Konrad, the problem with the actuarial studies is that the assumptions are always wrong in the long run. They're valid assumptions at the time of the creation, but they never hold, nothing does. Ergo you can't keep using them. Which is why you have to get them redone for financial statements at least every two years otherwise you've got a lot of garbage on your financial statements. The accountants don't trust your numbers that much. Even the 10 year predictions done by the actuaries in places like the GAO, etc. are deeply flawed because of the assumptions that limit their effectiveness as long term tools. Topic is finance, not actuarial science as a whole. Financial markets NEVER do exactly what you predict. So yeah, after reading hundred and hundreds of financial reports and actuarial assessments, I've yet to see a single one in the financial markets which has held up under long term scrutiny. A few get close, but none get it exactly right. Considering the predictions for insolvency range outwards 17 or more years, depending on who's math you use, particularly if you use the garbage called dynamic scoring, you're gonna be wrong, and the farther out the deadline the more wrong you're gonna be. If you end up close, it's usually for the wrong reasons, so you're not right, it's like yelling out a number as an answer to a basic mathematical equation, if you have enough people yelling, 1 is bound to get it. But that doesn't make the underlying assumptions they used to get there correct. One of the biggest problems here though, isn't the actuary themselves, but that companies and governments continue to use excessively high expected return rates and have not adjusted for changes to the market which are more reflective of what they actually get over time. Actuaries are paid to use those numbers, which means some of the fault for the actuary being wrong is entirely in the hands of management who wanted a particular assumption used. Actuaries, like other specialists, have to keep clients happy.