A History of British Actuarial Thought

In the first book of its kind, Turnbull traces the development andimplementation of actuarial ideas, from the conception of Equitable Life in themid-18^th century to the start of the 21^st century. This book analyses the historical development of British actuarial thought in eachof its three main practice areas of life assurance, pensions and generalinsurance. It discusses how new actuarial approaches were developed within eachpractice area, and how these emerging ideas interacted with each other and wereoften driven by common external factors such as shocks in the economicenvironment, new intellectual ideas from academia and developments intechnology.

A broad range of historically important actuarial topics arediscussed such as the development of the blueprint for the actuarial managementof with-profit business; historical developments in mortality modelling methods;changes in actuarial thinking on investment strategy for life and pensions business;changing perspectives on the objectives and methods for funding Defined Benefitpensions; the application of risk theory in general insurance reserving; theadoption of risk-based reserving and the Guaranteed Annuity Option crisis atthe end of the 20^th century.This book also provides an historical overview of some of themost important external contributions to actuarial thinking: in particular, thefirst century or so of modern thinking on probability and statistics, startingin the 1650s with Pascal and Fermat; and the developments in the field of financialeconomics over the third quarter of the twentieth century. This book identifieswhere historical actuarial thought heuristically anticipated some of thefundamental ideas of modern finance, and the challenges that the professionwrestled with in reconciling these ideas with traditional actuarial methods.

Actuaries have played a profoundly influential role in themanagement of the United Kingdom’s most important long-term financialinstitutions over the last two hundred years. This book will be the first tochart the influence of the actuarial profession to modern day. It will prove avaluable resource for actuaries, actuarial trainees and students of actuarialscience. It will also be of interest to academics and professionals in relatedfinancial fields such as accountants, statisticians, economists and investmentmanagers.