I remember reading this piece from Zvi about the remedial math challenge and how grade inflation, pass the buck culture pervades, and increasingly agree re direct instruction with practice. Challenge is hiring and upskilling a massive group of teachers to this level in a country and system which doesn’t value teachers in any form. And then not changing the instruction, tech, policy and standards all the time … and lots of addition without also removing something …
I know it's a very minor part of the post, but CA home insurance is broken because people don't actually want to pay for the risk their property incurs. Insurance regulation is designed to keep prices down; a few examples of how this happens are:
1. Insurance companies have to request rate increases through the California Department of Insurance, which has the power to approve or deny them for a variety of reasons.
2. Rate increases of 7% or greater have required public hearings; this functionally caps any rate increase requests at 6.9%. That's why if you look at the public filings, a pretty sizable percentage sit at 6.9%.
3. Up until recently, you couldn't price wildfire risk based on anything but your actual claims history. This seems sensible, but big wildfires don't happen often enough for this to give adequate rates. It's why catastrophe models are standard tools for making rates (California has allowed their use for earthquake insurance since the late 90's, and the same goes for Florida for hurricane insurance).
The main disconnect here is between "the amount that the government and people want insurance to cost" and "What the free market would charge for insurance." That gap widened in recent years; in particular, the wildfire issue was why we saw State Farm and others stop writing new policies in 2023.
That gap is present in education too, I think. It's the gap between "how many students want an A" and "what an A should represent." The solution in insurance is making people pay for the risk their house takes on. The solution in education is a little more complicated, but it boils down to standardizing what an A represents.
The "oh well" comes from people who don't actually want that gap to close. Nobody that lives next to a giant forest wants to pay the actual cost of their risk, so everyone else stomachs a 5% rise in their insurance and pays for it. In education, nobody wants a C.
The good news is they are finally allowing home insurance premiums to rise here. I just bought new insurance this week and got off CA Fair Plan and i'd expect the cost to insure my home to fall again next year as more carriers come back and create more competition as the premiums can float to a market-clearing level
We can hope! I'm slightly less optimistic because the new system still doesn't incentivize writing the highest risk policies, but it's still a huge improvement. The FAIR plan is still a problem, because all the admitted insurers have to cover any losses reserves don't cover. And those losses can be passed to the consumer, effectively meaning that the entire state is paying for the high risk areas.
I remember reading this piece from Zvi about the remedial math challenge and how grade inflation, pass the buck culture pervades, and increasingly agree re direct instruction with practice. Challenge is hiring and upskilling a massive group of teachers to this level in a country and system which doesn’t value teachers in any form. And then not changing the instruction, tech, policy and standards all the time … and lots of addition without also removing something …
I know it's a very minor part of the post, but CA home insurance is broken because people don't actually want to pay for the risk their property incurs. Insurance regulation is designed to keep prices down; a few examples of how this happens are:
1. Insurance companies have to request rate increases through the California Department of Insurance, which has the power to approve or deny them for a variety of reasons.
2. Rate increases of 7% or greater have required public hearings; this functionally caps any rate increase requests at 6.9%. That's why if you look at the public filings, a pretty sizable percentage sit at 6.9%.
3. Up until recently, you couldn't price wildfire risk based on anything but your actual claims history. This seems sensible, but big wildfires don't happen often enough for this to give adequate rates. It's why catastrophe models are standard tools for making rates (California has allowed their use for earthquake insurance since the late 90's, and the same goes for Florida for hurricane insurance).
The main disconnect here is between "the amount that the government and people want insurance to cost" and "What the free market would charge for insurance." That gap widened in recent years; in particular, the wildfire issue was why we saw State Farm and others stop writing new policies in 2023.
That gap is present in education too, I think. It's the gap between "how many students want an A" and "what an A should represent." The solution in insurance is making people pay for the risk their house takes on. The solution in education is a little more complicated, but it boils down to standardizing what an A represents.
The "oh well" comes from people who don't actually want that gap to close. Nobody that lives next to a giant forest wants to pay the actual cost of their risk, so everyone else stomachs a 5% rise in their insurance and pays for it. In education, nobody wants a C.
The good news is they are finally allowing home insurance premiums to rise here. I just bought new insurance this week and got off CA Fair Plan and i'd expect the cost to insure my home to fall again next year as more carriers come back and create more competition as the premiums can float to a market-clearing level
We can hope! I'm slightly less optimistic because the new system still doesn't incentivize writing the highest risk policies, but it's still a huge improvement. The FAIR plan is still a problem, because all the admitted insurers have to cover any losses reserves don't cover. And those losses can be passed to the consumer, effectively meaning that the entire state is paying for the high risk areas.