Those of you who know me well will realize that any signs of feminism that might make themselves felt in the mind of Crox are soon tempered by the brute facts of biology.
Equality of opportunity, equality in the workplace, equality in the home – well, I’m for all these things. What sane person wouldn’t be?
But the fact remains that there are verifiable, biological differences between men and women that affect many aspects of our lives, and we would be foolish to ignore them. Insurers, for example, know what they are about, and they have long known that women and men have different rates of life expectancy, and tend to suffer disproportionately from different diseases. Although the Reaper is rigorously gender-neutral in the end, overwhelmingly more men than women die from prostate cancer, and (bear in mind that this is a wild guess supported by no evidence whatsoever) every person who dies from cervical or ovarian cancer is a woman.
It’s also the case that most motor accidents involve and are caused by young men – overwhelmingly so. Which is why insurers know that women drivers can, and should, be offered discounts. This kind of discrimination is supported by scientific evidence: and as women are more careful drivers, it is only fair that they shouldn’t be expected to foot the bills for accidents caused by boy racers. And yet the European Union, in all its cretinous, drooling, self-serving, irksomely meddlesome yet hogwhimperingly inept unwisdom, aims to change all that, with rules that will outlaw gender-based discrimination in the insurance industry. To my mind this flight from solid scientific data in pursuit of some nebulous goal of politically-correct cloud-cuckooland is utterly bonkers, and a good reason, if there weren’t enough already, for Britain to leave the EU, an organization which is quite clearly staffed by people who are light of brain, and who, insulated from the rest of us by their tax-free income and expense accounts, seem to have problems coming to terms with reality.
It’s okay: We’ll just start driving more haphazardly to make up for it.
Eva- you me remembered that a while ago, a woman behind the car hit me when I was parked my car, she was at fault. The problem it turned out more damaged than I. I don’t have sure in Insurance Company (very expensive in Chile). She had insurance and if I use it against me, also lied by telling a false story to the Insurance Company. Now I have to face the insurer in the Courts, imagine the cost to me, thinking that I had no guilt, it is more, she should pay me for the damages in my car.
Yeah, that’s just plain silly. What’s next, increasing life insurance premiums because charging extra to people who engage in base jumping and mountaineering is discriminatory?
No. The logical next step is to leave the EU. We were promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (whose small print, no doubt written in Comic Sans, allegedly contain these dribblingly swivel-eyed provisions) but the last government reneged on that. The present government side-stepped the issue.
Even a certain Dr JR of Rotherhithe commented to me this morning, as we shared a Metro at Green Park, that maybe we should leave the EU.
Well, there you are then. It must be right.
Which brings up the big debate in the US known as the “profiling debate”. Shortly after 9-11, a similar issue “cropped up” with regards to security checks prior to boarding flights. Despite absolute facts on the ground backed up by very clear statistics about the background of the hijackers (and their backers and supporters), the US had a very hard time “digesting” this information.
At the time, I was flying about to interviews for a position. One time, I was in line to board an aircraft–in DC, I believe–when the security decided to perform an additional check on certain passengers prior to boarding. How? Randomly. After all, they did nopt want to “profile” people. This meant that the two young gentlemen in leather jackets and sunglasses behind me speaking in a middle-estern language language promptly boarded the plane, while an old American great-grandmother from the midwest carrying a batch of home-made chocolate chip cookies was pulled aside and the feather on her hat was prodded and pulled until the security agents were satisfied that she was not a threat. Just like in the case mentioned by Henry–statistically, all hijackers were young men. Why bother with the ridiculpous charade of examining an old women?
It should not be called “profiling”, but simply statistics-based security…
Well, yes and no. There’s a legitimate debate over the extent to which insurers should and should not be allowed to profile people. After all, the whole point of insurance is to spread risk. Everyone contributes a small premium, most of them never get it back, and the money (minus the insurers’ profits) gets distributed to those who suffer whatever indignity they’re insuring against.
The insurers naturally want to know who are the higher risk people and charge them more. However, the end result of that process is to negate insurance itself. In the limiting case where the risk model is perfect – the insurers know exactly who will get ill – then everyone ends up paying the exact cost of their treatment, plus a bit extra for the insurer’s cut. The lucky well people pay nothing, and the unlucky ill are stuck with huge premiums.
Morally, it seems to me that the fair solution is to allow insurers to charge people extra if they incur voluntary risks. By all means charge smokers higher premiums, or fat people, or those who choose to drive faster cars. Give no-claims discounts to those who have proven themselves more responsible than average.
But by the same token, it’s not fair to charge people extra for risks that aren’t their fault – being born in possession of a mutated copy of the Brca1 gene, for example. That kind of involuntary risk is precisely what insurance is there to mitigate, by spreading it across the population as a whole – in just the same way as it spreads the risk of your house being hit by lightning. Possession of a Y chromosome seems to me to fall into this domain.
Rubbish. You’re saying being a bad driver is genetic and there’s nothing you can do about it. Being a bad driver is perfectly voluntary.
rpg: Eh, no – the insurance companies are the ones saying being a bad driver is genetic, by raising premiums on all men regardless of evidence one way or the other for any given individual. They’re also probably correct! As Lord Crox says, there are many biological differences between men and women. These differences presumably affect the likelihood of car accidents. I am not convinced that insurance companies should be allowed to take gender differences into account, seeing as the only function of insurance is to share out unavoidable risks between people – and what is more unavoidable than the DNA you’re born with?
Statistical. Not genetic. They’re raising premiums on all men because it’s effectively impossible to determine which small group of young men cause 90% of accidents. It’s far more likely to be sociological than biological.
I mean, you might as well say that all men are rapists, or all women should cover themselves up because men can’t be trusted to behave themselves, or all Arabs and Irishmen are terrorists.
There are two issues here. One is to do with divination. Peter writes (btw, welcome to OT, Peter):
However, the end result of that process is to negate insurance itself. In the limiting case where the risk model is perfect – the insurers know exactly who will get ill – then everyone ends up paying the exact cost of their treatment, plus a bit extra for the insurer’s cut. The lucky well people pay nothing, and the unlucky ill are stuck with huge premiums.
The limit will only be reached if insurers can know the future, rather than simply modelling likelihood based on past results. Perfect foreknowledge is of course impossible. And, as rpg says, accidents are determined at least as much by statistics as genetics, you can still say that most road accidents are caused by men, but there will always be some that are caused by little old ladies; there will always be people dying of lung cancer who never smoked in their lives, and so on.
The other issue is the confusion between the general and the specific. The media do this all the time – here is a story on the issue by the BBC in which brother-and-sister twins are interviewed and asked about the enormous differences in premiums they are being asked to pay as young drivers, specifically because of their genders.
This is typical media bollocks – the fact that one young man is as careful a driver as his sister doesn’t negate the weight of evidence that, as a group, young men behind the wheel are bigger risks than young women. A few years ago, I was involved in an accident in which a young woman driver ignored traffic signals and rammed into my car at a junction. Does this mean I think all young women are bad drivers? Of course not.
The task insurers are faced with is weighting the known risks (reckless young men behind the wheel) against the statistical noise (non-smokers dying of lung cancer) so that they can provide no-claims bonuses (a way of rewarding, say, those young men who buck the trend and turn out to be model drivers) and make a profit in the end which they can invest for their shareholders.
You’re still not addressing the point I’m trying to make, which is the difference between two classes of risk factor: those which an individual has voluntary control over, and those which they do not.
Leaving aside the gender question for a while: is it reasonable for insurers to charge higher premiums to those carrying a mutated Brca1 gene, or an unfavourable ApoE variant? If so, why? If not, why not?
I’m not sure whether that difference is clear-cut. Sure, people can’t help being male, but there is enormous variation in how this fact penetrates (excuse me) behaviour, which then feeds into risk. But the cost of assessing the risk posed by individuals would be prohibitive, and the exercise would probably be pointless given the stochastic element, so it’s easier to take a broad brush approach by charging higher premiums for young men in general, and rewarding individuals with no-claims bonuses.
Is it reasonable for insurers to charge higher premiums for people with (say) mutated Brca1 genes? Yes, in the same way that insurers load premiums on people who are over a certain age, over a certain weight, have diabetes and so on.
Doesn’t that then create a strong incentive not to find out one’s Brca1 status, though? Who would take the risk of rendering themselves uninsurable?
Indeed.
I dispute that individuals don’t have control over whether they’re bad drivers or not.
There is most likely a huge sociological factor at play. There is a particular risk group for this case–young men between the ages of about 18-24 (which is why most insurance companies sting that age group particularly). Alcohol is also a factor.
The question you need to ask to determine a genetic component is, what rate of male vs female drivers cause accidents. And then you have to remove confounders such as alcohol and social pressure to be a dick.
I dispute that individuals don’t have control over whether they’re bad drivers or not.
So do I! That’s pretty much my whole point. They have control over whether they’re bad drivers or not: they don’t have control over whether they’re male or not. That’s why in an ideal world, insurers should weight premiums based on the former factor and not the latter.
I’d like to live in your ideal world.
In the risk calculation, where would you like insurance companies to draw the line concerning factors to be taken into account? With respect to car insurance, despite being a woman (…), I certainly run significantly higher risks of getting into (serious) accidents simply because I drive to and from work for over two hours total every day, half on the extremely busy Autobahn and half on the country roads (which regularly feature dead deer or wild boars along the side of the road).
Other than that: I just had a car insurance spammer on my blog thanks to this post…………
Thanks for that Steffi – your point also addresses Peter’s arguments, in that there are more things to be addressed in calculations of risk besides one’s gender (which one can’t help), such as where you live, how many miles you drive in a year (something that I know affects my own premiums), the make of your car (especially its power) and so on. So, insurance companies do rate a variety of factors, some of which you cannot determine, others that you can control, when making their calculations. It’s not a simple matter of one or the other.
Sorry about the spammer – I’m getting quite a few spammers at the moment. I guess that’s the downside of being incredibly popular, handsome and so on
Oh, I’m well aware of the fact that insurers take many things into account. I was under the impression we were discussing a more interesting question, to wit: which of them they should take into account. Being male / female is a special case of the more general question of genetically determined risk.
Insurers want to draw the boundary at known/unknown risks: they will adjust for every known risk they can think of. This has the downside that it stifles knowledge – it creates a powerful incentive not to look took deeply into your own circumstances for fear of what you might find. Also, what’s the next step? Should the insurers insist on genetic testing to prevent this kind of wilful ignorance? After all, they wouldn’t let you get away with claiming you didn’t know whether you had window locks fitted or not, so why should they let you get away with claiming you don’t know your Brca1 status?
I contend that a better principle would be to draw the boundary at voluntary/involuntary risks. Being born with mutated Brca1 is a stochastic, involuntary risks, just the same as having your house struck by lightning. This issue is inevitably going to loom ever larger as we find out more about the Human Gnome and identify more such known-but-involuntary risks.
Thanks again, Peter, for joining the discussion. You do raise an interesting point – if being born with a mutated Brca1 gene is as involuntary as being struck by lightning, then I guess one’s gender is the same. From an individual’s perspective it does seem very unfair to be burdened with higher premiums as a result. However, the fact remains that there is a distinction to be made between individuals and groups, and – in the case of motoring, where this started – it’s a plain fact that young men, as a group, are riskier propositions than young women, and for the EU to legislate against reality is crazy.
I don’t see it as the EU legislating against reality – I see it as the EU reminding the insurance company what their job is!
Insurance is there to protect the insured parties against bad luck and uncontrollable risk, by having everyone pay a small premium and then shouldering the costs of those whose dice rolls come up snake eyes. That’s its only reason for existence.
Is stupid, and doing so with the liars (gen: UIU890TytrBrocapoto), the only thing that interests of teh Insurance Company is to charge insurers. Although one is not guilty, bastard damn.