Slate is deeply confused about insurance

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Timothy Noah is basically saying that a car insurance company can only stay in business if it has both good and bad drivers buying policies. Obviously that's horse****.

SHOCKING NEWS: newspaper lies to it's readers out of ideological reasons

there has been a lot of this in slate since it was founded, learn some ****ing source criticism

one thing which you don't seem to realize: bad logic and/or lying to your readers works great if your readers are dumb. for more of this, see huffington post or every single column by glenn greenwald.

[MRT144]

What other option is there?

MARK IT ZERO!

Seriously, I think it's to make sure the assumptions of the model aren't constrained just to what we want to believe. I propose a model debunking skunkworks.

[Felch]

there has been a lot of this in slate since it was founded, learn some ****ing source criticism

Trust me, I read Slate knowing that I will disagree with the tone of 80% of the articles. When they ran an article about whether dry-erase markers or chalk had a bigger carbon footprint, I wondered if they even stopped to think what a silly topic that was. But I'm okay with somebody who comes to a different conclusion as long as they're not blatantly wrong about any key points. This article just seemed like an unusually bad line of reasoning.

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But I'm okay with somebody who comes to a different conclusion as long as they're not blatantly wrong about any key points. This article just seemed like an unusually bad line of reasoning.

This is an excellent attitude, and I agree 100%

Op-eds which you disagree the most are the ones you should think about the most, because they make you question your attitudes and thus enlarge your world-view.

That said, Slate.com has a ****load of faulty reasoning (as you put it), and oftentimes just cynical lying about key points to support the writer's (or writers') argument. If you think the ones in the article which you linked are just naïve mistakes, you can always send response to the writer and see how it goes. Me, I've just given up on Slate.

[Straybow]

[Q=rah;5676853] And note, insurance companies don't make much in profits from premiums. Most of their income is from investment income. Heck the payouts for hurricane andrews were more than every single premium dollars that had ever been paid into the system at that point. But that doesn't mean money wasn't made and it sounds great when you're asking the insurance commision for permission to raise rates.[/Q] Nonetheless, premiums are scaled according to risk in order to properly distribute that risk. Just widening the pool has less effect on the premiums, it just changes the risk for the insurance company.

One could also point out that two people get the same payout with the same policy terms, one who has been paying premiums for decades and another who has only made a few premium payments. There is typically some discount given to long-standing policy holders, but nowhere near enough to account for the potential disparity in total premiums paid.

[Q=MRT144;5676861]And this speaks to the problem of correlation of catastrophic events affecting more than just claims filed.[/Q]

MRT sighting!