Regarding the Mortality Investigation, instituted by the Actuarial Society of America and now in progress

Extract

In October 1900, on the morning of the first day of the autumnal meeting of the Actuarial Society of America, Mr. Emory McClintock, Actuary of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, read a paper entitled “The Objects to be attained in Future Investigations of Mortality and Death Loss”, in which he stated that probably four-fifths of the publications of companies' general experience possessed only a “casual interest”, and that the same amount of effort might much better have been devoted to investigating special classes of business, adding that “it is “more important to the future interests of life insurance to learn “how fishermen compare with farmers, how physicians compare “with clergymen, and the like, than it is to gather all these “heterogeneous materials into one grand average in the form of “a new life table.”