Summary |
General Insurance is a highly technical field and it would be foolish for any actuarial student to imagine that this textbook, dealing as it does with statistical and other actuarial contributions to management, offers a complete guide to general insurance or indeed that any textbook could be more than a foundation to be built upon with hard experience. The purpose of this textbook is modes. It is generally agreed that the profitability of general insurance requires to be safeguarded by the application of rational procedures for the classification and assessment of risks and the establishment of adequate premium bases and reserves. A beginning has been made and is being continually pursued to develop suitable techniques for this purpose. In this development actuaries and other statisticians, together with those currently engaged in the management of general insurance with a wealth of experience behind them, have. Collaborated to a point at which it is felt that the fruits of their work should be made a compulsory part of the actuarial discipline. This is what this textbook seeks to do. It seeks to bring together the existing state of knowledge and the existing state of practice in the general insurance field. These two states are different. In all fields of industry science tends to forge ahead of practice. New techniques have to be proven before they are adopted in general practice. So the book is a compromise between knowledge and practice. As practice catches up with knowledge the book will have be revised. In a sense the very rapidity with which this book becomes outdated and inadequate will be a measure of its usefulness.
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