Wednesday, March 20, 2013

"Insurers and financial firms are scooping up experts in natural disaster risk"

See also: "UPDATED--Are You a Recent Graduate Who Hasn't Found a Job? Consider Becoming a Charlatan".
This is a field where the "Baffle 'em with bullshit" approach works almost as well as having the knowledge and the chops.
The key is to make all your pronouncements non-falsifiable.*
From Quartz:

Seaside Heights, New Jersey, after Hurricane Sandy.
Suddenly, risk is hot. Not the financial kind, per se, but the risk of natural disasters inflicting heavy losses on markets, insured assets and even the social fabric of whole countries. And the folks who measure and model that risk—engineers, physicists, meteorologists and social scientists—are more in demand than ever, reports the scientific journal Nature.

Even as climate change increases the ferocity of severe weather, the planet is covered with more (vulnerable) infrastructure than at any point in the past—so the the frequency of costly black swans is increasing. In 2012, worldwide, natural disasters inflicted $160 billion in damages, estimates Munich Re, one of the world’s biggest re-insurers, or companies which insure insurers. Most of that damage was due to a single event—Hurricane Sandy—and 90% of total losses occurred in the US....MORE
*If you are serious about this stuff--see: Karl Popper.
If you really want to get your head on right, read Feynman (esp. Cargo Cult Science)
Or Dogbert:


August 22, 2009