A Modern Fable
By David Laks
We’re all going to die. It’s just a question of when. That is my job—to figure out when you will die. Well, not you specifically, but you as a representative of you. The digital model of you. I am a data analyst at John Adams Life Insurance Company and my job is to program big databases to determine the life expectancy of people. What we like to call in the biz, the actuarial tables. John Adams was a pretty stogy old fashioned workplace when I first got there. We were still expected to wear a jacket and tie to work every day, sit down in our cramped cubicles and click and clack away at our keyboards extracting whatever data we could find from the U.S. Census. My claim to fame was to modernize the whole approach and bring John Adams into the 21st century. Here’s what I did.
One day, sitting at home in my Back-Bay condo, kicking back with a cold brew from the corner Starbucks, I was hacking into the Facebook database. Hey, some people watch Seinfeld reruns, I like to hack sinister social media giants for fun—don’t judge me. I was trying to see if I could search on vaping posts, and then correlate that to vaping shops in the area. That part was easy. It was a bit harder to burrow into the area hospital databases to see if we could find an increase in admissions for respiratory illnesses. Hard but not impossible. Now don’t get your privacy knickers all in a bunch. I was not looking at individual names; this was a big-data exercise. The Feds will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to determine what I found out in my one elicit nocturnal journey: The rate of lung disease from vaping is the same as smoking cigarettes, and you can expect the same reduction in life expectancy. The next day, I showed my boss the data and told him that we need to change the insurance policy application to include vaping alongside smoking tobacco.
Let’s do the math—I love those four words—let’s do the math. It’s kind of like God saying, “Let there be light.” The world is in order, harmony. No messy indecisions, relationships, indeterminate feelings. Math is deterministic; it has structure, meaning, answers. I went through the numbers and showed that by changing our insurance policy to treat vaping like tobacco we would save $3.7B over 20 years. My career ascended. Literally. I was given an office on the 38th floor and asked to put together a crack team of software engineers that would drill down into every aspect of human behavior and genetics to quantify its impact on life expectancy. Our floor was like a tech start-up. Bring your dog to work. Free meals, beer and kombucha in the fridge. We revolutionized the insurance business. Customers filled out an application and our algorithms went through their social media footprint in an instant and calculated an insurance policy that was customized for each of them. Legal? Hmm, maybe. Read the T&Cs.
It was January 30, 2020 when I was taking an Uber from my new luxury condo at the Wharf and I read about the corona virus disease. The warnings were muted, with numbers coming out of China that had a 2% death rate. I felt a stir in my stomach but ignored it as my focus at the time was on correlating the racial changes due to Trump’s immigration policies and how that might impact our numbers. Racial profiling—that’s kinda what we do.
On February 15, I was reading that the number of virus cases was up to 67K. Now it caught my full attention. I decided to do a hack of the Wuhan, China, hospitals to see what numbers I could find. Holy shit. The death rate was not 2%, it was 50%. I did some mathematical simulations—this was a fucking disaster for us. I mean the deaths were disturbing and all, but the number of life insurance policies that would have to be paid due to the virus was staggering. I had to talk to my boss right away.
“You can go in now Mr. Little,” said Ms. Penny the admin for my boss Mr. Duck.
“Little, what can I do for you? You look kind of pale yellow. Are you OK?”
“Well, sir, I decided to do some investigation of this coronavirus, and I don’t know how to say this other than just come out and let you know that John Adams will be bankrupt by the end of the year.”
Mr. Duck staggered across his office and said, “Let’s get your whole staff to work on the numbers and see if they get the same numbers you do.”
So, I got the team all working on various simulations and each of them came to the same conclusion, that John Adams would cease to exist by the end of the year.
One of them said, “What are we to do?”
Another said, “If these windows could open, I would jump out.”
A third added, “My goose is cooked.”
And finally, I said, “The chickens have come home to roost. We have no choice but to let our CEO know.”
We all marched up to Ms. Fox’s office and demanded to see her immediately. She listened intently and asked if we had told anyone else? We said no, and then she said, “I want each and everyone of you to never speak of this again. If I find out that you have shared this crazy theory with anyone, I will fire you on the spot. Is that understood?”
• • •
Jan 18, 2021. Boston Globe
The stunning demise of one of Boston’s financial pillars, John Adams Insurance Company, was further complicated by the indictment of its longtime CEO, Loxanne Fox, derisively known as Foxy Loxy. It appears she knew of the negative financial impact the coronavirus was going to have on the company and secretly sold shares in a clear violation of insider trading law. It has been rumored that Fox left the country for a villa on a remote Pacific island. A former company employee said off the record, “I told her it was like the sky was falling. I guess she did listen to me after all.”
David Laks was an engineer and business leader during his 40-year career in high-tech electronics. He now is not.
Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash.