Ignoring a Risk
Ignoring is perhaps the most common approach to large but infrequent risks.
Most people think of a 1 in 100 year event as something so rare as it will never happen.
But just take a second and look at the mortality risk of a life insurer. Each insured has on average around a 1 – 2 in 1000 likelihood of death in any one year. However, life insurers do not plan for zero claims. They plan for 1 -2 in 1000 of their policies to have a death claim in any one year. No one thinks it odd that something with a 1-2 in 1000 likelihood happens hundreds of times in a year. No one goes around scoffing at the validity of the model or likelihood estimate because such a rare event has happened.
But somehow, that seemingly totally simple minded logic escapes most people when dealing with other risks. They scoff at how silly that it is that so many 1 in 100 events happen in a year. Of course, they say, such estimated of likelihood MUST be wrong.
So they go forth ignoring the risk and ignoring the attempts at estimating the expected frequency of loss. The cost of ignoring a low frequency risk is zero in most years.
And of course, any options for transferring such a risk will have both an expected frequency and an uncertainty charge built in. Which make those options much too expensive.
The big difference is that a large life insurer takes on hundreds of thousands and in the largest cases, millions of exposures to the 1-2 in 1000 risks. Of course, the law of large numbers turns these individual ultra low frequency risks into a predictable claims pattern, in many cases one with a fairly tight distribution of possible claims.
But because they are ignored, no one tries to know how many of those 1 in 100 risks that we are exposed to. But the statistics of 20 or 50 or 100 totally unrelated 1 in 100 risks is exactly the same as the life insurance math.
With 100 totally unrelated independent 1 in 100 risks, the chance of one or more turning into a loss in any one year is 63%!
And the most common reaction to the experience of a 1 in 100 event happening is to decide that the statistics are all wrong!
After Superstorm Sandy, NY Governor Cuomo told President Obama that NY “has a 100-year flood every two years now.” Cuomo had been governor for less than two full years at that point.
The point is that organizations must go against the natural human impulse to separately decide to ignore each of their “rare” risks and realize that the likelihood of experiencing one of these rare events is not so rare, what is uncertain is which one.
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