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Notes -
A few thoughts on flood risk:
There are huge swaths of the United States that have only been populated by literate civilization for 100-200 years. This isn’t enough data to get good risk estimates on the 100-year flood zone, much less the 500-year flood zone.
Rainfall is NOT NORMALLY DISTRIBUTED! If you try to take historical rainfall totals, calculate the mean and standard deviation, and then use basic statistics to predict the likelihood of out-of-distribution events, you are going to get rekt because you didn’t have a term for “giant hurricane dumps five months worth of rain in two days”.
Because of this, there is essentially no market for private flood insurance in hurricane-prone areas. The federal government has to operate a flood insurance program at a loss in order to make the market. These policies are often underpriced given the true risk, and thus are a source of moral hazard.
can't private insurers hire a mathematician who can count non-normal distributions?
They did, and they came to the conclusion that they couldn't profitably write flood insurance policies in most of America at prices the property owners were willing to pay. Flood insurance in the US is largely provided by FEMA at below-market rates.
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Yeah, but the numbers knock your socks off.
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