Hi Property & Casualty Actuaries!
Are their any good “Actuarial” audiobooks out there? Books that aren’t just audible versions of exam prep materials. For context, of books i’ve read that i consider “actuarial” in which there is overlap between the data sciency/modeling stuff that very well could be “actuarial” i consider Against the Gods, the remarkable story of Risk by Peter L Bernstein, and The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver.
Any recommendations?
Till All are One,
Epistemus
How does one purchase and listen to audio books? I’m getting old
There’s more than once source, but my common method is to download the Audible app through my appstore to my mobile device, pay for credits with real money, then download audiobooks and play them through the Audible app for your mobile phone.
Similarly, but free, is the app Hoopla, which you can use to interface a local library, and download audiobooks, for free, from your library. The library will have settings for how many downloads of a given a type you can do in a month, and these types will vary, but then you also play the audiobook through the Hoopla App. There’s another App, “Libby” i believe that interfaces with libraries and may be able to play audiobooks too.
I like being able to set playback speed to 1.5x.
Welcome to the year 2000!
If you broaden your scope to “insurance”, there’s always: “The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent”. 
I think Audible has free books through Amazon Prime, too.
OverDrive and RBDigital are other most-library-related audiobook app/services.
Google sells audiobooks through Play Books and I suppose you can buy them through iTunes, too.
I recommend The Wisdom of Finance, by Mihir A. Desai.
It touches on P&C insurance as well as finance more generally. It’s not too long, and works well as an audiobook. You get to hear the Flitcraft Parable from the Maltese Falcon…
I mainly get free audiobooks via my library using hoopla (10 free borrows per month in Westchester County currently … I need to pick my last 2 for March!). There are other apps like Overdrive, as mentioned above. You can check your local library system.
I got a little bored with some of the examples (as an audiobook anyway), but the chapter main ideas/lessons are solid and relevant to actuarial/analytics work.
I read this on scribd so you might be able to find it elsewhere.
Sounds like a “How To” book more than a “How to Recognize” book.
I liked The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
I started with this one meep. Turns out it was free on audible and doesn’t require any credits. I actually do enjoy this type of “story how we got here”. Further, it has a great analogy about like dutch east india company value > Google+amazon+alibaba+ other giants of today. really puts into perspective how large this company was. Thanks a lot!
I like Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics & Applied Economics, which I think gives a certain type of perspective, even if you’ve had a lot of experience with economics.
What’s great about those books is -no-formulas-.
It’s like the Wisdom of Finance – none of the concepts are new to me. I’m getting these books for other perspectives but mainly ways to explain these to other people and namely to non-actuaries.
And they’re great refreshers. Similarly, i’ve studied topics discussed in the books for exams or in college or in more academic settings, but they also help remind you what you’ve learned, and dare i say, the beauty in all of these cool actuarial/finance/mathy things.
Tom Stranger is hilarious!
“The Policy” by Patrick Lynch is available on Audible.
It is a novel, so fictional.
It is dated, though. 1999, so note (or reminisce about) the technology.