Principles of Insurance

This book is the first edition of a comprehensive text on insurance principles that went into 8 revisions over 30 years before going out of print after the eighth edition was published in 1985. It is especially interesting to read how practices have changed over the years - the first edition was published in 1952 and it has many unstated assumptions. For example, life insurance mortality was based on the 1949 Commissioner's Standard Ordinary (CSO) table; since the first edition was published in 1952 there have been new CSO tables published in 1958, 1980, and 2001 - in each case mortality has dropped so that current cost per thousand dollars for life insurance is less than 10% of what it was back then. There are other examples of regulatory changes and industry changes that are very interesting to read about. This book, therefore, should not be viewed as a current text by any means, but as an historical snapshot. I enjoyed it very much and was pleased that it could be purchased reasonably inexpensively. (I doubt there is any collector's value in the text, but certainly some interest value to me.)