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My heart breaks for the bees and their keepers (which is weird because most tragic news doesn't phase me), but I don't think think this is a good case for insur

My heart breaks for the bees and their keepers (which is weird because most tragic news doesn't phase me), but I don't think think this is a good case for insurance. You can profitably insure against a flood because it is not more likely to rain when everybody has flood insurance--the risk is independent. But any measure designed to take the sting out of the risk is going to increase the density of colonies and thereby create more risk than there was in the first place. It has a positive feedback loop.

msrenee 2y ago
People are more likely to build in flood zones if they can purchase flood insurance. There's a small town here where every house is within a flood zone off the river and they were underwater for about a week a couple years ago. Built right back up and now there's 2 or 3 new housing developments going in.
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  The entire coast of Florida is comprised of vacation homes and condos right in the path of hurricane storm surge on tiny sandy keys a few feet above sea level. Fortunately, the feedback loop is finally disintegrating. Unfortunately for those left holding the bag, it's disintegrating by insurers fleeing the state and leaving properties uninsurable - just deserts for those who knew the risks and thought they could profit off the situation, but terrible for locals forced out of their homes. I too have little sympathy for those who rebuild and increase development in a river floodplain.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Flood insurance is generally very expensive. That's should be a massive downside. I won't even look at a house if I know it needs flood insurance. I've seen a few that I would have been interested in had they not required the insurance - meaning I found the flood risk to be acceptable and there were mitigating factors if it did occur.
- ta988 2y ago
  So everybody having an insurance pays for this abuse?
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Hopefully an insurer would be aware of the flooding history and set premiums accordingly.
  - hedora 2y ago
    The flood plane thing is pretty extreme (and usually involves some sort of corruption, since zoning is involved), but pretty much everywhere on earth is seeing a correlated increased risk of building damage. The insurance companies are using this as an excuse to increase profitability. Focusing on corner cases is a distraction. Only a tiny percentage of houses are built in flood planes. A much larger percentage are in the sorts of towns that completely burn to the ground these days, or are in places that became flood planes since the housing was built (e.g., a big chunk of silicon valley). Other areas face other new/more common correlated disasters, like tornados, widespread crop failure, high wet-bulb days, grid/industrial collapse due to winter storms, etc.
- bombcar 2y ago
  Flood insurance is needed to get the mortgage - if it's not a legal mandatory requirement, people will buy (and even build) anywhere they can. Flood plains are often desirable in various other ways, too.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > There's a small town here where every house is within a flood zone off the river and they were underwater for about a week a couple years ago. Built right back up and now there's 2 or 3 new housing developments going in. Yeah we got the same shit in Ahrtal, Germany. The government decided to do nothing and so, predictably, three years after the last flood, a few weeks ago the next flood came - way smaller than the 2021 flood, but still decently destructive. IMHO, after devastating flood events governments should declare the affected area uninhabitable, insurances and governments pay out fair market value, and the land is then flattened and condemned for future settlement. There is just no way that with the escalating severity due to climate change this land will ever be safe from flooding again. [1] https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ahrtal-unwetter-auswirkungen-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ahrtal-unwetter-auswirkungen...
cjbgkagh 2y ago
Diffusion of risk does not make it go away, and that diffusion is not what makes insurance profitable. You can insure things like 'hole in one' prize money on an individual basis - it's up to the insurer to set the price and they can and frequently do one-offs. Astute insurers would see the proliferation of hives as an insurance risk and up their rates accordingly which would result in more Beekeepers dropping out of the market. At which time they will likely complain to the government about insurers putting them out of business. I should point out that they could likely have bought insurance for their exact circumstance but they also likely would not have liked the price. In effect they're generally asking for cheap insurance - which is like asking for free money. As best I can tell the failures of the markets in flood insurance are the results of government interventions.
ISL 2y ago
One could make the same argument against car insurance, and most kinds of insurance. I'm pretty sure that if car insurance were somehow banned, especially medical-liability, fewer people would own and operate motor vehicles. Insurance exists to put an upper bound on risk; the bad thing will hurt or be inconvenient, but with insurance it won't kill you. Perverse incentives appear in the case where the insurance payout is greater than the inconvenience/pain of the insured event. Until that threshold is breached, however, I don't think there's a case against insurance (and insurers that inadvertently pay people to have accidents rapidly go out of business).
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  Insurance has high upper bounds of coverage, liabilities over this are very unlikely to occur. AFAIK you can't get car liability insurance for infinity dollars. So in theory everyone is accepting some risk even with insurance, they just feel that it's small enough to be worth it. There are plenty of places on earth that have very little car insurance penetrations so we don't have to guess what that would look like. To me it looks pretty much the same. The major difference is that it's difficult to sue for liability and the people you're suing don't have much money so it's often pointless. Society just accepts that accidents happen, people die, and the survivors move on. In these, often highly unequal societies, the people who have money have a lot of it so they in effect self insure.
  - ISL 2y ago
    By 'upper bound' here, I meant for the insured. Above the deductible (and premium payments), the insured's exposure is largely lost time and headaches, the remaining financial burden is borne by the insurer. If anything, the presence of insurance might increase the amount of compensation an aggrieved party might be able to reap. Agreed that there are plenty of places in the world where car-insurance is non-existent. In those places, accident victims may not receive proper compensation for their injuries/destroyed property or the recompense may not be monetary in nature.
    - cjbgkagh 2y ago
mminer237 2y ago
Wouldn't your premium just be based on the density of your hives? Insurance insures your individual risk. If you increase your risk, you pay more for it.
- sp332 2y ago
  Yes, and coverage or discounts could be predicated on risk-reducing precautions.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    Does that work? Companies get fined for bad behavior all the time and they rarely change that behavior. It would seem that once we enter a one dimensional incentive space dictated by money we just forget about the reason behind those incentives and instead try to hack around our new limitations.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  The way these pathogens work is that once the environment is sufficiently dense with their spores there is no stopping them. There are certain continents where you just can't grow bananas for this reason. That's why they're burning the bees with the equipment, to prevent it from spreading. So what's to stop your neighbor from paying the high premiums, getting infected, and then a wayward bee carries the infection to your uninsured hives? As much as it would be nice to protect the bottom line for each farmer, it's far more important to protect the environment's compatibility with bees, and thats not a game that insurance is set up to play.
gavmor 2y ago
In my naive understanding, it seems a direct analog of any insurable crop, eg corn.
- cameron_b 2y ago
  Crop Insurance will have requirements for protocols that must be followed to make a crop insurable. For instance, some fruit or seed crops have pollination requirements of 2 hives per acre which must be carried out or they will not provide coverage for certain types of crop failure. An alternative analog would be not noticing that a cow was acting up, and allowing a whole herd to contract tuberculosis because a farmer didn't contact the vet or isolate parts of his herd from each other or the neighbors. Some things just happen, and they suck. But some things happen when you aren't on top of good management practices, and that sucks but some of it is on the farmer.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
otterley 2y ago
> You can profitably insure against a flood because it is not more likely to rain when everybody has flood insurance--the risk is independent. Flood insurance is a weird corner case of the market. Insurers would rather not provide flood insurance because of the widespread impact of flooding caused by weather; the claims are enormous. They'd prefer to exclude weather-associated flooding and limit it only to flooding caused by, say, broken plumbing. To the extent you can purchase flood insurance in flood-prone areas, it's because the government has intervened in the market and requires insurers to provide it as a condition of doing business in the state or to get a federally-backed mortgage loan. For the same reason, earthquake damage is explicitly excluded from homeowner's insurance in quake-prone states like California, Washington, and Hawaii. You have to purchase separate, and very expensive, earthquake insurance. When people see the premiums, they usually decide to forego it. Some sources: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240311-why-climate-change-is-making-the-us-uninsurable https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240311-why-climate-chan... https://www.nar.realtor/flood-insurance/faq-national-flood-insurance-program-expires-september-30-2024 https://www.nar.realtor/flood-insurance/faq-national-flood-i... https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/105-type/95-guides/03-res/eq-ins.cfm https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/105-type/95-guides...
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
I think this is an excellent case for insurance, because it seems like something that might rely on beekeepers noticing the disease and acting quickly, even though it might be an option and in their (short-term) interest to look the other way. When doing the right thing is ruinous with nothing to soften the blow, not doing the right thing becomes a lot more attractive.
Marsymars 2y ago
This is true, but there's also the opportunity for a negative feedback loop where the insurer mandates and enforces compliance measures in order to reduce risk.

msrenee 2y ago

People are more likely to build in flood zones if they can purchase flood insurance. There's a small town here where every house is within a flood zone off the river and they were underwater for about a week a couple years ago. Built right back up and now there's 2 or 3 new housing developments going in.

LeifCarrotson 2y ago
The entire coast of Florida is comprised of vacation homes and condos right in the path of hurricane storm surge on tiny sandy keys a few feet above sea level. Fortunately, the feedback loop is finally disintegrating. Unfortunately for those left holding the bag, it's disintegrating by insurers fleeing the state and leaving properties uninsurable - just deserts for those who knew the risks and thought they could profit off the situation, but terrible for locals forced out of their homes. I too have little sympathy for those who rebuild and increase development in a river floodplain.
giantg2 2y ago
Flood insurance is generally very expensive. That's should be a massive downside. I won't even look at a house if I know it needs flood insurance. I've seen a few that I would have been interested in had they not required the insurance - meaning I found the flood risk to be acceptable and there were mitigating factors if it did occur.
ta988 2y ago
So everybody having an insurance pays for this abuse?
- lxgr 2y ago
  Hopefully an insurer would be aware of the flooding history and set premiums accordingly.
- hedora 2y ago
  The flood plane thing is pretty extreme (and usually involves some sort of corruption, since zoning is involved), but pretty much everywhere on earth is seeing a correlated increased risk of building damage. The insurance companies are using this as an excuse to increase profitability. Focusing on corner cases is a distraction. Only a tiny percentage of houses are built in flood planes. A much larger percentage are in the sorts of towns that completely burn to the ground these days, or are in places that became flood planes since the housing was built (e.g., a big chunk of silicon valley). Other areas face other new/more common correlated disasters, like tornados, widespread crop failure, high wet-bulb days, grid/industrial collapse due to winter storms, etc.
bombcar 2y ago
Flood insurance is needed to get the mortgage - if it's not a legal mandatory requirement, people will buy (and even build) anywhere they can. Flood plains are often desirable in various other ways, too.
mschuster91 2y ago
> There's a small town here where every house is within a flood zone off the river and they were underwater for about a week a couple years ago. Built right back up and now there's 2 or 3 new housing developments going in. Yeah we got the same shit in Ahrtal, Germany. The government decided to do nothing and so, predictably, three years after the last flood, a few weeks ago the next flood came - way smaller than the 2021 flood, but still decently destructive. IMHO, after devastating flood events governments should declare the affected area uninhabitable, insurances and governments pay out fair market value, and the land is then flattened and condemned for future settlement. There is just no way that with the escalating severity due to climate change this land will ever be safe from flooding again. [1] https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ahrtal-unwetter-auswirkungen-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ahrtal-unwetter-auswirkungen...

cjbgkagh 2y ago

Diffusion of risk does not make it go away, and that diffusion is not what makes insurance profitable. You can insure things like 'hole in one' prize money on an individual basis - it's up to the insurer to set the price and they can and frequently do one-offs. Astute insurers would see the proliferation of hives as an insurance risk and up their rates accordingly which would result in more Beekeepers dropping out of the market. At which time they will likely complain to the government about insurers putting them out of business. I should point out that they could likely have bought insurance for their exact circumstance but they also likely would not have liked the price. In effect they're generally asking for cheap insurance - which is like asking for free money. As best I can tell the failures of the markets in flood insurance are the results of government interventions.

ISL 2y ago

One could make the same argument against car insurance, and most kinds of insurance. I'm pretty sure that if car insurance were somehow banned, especially medical-liability, fewer people would own and operate motor vehicles. Insurance exists to put an upper bound on risk; the bad thing will hurt or be inconvenient, but with insurance it won't kill you. Perverse incentives appear in the case where the insurance payout is greater than the inconvenience/pain of the insured event. Until that threshold is breached, however, I don't think there's a case against insurance (and insurers that inadvertently pay people to have accidents rapidly go out of business).

cjbgkagh 2y ago
Insurance has high upper bounds of coverage, liabilities over this are very unlikely to occur. AFAIK you can't get car liability insurance for infinity dollars. So in theory everyone is accepting some risk even with insurance, they just feel that it's small enough to be worth it. There are plenty of places on earth that have very little car insurance penetrations so we don't have to guess what that would look like. To me it looks pretty much the same. The major difference is that it's difficult to sue for liability and the people you're suing don't have much money so it's often pointless. Society just accepts that accidents happen, people die, and the survivors move on. In these, often highly unequal societies, the people who have money have a lot of it so they in effect self insure.
- ISL 2y ago
  By 'upper bound' here, I meant for the insured. Above the deductible (and premium payments), the insured's exposure is largely lost time and headaches, the remaining financial burden is borne by the insurer. If anything, the presence of insurance might increase the amount of compensation an aggrieved party might be able to reap. Agreed that there are plenty of places in the world where car-insurance is non-existent. In those places, accident victims may not receive proper compensation for their injuries/destroyed property or the recompense may not be monetary in nature.
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago

mminer237 2y ago

Wouldn't your premium just be based on the density of your hives? Insurance insures your individual risk. If you increase your risk, you pay more for it.

sp332 2y ago
Yes, and coverage or discounts could be predicated on risk-reducing precautions.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Does that work? Companies get fined for bad behavior all the time and they rarely change that behavior. It would seem that once we enter a one dimensional incentive space dictated by money we just forget about the reason behind those incentives and instead try to hack around our new limitations.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
The way these pathogens work is that once the environment is sufficiently dense with their spores there is no stopping them. There are certain continents where you just can't grow bananas for this reason. That's why they're burning the bees with the equipment, to prevent it from spreading. So what's to stop your neighbor from paying the high premiums, getting infected, and then a wayward bee carries the infection to your uninsured hives? As much as it would be nice to protect the bottom line for each farmer, it's far more important to protect the environment's compatibility with bees, and thats not a game that insurance is set up to play.

gavmor 2y ago

In my naive understanding, it seems a direct analog of any insurable crop, eg corn.

cameron_b 2y ago
Crop Insurance will have requirements for protocols that must be followed to make a crop insurable. For instance, some fruit or seed crops have pollination requirements of 2 hives per acre which must be carried out or they will not provide coverage for certain types of crop failure. An alternative analog would be not noticing that a cow was acting up, and allowing a whole herd to contract tuberculosis because a farmer didn't contact the vet or isolate parts of his herd from each other or the neighbors. Some things just happen, and they suck. But some things happen when you aren't on top of good management practices, and that sucks but some of it is on the farmer.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

otterley 2y ago

> You can profitably insure against a flood because it is not more likely to rain when everybody has flood insurance--the risk is independent. Flood insurance is a weird corner case of the market. Insurers would rather not provide flood insurance because of the widespread impact of flooding caused by weather; the claims are enormous. They'd prefer to exclude weather-associated flooding and limit it only to flooding caused by, say, broken plumbing. To the extent you can purchase flood insurance in flood-prone areas, it's because the government has intervened in the market and requires insurers to provide it as a condition of doing business in the state or to get a federally-backed mortgage loan. For the same reason, earthquake damage is explicitly excluded from homeowner's insurance in quake-prone states like California, Washington, and Hawaii. You have to purchase separate, and very expensive, earthquake insurance. When people see the premiums, they usually decide to forego it. Some sources: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240311-why-climate-change-is-making-the-us-uninsurable https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240311-why-climate-chan... https://www.nar.realtor/flood-insurance/faq-national-flood-insurance-program-expires-september-30-2024 https://www.nar.realtor/flood-insurance/faq-national-flood-i... https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/105-type/95-guides/03-res/eq-ins.cfm https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/105-type/95-guides...

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

I think this is an excellent case for insurance, because it seems like something that might rely on beekeepers noticing the disease and acting quickly, even though it might be an option and in their (short-term) interest to look the other way. When doing the right thing is ruinous with nothing to soften the blow, not doing the right thing becomes a lot more attractive.

Marsymars 2y ago

This is true, but there's also the opportunity for a negative feedback loop where the insurer mandates and enforces compliance measures in order to reduce risk.