Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his essay on title insurance, a service designed to never be performed with a "laughably low" 5% loss ratio compared to 50-80% for almost all types of insurance. The typical American moves every seven to eight years, paying a $500 annual tax for basically no good or service. This is due to a quirk about how America records real estate ownership: it mostly doesn’t. Confused? Welcome to the joyous anarchy that is American real estate. – Full transcript available here: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/the-4-000-insurance-policy-designed-to-never-pay-out/ – Sponsor: Framer is a design and publishing platform that collapses the toolchain between wireframes and production-ready websites. Design, iterate, and publish in one workspace. Start free at framer.com/design with code COMPLEXSYSTEMS for a free month of Framer Pro. – Links: Bits about Money, Working title (insurance) https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/working-title-insurance/ – Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (01:59) What is "title," anyway? (02:48) Distributed versus centralized database design in property rights (04:50) A quick digression for privacy-minded buyers (08:21) High confidence and complete confidence are different (11:28) Title insurance and title searches (14:33) One very quirky risk transfer and a statistical artifact (19:14) How title insurance is sold (20:03) Sponsor: Framer (21:34) How title insurance is sold (cont’d) (23:36) Is there anything to be done here? (25:47) Potential innovations in title insurance
