STUMP Orientation: Death, Taxes, DataViz and Sumo!

A quick guide to this substack - the subjects, the archive, the type of material

Howdy, y’all! Substack emailed that there was a sizable bump in subscribers this past month.

That was probably due to the BBC4 Radio 4 podcast I showed up on as well as getting a shout-out from John Burn-Murdoch at Financial Times, who was also on the podcast.

So let me give you a quick orientation — this may be useful for “seasoned” readers who may have missed some of this the first time.

Why STUMP?

STUMP = Stu + MP.

Stu is my husband, and MP = me, Mary Pat (Campbell). I also go by the name of Meep. More on me here.

Stu is a silent partner regarding all my websites. He mainly helps do all the admin work, and I provide all the content.

DEATH

Many people got here due to my mortality trend posts, for obvious reasons.

I’m a life actuary, meaning my specialty involves analyzing mortality trends and dealing with life insurance and annuity products that involve life contingencies.

More simply: I count dead people.

My Twitter banner

The key post is STUMP 2023: Mortality Trends and Resources

I have stickied that post on the substack and keep it updated with key mortality-related posts, but not all mortality posts. It is also organized by theme, such as cause of death or age group.

All mortality-related posts (but not podcasts) can be found here: Mortality with Meep

From 2023 posts that you may be interested in, there is a series of video posts that you may be interested in:

2020-2022 U.S. mortality videos and posts:

Part 1: Video: U.S. Mortality Through the Pandemic, All Causes and by Age Group, Provisional through 2022

Part 2: Video: U.S. Mortality Through the Pandemic, part 2 -- Differences by State

Part 3: Video: U.S. Mortality Trends 2020-2022 part 3: Major Categories of Death

Part 4: Video: U.S. Mortality Trends 2020-2022 part 4: COVID

Part 5: Video: U.S. Mortality Trends 2020-2022 part 5: Historical trajectories for Causes of Death 1999-2022

Part 6: Video: U.S. Mortality Trends 2020-2022 part 6: Heart Disease and Cancer

Part 7: Video: U.S. Mortality Trends 2020-2022 part 7: Other Physiological Causes of Death

Part 8: Video: U.S. Mortality Trends 2020-2022 part 8: External causes of death

Silly death

For what it’s worth, not all my mortality-related posts are serious.

One of my favorite things is keeping track of fictional deaths.

Public Finance

My other big area is public finance, usually focused on long-term commitments and the methods of financing them. This is primarily public pensions and Social Security or similar programs.

A series from this year, Choices Have Consequences:

• Retirement Policy

• Retirement Age

• Retirement Benefit Design – COLAs, Replacement Rate, Indexing, and More

• Funding (or, rather NOT funding) Public Pensions

• Pension Obligation Bonds

• Public Pension Investments in Alternative Assets

Another series I’ve started this year (and I need to make some more posts on) are appreciations of others working in this sphere, who I’ve used as sources.

Public Finance Spotlights

• Liz Farmer

• Public Plans Database

• Wirepoints

Data Visualization

As you may be able to see from above, I really love making graphs.

Pretty much all the graphs I use in the posts are made in Excel, and I generally share the spreadsheets with the graphs. I have made videos explaining how I made some of the specialty graphs I made, such as the jitter graph you see above.

I am always working on making the data visualizations more effective.

Sumo!

I’m a big sumo fan. In general, I keep sumo posts on Sundays.

And yes, I make graphs for sumo, too.

Podcast

STUMP - Death and Taxes is a weekly podcast in which I generally switch between mortality and finance subjects (though I sometimes switch to something completely different.)

It does live natively in substack, but you can also subscribe and/or listen via Apple podcasts or other such services:

Enjoy!