Insurance and astrology

One of the most curious times of year tends to be the dog days of summer. Most people are taking a holiday and this encourages journalists and the rest of us who write professionally to come up with odd or less serious stories. When people are relaxing while nursing a cocktail with a monkey climbing up the stick holding the olive, no one wants to hear about shootings and end-of-the-world floods in Australia. They like their beer lite and their news lighter in tone. All of which makes it really strange to find Allstate hitting the headlines in January for claiming Zodiac Signs match up to claims records. What were they thinking? That insurance is a kind of voodoo science in which you cast horoscopes to see how many accident claims will come in? Perhaps someone in their PR department needs psychiatric help. This is grabbing the attention of the press for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway, no matter why we have been started down this road, the news immediately gets all these wonderful stereotypes in our brains jumping up and down for attention. Taurus drives like a bull, aggressive when it comes to moving through traffic, hates changing lanes and stubborn when asked to let someone filter in. Whereas Libra is patient with other drivers, well-balanced when rednecks in trucks cut in front, and generally cheerful when someone steals a parking space. Except that's not quite what Allstate is talking about.

While we were sleeping, astrologers have been debating whether the old pattern of signs and the birth days they represent is still correct given our new understanding of how planets and stars influence our lives. The controversial result has been a new calendar and a thirteenth sign - Ophiuchus aka Serpentarius. It's genuinely fascinating that whole generations of people have been growing up without realizing the influence of Ophiuchus. Shame on all these astrologers for not telling us before. Except, of course, they have an excuse . It's all the fault of the Big Bang. The Universe is expanding so the view our ancestors had of the stars no longer matches what we see today as the Earth journeys across the night skies.

So, Allstate wants us to know that, under the new calendar, Virgos made the most claims (actually 12% of the total) while Scorpios claimed the least (actually 1.5%). Now you Virgos should not panic and try to reregister your birth days. Allstate is not planning to base premium rates on your Zodiac Signs, whether the traditional twelve or the new thirteen. So, when you start using the search engines to get all those auto insurance quotes, they will all be based just on your real world personal information. But, if for a moment, we speculate on what would happen if all the insurance companies pooled all their data. Would they find a real statistical link between the Zodiac and claims made? It's a spooky thought. If it happened, just imagine how the auto insurance quotes might look , predicting an annual premium of $875 and the possibility of you meeting a tall, dark stranger in a traffic accident.

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