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.
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Full transcript available here: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/the-4-000-insurance-policy-designed-to-never-pay-out/

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Links:

• Bits about Money, Working title (insurance) https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/working-title-insurance/

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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