STUMP » Articles » STUMP Orientation: Death, Taxes, DataViz and Sumo! » 3 June 2023, 17:33

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

Go over here to subscribe to the Substack site — the posts are all free, for what it’s worth. I do keep this old site up, because I like owning my stuff.

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.

MORTALITY WITH MEEP
Meep Hits the Road and Plays the Oldies: Today – Silly(ish) Mortality Posts!

MARY PAT CAMPBELL
·
AUGUST 6, 2022
Meep Hits the Road and Plays the Oldies: Today – Silly(ish) Mortality Posts!
I’m about to take a vacation (or, rather, I’m about to pack up and take the kids elsewhere, leaving Stu to have a vacation with the ducks.) I hope it ends better than the vacation in 2017. While I’m away, I’m pulling out my old records, I mean posts, pulling back to some golden oldies from the

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!