The website HonestMath.com challenges the claims by a social media influencer and proponent of an insurance product known as maximum premium indexing. The site’s operator, Khalen Dwyer, shows the mathematical analysis behind his conclusions.A TikTok and Twitter fight broke out in January pitting two often incompatible ideals — marketing hype and the emotional vibes it generates versus math.
What I like about Honest Math’s approach is that Dwyer publishes reasoned scenario-driven analyses and the assumptions on which they’re based. In his tussles against Ray on Twitter, he requests and adheres to Ray’s starting assumptions as he compares the financial outcomes of different investment strategies over time.
“Our analysis reflects MPI’s underperformance relative to a traditional retirement portfolio,” Dwyer told me, “despite granting Curtis the benefit of wildly optimistic assumptions.” I didn’t expect that Ray would find Dwyer’s math convincing, considering the maxim about human behavior attributed to Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”“I’ve seen no evidence that possesses a thorough understanding of the math of his product, nor that he’s capable of modeling it himself in sufficient detail,” Dwyer said.