Well, a colleague piped up that when her Dad died there had been "all sorts of payments and stuff, and it paid for me to go to university, and Mum kept the house".

Wow. Didn't I feel small.

I had a prejudice against insurance and shed it quickly, hearing such stories. However, there is a school of thought that doubts insurance is useful.

One man I know who regularly talks with the bureaucrats in Wellington says they wonder whether life insurance is useful.

They say, "there is no very good research that shows life insurance adds value". Now I know that you can make a lot of mistakes in science - "I had cancer, then I took vitamins, now I don't have cancer" - by confusing correlation with causation.

However, going back to my early colleague's story, we've got a real agent of causation: the money came from the insurance and was used to pay for real things; things that they could not have afforded if the money had not arrived. We know they were better off.

The next question the bureaucrats will say is, but was society better off? What about all the people that had less to spend because of their insurance premiums?

You may not believe it, but this kind of conversation really occurs. To which one might patiently explain that if a whole group of individuals have got together to spread an unpredictable and catastrophic risk (the main income earner dying, for example) into a series of shared, predictable and manageable premium payments, then maybe we should trust that they have it right and don't need any further explanation.

But you'd better be ready with your real life examples - because there are people out there who aren't sure. Sometimes they tell themselves this story to justify why they don't spend any money on insurance.