# How should I die? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 8, 2024, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776 "2024-01-08T13:22:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/61 "2024-01-08T21:41:29Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > So far at least that at least in the UK over the last 70 years it is true. > [@DSeid](#): > > Also in the USA 1900 to 2010. Help me out here, I’m not immediately seeing anything in either of those cites that shows the total accidental death rate over time. The first one has a long section about it, but only gives absolute numbers for specific causes (some rising, some falling) and talks about how significant they are as a proportion of the total death rate. The second cite has nothing at all that I can see. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/62 "2024-01-08T21:46:53Z")
The graphics. Have to do math to get percentages on the USA one. Not adding in suicide percentage is about 4 to 5% accidents both time periods. Clear to eyeball on the UK one. Big changes up in cancer down heart disease but that accident etc group about the same. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/63 "2024-01-08T21:48:27Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > The graphics. So the graphic in the Carolina one has the accidental death rate halving between 1900 and 2010. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/64 "2024-01-08T21:50:14Z")
As a _share of total deaths_ about the same. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/65 "2024-01-08T21:50:47Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > share of total deaths That’s not the hypothesis. The suggestion was that while the death rate from disease has decreased, the death rate from accidental causes has not. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/66 "2024-01-08T21:56:25Z")
It isn’t? > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > the percentage of people who die “unnatural” deaths (ie those not related to health problems) seems to remain pretty constant I don’t know about across other time periods or other countries but interesting that the first two I can find while quickly looking between things at work do show that. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/67 "2024-01-08T21:57:36Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > It isn’t? No. “The percentage of people who die” clearly does not mean the proportion of total deaths that are attibutable to this cause, it means the percentage of living people who die. The death rate from this cause. It would hardly be surprising to discover that the death rate from disease has halved from medical advances, and the death rate from accidents has also halved from safety improvements. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/68 "2024-01-08T22:05:32Z")
Even if you avoid all the specific disease risks listed in the OP, eventually your body gets to a point where it just hasn’t got the capacity to repair itself, so some minor injury becomes a more serious wound than it would have been if it happened in your 20s - you get infections and these take their toll, and general wear and tear on various organs (just from the mere fact you are using said organs) starts to overtake your body’s capacity to maintain them; they fail, you die if it’s a vital organ; if it’s not something immediately vital, you get sick and that stress creates a cascade where other organs can’t keep up; they fail, you die. In terms of not dying from the diseases on that list, if the advice is valid, all it’s doing is _reducing_ the risks, which in practical terms just extends the likely time before the thing gets you regardless (because the risk could never be reduced to zero). That’s fine if all you are doing is pushing back one risk - so you do all the things that reduce the risk of heart disease, and you push that risk back beyond the horizon where it’s likely something else will come into play; if you push that risk back too, it’s the same - you’re only pushing it to the point where it’s less likely than other things. If you somehow succeed in pushing _all of the risks_ back (unlikely, but if you did), you’re probably just facing the same list of enemies, but a bit later than scheduled. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/69 "2024-01-08T22:10:06Z")
I think the first cite I posted has the clearest presentation of the statistic in @Little_Nemo’s hypothesis (accidental death rate), including demographic adustment, although the data look consistent in the other cites that you posted. The death rate from all accidental causes decreased pretty steadily by two thirds from 1900 to the 1990s, and then spiked up again in the last decade due to drug abuse. See the two charts on here, the second one breaking out different causes. > **[Historical Trends: Standardized Death Rate - Injury Facts](https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/historical-preventable-fatality-trends/standardized-rate/)** > > The age-adjusted death rate for preventable injuries decreased 36% from 1903 to 2021 – from 99.4 to 63.3 deaths per 100,000 people. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/70 "2024-01-08T22:13:48Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > No. “The percentage of people who die” clearly does not mean the proportion of total deaths that are attibutable to this cause, it means the percentage of living people who die. The death rate from this cause. It wasn’t clear to me anyway. I suspect what @Little_Nemo read was something based off what I am seeing in the limited check I’ve done. As a share of causes of death it has stayed pretty flat even as the fraction due to other causes have changed significantly. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/71 "2024-01-08T22:19:29Z")
If you look at the chart that is broken out by cause, you can see that it was dominated by falls and motor vehicle accidents in the first half of the 20th century. Falls dropped dramatically; motor vehicles steadily improved but was still the leading cause for the second half of the 20th century; then deaths from drug abuse took over as the leading cause in the last decade. It seems pretty implausible to me that some high level risk homeostasis across unrelated causes is operating here - that as the risk of dying from falls at work decreases, in our need for a rush we start abusing drugs. And the data don’t support that, given the steady downward trend in total death accidental death rate for a century until the sudden recent spike from drug abuse. What seems more plausible to me is that there is some fairly constant level at which society finds the death rate unacceptable and acts to reduce risk. So if some new risk like drug abuse comes about, we let the death rate from that cause rise to a similar level to the prior risk from workplace falls before it becomes so high that we decide we must act. In other words, it’s not so much driven by risk seeking, but risk tolerance. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/72 "2024-01-08T22:20:27Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > In other words, it’s not so much driven by risk seeking, but risk tolerance. That was the hypothesis I was considering. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/73 "2024-01-08T22:21:13Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > No. “The percentage of people who die” clearly does not mean the proportion of total deaths that are attibutable to this cause, it means the percentage of living people who die. The death rate from this cause. > > It would hardly be surprising to discover that the death rate from disease has halved from medical advances, and the death rate from accidents has also halved from safety improvements. I think what we are _really_ interested in is the MTTD - the Mean Time To Die of various causes. Deaths as a percentage of total deaths is skewed by changes to life expectancy. Mean Time To Die would measure the average time we would expect it to take someone to die of a random accident, assuming nothing else took them out first. My guess is that MTTD has gone up over time due to increased safety measures (seat belts and speed limits, earthquake codes, etc etc) ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/74 "2024-01-08T22:21:21Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > I suspect what @Little_Nemo read was something based off what I am seeing in the limited check I’ve done. I can see how the phrase “percentage of people who die” is a little ambiguous without context, but your initial interpretation makes no sense. Seeing that the death rate from accidents has fallen just as fast as the death rate from disease is _exactly what you’d expect_, and hardly something surprising that anyone would remark upon. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/75 "2024-01-08T22:22:17Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > Deaths as a percentage of total deaths is skewed by changes to life expectancy. > > Mean Time To Die would measure the average time we would expect it to take someone to die of a random accident, assuming nothing else took them out first. Yes, and the cite I posted shows exactly that. It is age-adjusted. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/76 "2024-01-08T22:26:38Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > Yes, and the cite I posted shows exactly that. It is age-adjusted Oh, I meant to add - if what @Little_Nemo half remembered was correct, we would expect humans to engage in risky behavior until MTTD reached a certain level; increasing safety precautions would lead people to take greater risks, such that MTTD is the same. For example, a bike rider in Year 1 might suffer a fatal fall on average once every 50,000 hours of riding (wild ass guess), but wearing a helmet reduces this so that it takes on average 150,000 hours before a fatal accident occurs. But when a law is passed requiring helmets, the helmeted riders go offroading or go faster or cut in front of cars; and this increased risk tolerance would continue until bikers can be expected to suffer a fatal crash once every 50,000 hours again. While there may be some increase in risk taking behavior, I would need some serious evidence to conclude that this always trends towards canceling out initial safety gains. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/77 "2024-01-08T22:31:21Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > No. “The percentage of people who die” clearly does not mean the proportion of total deaths that are attibutable to this cause, it means the percentage of living people who die. The death rate from this cause. Perhaps I was not clear. But I have to admit I’m not seeing the distinction you’re making here. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/78 "2024-01-08T22:35:00Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I’m not seeing the distinction you’re making here. (1) Proportion of total deaths attributable to a cause. If the total mortality rate decreases by 50%, but all causes decrease equally, this proportion stays the same. That’s what @DSeid was reporting. And that’s unremarkable - roughly similar improvements in both medicine and safety. (2) Death rate attributable to a cause - the probability of a living person dying from that cause in unit time. This is what you were suggesting remained roughly constant over historical time for accidental deaths, and which would be surprising. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/79 "2024-01-08T22:56:26Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > While there may be some increase in risk taking behavior, I would need some serious evidence to conclude that this always trends towards canceling out initial safety gains. Exactly. It wouldn’t be a surprise to discover that risk compensation eroded gains to a certain extent (and perhaps it might be more than we might intuit), but it would be remarkable if risk compensation were so strong that it completely _eliminated_ gains. It’s worth noting that pretty good evidence-backed arguments were made that mandatory bicycle helmets was net counterproductive. But that’s because there’s the wrinkle of health gains from cycling as cardio exercise. Some data did appear to show that risk compensation was eliminating _most_ of the safety gains, while also at the margin discouraging people from riding at all when it involed the hassle and discomfort of wearing a helmet. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2024, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776/80 "2024-01-09T00:08:00Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > Seeing that the death rate from accidents has fallen just as fast as the death rate from disease is _exactly what you’d expect_, and hardly something surprising that anyone would remark upon. Such is _not_ intuitively obvious to me. Other causes of death vary up and down significantly as a share; not sure why (if it truly is the case over time and cultures more than these two spot checks) accidental death shouldn’t vary widely as a share as well. Why do would you expect that medicine overall and safety would move in lockstep? There was a huge change in other deaths overall fairly rapidly with improved sanitation and to a lesser degree both antibiotics and immunizations. Why would safety improve by the same jumps at similar times? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-should-i-die/995776.md?page=5)