> 4. Most of these leading killers are themselves mainly caused by old age. If "Old Age" were a category, it would be causing by far the majority of deaths. Aga

> 4. Most of these leading killers are themselves mainly caused by old age. If "Old Age" were a category, it would be causing by far the majority of deaths. Again, it's not the case that nothing could be done about this. We could be doing much more medical research on aging. I guess most of this article's discussion makes some sense, up until the point above. There will always be a top ten causes of death but those causes wouldn't always be interesting. If we lived 120 able-body-and-minded-years, I would call that success or at the very least progress. How would this top ten graph look then? Probably not very different. Before I read #4 I thought to myself: "gee, as long as we're dying of old age, then that's probably a really good sign." The author draws almost the opposite conclusion. "We could be doing much more medical research on aging" -- yes, that's fair. What if research on aging led to us dying of Cancer and Alzheimers ten years later than the baseline? Twenty? Again, progress, but it wouldn't be reflected in this graph. What might be a really useful use of this data is to show a fifty or hundred-year-ago baseline. What if fifty years ago the pareto included causes like auto collisions or home fires? If that were the case we might want to have some clever quip like: "Regulations: the silent lifesavers." (Regulations are often depicted as tools of the evil bureacracy).