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Not an expert in the area at all, but it seems to me that if a particular factor shortens 10 lives by 7 years apiece, and life expectancy is 70 years, then in a
by mikepurvis 5y ago
Not an expert in the area at all, but it seems to me that if a particular factor shortens 10 lives by 7 years apiece, and life expectancy is 70 years, then in a statistical sense it has "caused" one death, and that this is the case even if no one exactly died from it, in the acute sense that a car crash or firearm causes a death. I'm not sure if that's what's going on here, but even a slight harm multiplied across national or planetary population scales could easily get you to a number like 10M/year.
- tshaddox 5y agoI don't think these studies are just taking the average life expectancy (let's say 70 years) and considering each 70-year reduction of life expectance to be 1 death. I think it's more like each time a person dies in a given year where event A occurs who would not have been expected to die in that year if event A hadn't occurred, that counts as 1 death caused in that year by event A.
- mikepurvis 5y agoIsn't that just about the same, in aggregate? 60 years from now, 7 people die at age 60 instead of 70, "caused" by air pollution. Smoothing it out, that's one death per year from now until then.
- tshaddox 5y agoI suppose it works out to be the same if the cause of death is distributed evenly among all ages, but I suspect that's rarely the case. If something causes a lot of people to die at 90% of average life expectancy you wouldn't want each one to only count as one tenth of a death.