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My first thought was "what the hell does health have to do with accidents?", which I learned was justified by the first article I found after googling for "life
by jere 14y ago
My first thought was "what the hell does health have to do with accidents?", which I learned was justified by the first article I found after googling for "life expectancy without accidents": http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-americans-poor-life-expectancy/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-amer...
>A few years back, Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of the University of Iowa asked the obvious question: what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth.
- digeridoo 14y agoPerhaps I'm tired, but how can the Japanese life expectancy figure be higher when considering fatal injuries?
- whatshisface 14y agoThe figure doesn't go up, the ranking goes up. (Meaning all the other figures go down.)
- jere 14y agoThe article has an updated section on that question. >I asked Robert Ohsfeldt about this, who responded that the adjustment factor was based on fatal injury rates relative to the average. Hence, the adjusted numbers shouldn’t be seen as hard numerical estimates of life expectancy, but rather as a way of understanding the true relative ranking of the various countries on life expectancy excluding fatal injuries.