What I [Lakeland] would like to see is a graph that shows the importance of diseases relative to the number of expected person-years they eliminate each year. A disease that kills 1000 people age 10 eliminates about 680000 person years, whereas a disease that kills 100000 people age 85 eliminates about the same 660000 person years. . . . this means that a really important killer in the US is automobile accidents, suicide, and childhood cancers, even though many many more people die of cancer and heart disease.
I imagine this has been done somewhere but I’ve never seen it tallied. You also have to decide where to draw the line, for example do you count diseases that kill fetuses.
P.S. His art is ok but these other paintings are more my style.
The question is interesting, indeed. To say that a disease that kills one ten-year old is equally bad as a disease that kills sixty-eight 67-year old people seems less than obvious.
John,
The life expectancy of an average 10-year-old is something like 70, and the life-expectancy of an average 67-year-old is something like 15 or 20, so the ratio would be 4:1, not 68:1. Maybe Daniel was too quick with his actual numbers.
I agree that looking at diseases and other causes of death in terms of "years of life lost" (or "Quality-Adjusted Life Years lost", to use a term of art) is interesting. Of course it's not the only way, or even the best way, to look at the economic or social effects of causes of death. For example, one could also look at the lost "investment" in some way. Pardon me for not phrasing the following in a PC way.
Consider people who die at age 5, 20, 50, and 80. The 5-year-old represents a total loss of 5 years of "investment" by parents, society, etc. The 20-year-old is even worse: all those years of schooling, all that emotional investment, etc., and just as they were about to start paying it back (at least in an economic sense), they die. The situation with the 50-year-old is a lot better: although they are still contributing, at least they have survived long enough to be (on average) net contributors. The average 80-year-old is probably not an economic contributor anymore, at least with "economy" defined narrowly — they, and the others, might also contribute in cultural ways that are not counted by conventional economic metrics.
Of course at some level it's a tragedy when anyone dies — well, actually, that's not true, I think there are some people the world would be better off without. Let me rephrase that. It is a tragedy when the "average person" of any age dies. But these tragedies are not equal. I have always felt, and continue to feel, that the death of someone in their late teens or early twenties is the "most tragic" because the death represents a loss of essentially all of their potential just as it was about to start to be realized in terms of creative achievement, invention, discovery, and economic productivity. Earlier deaths have the same loss, but at least they represent a lower loss of investment: better to have died at age 10 than to have suffered through all of junior high and high school and _then_ died! And later deaths…well, the average older person at least had some period of productive and happy life, hopefully the longer the better.
For what it's worth, I am 42 years old. I'm still enjoying life and hope that I'm not even halfway through it yet, but if I die tomorrow I will have at least passed "break-even", I think. Don't get me wrong, it will still be a tragedy (at least to me!) if I die tomorrow…but not as much as if I had died at age 20, though perhaps more of a tragedy than if I had died at age 5.
One could, crassly and imprecisely and certainly imperfectly, quantify this concept by looking at each person as an "investment vehicle" into which resources are poured in youth, and from which economic benefits derive once they start working.
Maybe Daniel was too quick with his actual numbers.
My actual numbers were directly from the table I linked. I think you've conflated my numbers and Johns numbers.
BTW: I agree strongly with Phil's analysis, yes it's a bit crass, but yes it's also an important consideration when thinking about applying resources to improving societal problems.
A difficult issue in deciding the effect of "solving" one of the main killers is the effect it would have on life expectancy. For example, by solving heart disease how many more years would the average 80 year old get? How many more years for the average 50 year old? etc.
I think this is an interesting statistical estimation issue.
FWIW, I was going for illustration rather than accuracy. I wasn't going for hyperbole, however, so thanks for the correction. ^_^ The point is that evaluating lives on a sliding scale is a sketchy proposition, IMO. For example, at the sentencing of a murderer, they sometimes have the family of the victim get on the stand and cry about how much they loved daddy, or whoever the victim was. It's not obvious to me that the enormity should be prorated in any way.
I find Phil and Daniel to be mistaken in that Phil's analysis is crass or not PC. There is sufficient data out there to make cross-cultural comparisons of which child is chosen to die when famine obtains, and that choice seems to depend greatly on a calculus of human worth far colder than what Phil proposes: from what I've read (not a lot, admittedly) the decision is strictly financial. Real poverty forces families to invest in children qua financial instruments because modern markets for risk don't exist in that world. See, for example, Partha Dasgupta's "An Inquiry Into Well-Being and Destitution."
The original question isn't even speculative: our society chooses on a trade-off between end-of-life care and neonatal care. What's the appropriate rate of exchange between an oldster in ICU and a premature baby in ICU?
I am not a demographer, but I was under the impression that years of potential life lost was a fairly standard calculation. It's done by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in their Cause of Death data. (see: https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/DetailsPa… , page 26)
Not, admittedly, a chart, but still. FWIW, the biggest contributors to YPL are cancers, heart disease and external factors, of which accidents is the biggest (especially for men, who are three times more likely to die from external causes than women). The policy solution there is not terribly obvious, sadly.
On the value of a life: what's really fun (I am being sarcastic) is getting into debates about whether a suicide should be considered a loss of any sort, given that the person chose to suicide implying they put a value of essentially zero on their own life.