In another thread there is a brief discussion happening of how many people were killed by a particular accident. The lead to wonder if this number can even be considered to be meaningful by itself.
When an accident kills, say, 100 people immediately, it seems pretty clear the that's the best way to discuss what happened. A trail derailed and 100 people lost their lives (or whatever happened).
But what about something more complex like, for instance, a chemical spill which leads to the premature deaths of 100 people over the course of the next 40 years? I'm not questioning that we can do the statistics and say that ~100 people (+/- some number) died due to this accident, even if we can't say that any particular person lost their life from that cause. But it seems to me that if you live on for 40 years, even if your eventual demise is due to this accident, those 40 years have some value.
Anyway, this had me considering that perhaps the more meaningful metric is number of years of life lost. There was a study a few years ago showing that people living in certain Chinese cities have a life expectancy something like 3 years less due to the air pollution that they need to breathe every day. That seems like a more meaningful metric to me.
Of course this then seems to overvalue young lives, if I'm suggesting that when ten teenagers are killed in an accident we say that, say, 650 years of life were lost, whereas if it were ten 65 year olds it might be 150 years of life lost.
All I can say is I found the thought interesting and if the issue were totally clear to me I wouldn't need to start a thread discussing it. :o
When an accident kills, say, 100 people immediately, it seems pretty clear the that's the best way to discuss what happened. A trail derailed and 100 people lost their lives (or whatever happened).
But what about something more complex like, for instance, a chemical spill which leads to the premature deaths of 100 people over the course of the next 40 years? I'm not questioning that we can do the statistics and say that ~100 people (+/- some number) died due to this accident, even if we can't say that any particular person lost their life from that cause. But it seems to me that if you live on for 40 years, even if your eventual demise is due to this accident, those 40 years have some value.
Anyway, this had me considering that perhaps the more meaningful metric is number of years of life lost. There was a study a few years ago showing that people living in certain Chinese cities have a life expectancy something like 3 years less due to the air pollution that they need to breathe every day. That seems like a more meaningful metric to me.
Of course this then seems to overvalue young lives, if I'm suggesting that when ten teenagers are killed in an accident we say that, say, 650 years of life were lost, whereas if it were ten 65 year olds it might be 150 years of life lost.
All I can say is I found the thought interesting and if the issue were totally clear to me I wouldn't need to start a thread discussing it. :o
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