Gerhard,

On Sun, 30 Jul 2006 23:23:00 -0300, Gerhard Fiedler wrote:

> Howard Winter wrote:
> 
> >>> An excerpt from the 2006 CIA factbook:
> >>> 
> >>> Rank  Country        Death rate (deaths/1,000 population)
> >>> 1     Swaziland      29.74
> >>> ..........
> >>> 107   United States  8.26
> >>> ..........
> >>> 166   Israel         6.18
> >>> ..........
> >>> 219   Gaza Strip     3.80
> >>> ...........
> >>> 226   Northern 
> >>>      Mariana Islands 2.29
> 
> >> That is total death rate. [...] Where are the figures on VIOLENT death?
> > 
> > I think those must be them, because if they are the total death rates
> > then life expectancy is a bit overestimated:  1000/2.29 means that
> > (assuming they are averages per year), a Northern Mariana Islander has a
> > life expectancy of over 436, while a USAmerican can look forward to
> > "only" living to 121. 
> 
> I'm not sure how you come to these figures, but they seem to assume some
> things around birth rate, total population number stability and age
> distribution that are not quite in alignment with reality. I'm not sure
> whether it's that simple -- but I'm not really a statistics expert.

OK, my use of the phrase "life expectancy" is probably wrong, what I was calculating is how long it takes for a batch of 1000 people to 
die, and given just the death rates (which is all we had in the quote above) this can be calculated given that the total population 
doesn't change very much.
 
> For example, the CIA gives for the USA: birth rate 14/1000, death rate
> 8/1000, net migration 3/1000, pop. growth 0.9%/y, life expectancy 78y. The
> Northern Mariana Islands numbers in the same sequence: 19/1000, 2/1000,
> 8/1000, 2.5%, 76y. I'm not sure where your 121y and 436y fit in here. 

Can you point to the URL for that data?

What I'm saying is that if net migration and birth rate keep the total population about the same, if the all-causes death rate is 8/1000 
and stays there it will take 125 years for a batch of 1000 people to die, from simple arithmetic - how can it be less?  This is barely 
believeable, but for the Mariana Islanders it would 500 years at 2 per year, which is clearly nonsense unless people are emigrating to 
somewhere else to die, or the death rate is going to make a dramatic upswing at some point.  If there is significant population growth, my 
logic may be defeated since older people are a smaller part of the population than they were when they were younger, so their contribution 
to the rate/1000 falls as they get older.  A quick calculation shows that 0.9% annual growth takes 77 years to double the population, so 
that may be the flaw in my argument!  When I get some time I'll try a spreadsheet of this to see how it runs through the years, and how 
long it actually takes for the initial 1000 people to die.

> I also don't know whether you've seen the various messages where I posted
> FBI (and government) numbers of violent death rates. They are much smaller. 
> 
> You can of course doubt both the CIA and the FBI -- but in this case, the
> numbers look rather realistic :)

I followed a link posted earlier to an FBI site that gave figures for cities (not aggregated to States or the whole of the USA) and I seem 
to remember that deaths due to murder and non-accidental manslaughter were in the region of 200 to 700 per 100,000 population (so 2 to 7 
per thousand).  Hopefully this is a small fraction of the total number of deaths, but I didn't keep the link, unfortunately.

Cheers,



Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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