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Posts Tagged ‘Death’

Speaking Very Ill of the Dead

In our “Legacy of a Jerk” podcast, we discussed (among other things) the injunction against speaking ill of the dead. It featured an interview with a daughter of a woman named Carole Roberson, whose obituary stated that she was “a difficult mother and a horrendous mother-in-law.” That said, the obituary also said that “she will STILL be missed.”

Several readers have now sent us this A.P. article about an obituary for a Nevada woman named Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick. She makes Carole Roberson sounds like an angel.

“On behalf of her children who she abrasively exposed to her evil and violent life, we celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the after-life reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty and shame that she delivered on her children,” the scathing obituary begins. … [It] was written by Johnson-Reddick’s adult children, whose horror stories prompted Nevada to become one of the first states to allow children to sever parental ties back in the 1980s. …


How to Live Longer (Ep. 109)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “How to Live Longer.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player in the post, or read the transcript below.)

It looks into why Hall of Fame inductees, Oscar winners, and Nobel laureates seem to outlive their peers. The deeper question in the podcast concerns the relationship between status (not income!) and longevity — a fascinating, complex, and controversial topic (here’s a good place to start reading) about which I believe we’ll hear a great deal in years to come. It will be valuable to know what kind of “status boosts” confer health advantages and, conversely, how disappointment and the like can chip away at us.

This podcast was timed to coincide with two events this week: the annual Baseball Hall of Fame election, in which no players were selected this year for the first time since 1996 (here’s ESPN’s take and here’s a useful statistical snapshot); and the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominees.


Is There Another Side to the "Hurricane Death Toll"?

Miguel Sancho, a senior producer with ABC’s 20/20, writes in with a question I’ve often wondered myself but cannot answer. Can you?

A thought – every hurricane season we see headlines ascribing blame for lives lost on a given storm. “Hurricane Irene Blamed for Five Deaths in North Carolina,” etc. Certainly when people drown, are killed by floating debris, or die because they can’t make it to the hospital, the statistic sounds logical. But it occurred to me that perhaps, in the interests of fairness and accuracy, we should also give Hurricanes “credit” for lives not lost thanks to the interruption of normal human activity. How many homicides, vehicular fatalities, or drug overdoses didn’t happen [last] week in New Orleans, for example, because people were otherwise occupied protecting themselves from Hurricane Isaac? Just wondering if anyone has ever studied this, comparing average morbidity rates in hurricane zones to the stats during the times when hurricanes roll through.
 
This is not to suggest that overall, hurricanes are a social good. Bastiat’s broken-windows fallacy and all that. But perhaps in this one particular metric, we aren’t seeing the whole picture.

Please don’t judge Sancho’s observation as insensitive to the death and destruction caused by the hurricane itself. I can assure you he is not.


The Season of Death (Ep. 87)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Season of Death.” The gist: Summertime brings far too many fatal accidents. But the numbers may surprise you.

(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)

If you’re a longtime reader, you probably already have an idea of what we’re talking about. Human beings are, in general, quite bad at assessing risk. We tend to be scared of big, noisy, anomalous events – like shark attacks, which in an average year kill fewer than five people worldwide — while overlooking the seemingly quotidian reality of, say, drowning deaths (about 4,000 per year in the U.S. alone) and motorcycle fatalities (about 4,500 U.S. deaths annually). We have been exploring this idea since Freakonomics, where we asked whether a gun or a swimming pool is more “dangerous.”


The Silver Lining of More Cancer Deaths

A National Post graphic does a good job showing causes of death across Canada by percentage, and notes that, for the first time, cancer is the leading cause in every province, responsible for about 30 percent of all deaths. That is a heartbreaking number, not least because cancer is a disease (or set of diseases, really) about which so much is still unknown.

As we wrote in a section of SuperFreakonomics called “We’re still getting our butts kicked by cancer,” seeing cancer statistics like this might naturally lead one to conclude that the “war on cancer” has been a dismal failure. That, however, would be an overstatement. While it’s true that we are, as one oncologist told us, “still getting our butts kicked,” there is somewhat of a silver lining in the cancer death rate.


Why Do Elected Coroners Underreport Suicide?

The WSJ reports on a new study that finds that elected coroners report 15% fewer suicides than do appointed medical examiners. The researchers looked at 1,578 counties with elected coroners, and 1,036 with appointed medical examiners, adjusting for poverty, marriage, household income, education levels and gun ownership. Their reasoning for the difference in reporting? Stigma and politics:

“Elected coroners would feel pressure because they are elected by the public at large and would be worried about antagonizing local community stakeholders who might badmouth them,” said Joshua Klugman, PhD, first author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia. “For medical examiners, we think the pressure is still there, but it’s to a lesser degree. They feel insulated from that.”

In addition, the researchers looked at 174 appointed coroners and found that their reporting rate matched the medical examiners, instead of the elected coroners.
In general, suicide is a taboo subject. But not too taboo for us — if you haven’t already downloaded our latest podcast, do so and find out about “The Suicide Paradox.”


Your End of Days: Would Life-Length Testing Save the Government Money?

A Spanish company announced this summer that it can help determine when people will die by using a blood sample, a $700 test, and research that earned three American geneticists the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2009. Though the test has its critics, and though it won’t offer an exact date for one’s death, it does promise to reduce uncertainty about longevity by examining a tiny part of DNA that reveals biological age as opposed to chronological age. Successive generations of the test are likely to improve in predictive power.
Our ignorance about an individual’s longevity is the source of a number of problems. Many of them are personal, but some have implications for society writ large, and taxpayers in particular. So one wonders: if the government can make you confront the calorie content of your diet, can it also make you confront your mortality?
If the government were to mandate “life length” testing, it could help resolve the intractable lifetime savings problem. Pervasive under-saving among households is a result of our impatience, to be sure, but it is certainly also a consequence of the fact that no one knows how long his savings need to last. Save too much and you miss out on having fun when you’re alive. Save too little and you end up broke and reliant on the social safety net that taxpayers fund.


Why You're More Likely to Die After Getting Paid

Last year, Notre Dame economist William Evans, along with Timothy Moore from the University of Maryland, documented that mortality rates spike by almost one percent on the first day of every month, remain high for the next few days, and then steadily decline over the course of the month. Now they think they’ve figured out one reason why: our paychecks are killing us.
In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Public Economics, Evans and Moore examined the death records of four demographic groups in the U.S.: seniors on Social Security; military personnel; families receiving tax rebate checks in 2001; and recipients of Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividends. Their results show that mortality increased the week after checks arrived for each of these groups.


Freakonomics Radio, Hour-long Episode 3: "The Suicide Paradox"

There are twice as many suicides in the U.S. each year than murders. And yet the vast majority of them aren’t discussed at all. Unlike homicide, which is considered a fracturing of our social contract, suicide is considered a shameful problem whose victims — and solutions – are rarely the focus of wide debate. In this third hour-long episode of Freakonomics Radio, we’ll push back suicide taboos, profiling who is most likely to commit this act (and least likely), and what we know about them.


Women Stage a Funeral Comeback

Slate reports that women are making a comeback in the funeral industry: “Today 57 percent of U.S. mortuary school graduates are women, up from 5 percent in 1970. Though this influx is stereotype bashing, it’s also something of a homecoming.”


A Classic Public/Private Clash

My mom passed away recently, and we’re planning a memorial service in her home city, where none of us three offspring lives. There are lots of expenses: the service; food afterwards; planes and hotels for all of the children, grandchildren and any great-grandchildren who can come.


"If You Must Be Hospitalized, Television Is Not the Place"

I ran into an old friend the other day whose actor husband is a regular on the TV show House. We caught up on friends and family, etc., including a few mutual acquaintances who have died since we last spoke. As we parted, I couldn’t help but laugh: at least these unfortunate deaths, I thought, were nowhere near as numerous as those on the kind of TV show her husband appears on.


Bad News for Me on Two Fronts

A new meta-analysis looks at past research into whether a person’s performance on basic physical functions like walking speed or ease in getting out of a chair predicts death.


You're Likely to Live!

You’re older than you’ve ever been, as the song goes, and now you’re even older. And for each eight years you age, you double your chances of dying. That’s the Gompertz Law of human mortality, which is actually sunnier than you think.


FREAK Shots: Death and Foreclosure

A blog reader named Lee emailed us a photo he took on Highway 86 in Imperial, California. “It made me wonder if [the economy] is really that bad that even dead people will lose their resting places,” he writes. “What will they do? Evict the dead?” Photo: Lee We called Victor Carrillo, the supervisor for Imperial County listed on the . . .


Does Fame Kill?

Reading about the sad and sudden death of the actress Natasha Richardson, I’ve come to wonder if perhaps, in some small part, she died not in spite of her fame but rather because of it.


What’s Your Best Idea to Cut Gun Deaths? A Freakonomics Quorum

Photo: Secretly Ironic Are there more guns in the U.S. or more opinions about guns? Hard to say. This blog has featured a variety of posts about guns in the past; today we present a quorum with a very narrow focus: what are some good ideas to cut gun deaths? Let’s put aside for a moment the standard discussions about . . .


The Reports of Her Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Yesterday, I posted a quiz asking what my wife Jeannette’s grandma has in common with Mark Twain. The answer is that she, like Twain, had her obituary published while she was still alive. Jeannette’s grandma is named Anne Hathaway. At age 92, she is still going strong. Just a few years ago, she traveled from Orono, Maine to Slovenia for . . .


Are All Deaths Suicides?

What does it mean to use “the economic approach” to thinking about the world? In the old days, if you asked 100 people this question, I bet at least 80 of them would have given some kind of answer having to do with dollars and cents, supply and demand, etc. Over the past few decades, however, “the economic approach” has . . .


The FREAK-est Links

PCs on the downswing in Japan. Can brain atrophies among the elderly lead to unintended racist views? The economics of death in the U.S. The Top 10 “wackiest” science experiments.


Announcing the Winners of Our Aptonym Contest

Last week, I blogged about a magazine fact-checker named Paige Worthy and asked you to submit your best aptonyms. You responded mightily, with nearly 300 submissions. Judging from this sample, the dentists, proctologists, and eye doctors of America seem particularly prone to aptonymous behavior. Below you will find the best submissions. As promised, the readers who sent them will receive . . .


The FREAKest Links: Smaller Homes, Free Burritos, and the Price of Death Edition

Bad news for retirees (and others) who want gigantic houses in Boulder, Colo.: local officials may enact home size restrictions. Under the proposal, residents would be allowed to build homes larger than 4,000 square feet only if they agree to invest in the preservation of agricultural or rural land in other regions. (Hat tip: J.C. O’Connell.) Here’s more on the . . .


The FREAKest Links: Rotten Chicken and Personal Debt Edition

Repulsed by that six-inch centipede? Or are you simply being reminded of your own inevitable demise? A study led by Cathy Cox, a graduate student in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia, determined that people find certain things disgusting because they make apparent our “vulnerability to death.” Food for thought next time you find yourself eating . . .


Another Organ Incentive, and … Funeral Insurance?

We’ve written repeatedly on the shortage of human organs for transplantation, and the different incentives that are being offered to produce more donated organs. Among the incentives: a commemorative medal and a shorter prison term. Now a reader named Ronald Wielink writes to tell us that in the Netherlands, a funeral insurance company is offering to cut funeral costs by . . .


The Miracle of Flight

A recent post on Consumerist.com asked readers to comment on a plan to install rear-facing seats on airplanes. The options for commenting were basically: a) I don’t like it b) I like it fine; and c) Whatever, no comment, who cares, people should just be happy airlines provide the miracle of flight, so let them do whatever they want. For . . .