Too lazy to look it up, how does this track with average life expectancy?
What was the cause of that earlier age death dip around 2016-2017?
Side note I used to take the calls and type up the obits for NYT in an overnight call center in Buffalo. Some thought nothing of spending 5k on one and the half balked at the 4 line price. I used to say to my mom all the time I was consistently published in the Times. She wasn’t amused.
What the hell happened in 2015-2016?
Would be interesting to plot birthdate of deaths. Is prominence because a set of people were the right age to ride the wave of media creating prominence? Or is it just proportionally related to birth rates? Or is media expanding their definition of prominence?
If you use median, it would avoid the potential skewness introduced by a few very young “prominent” who died in a year, which I suspect happened in 2016. You should also report the N in each year.
Less smoking by prominent people is my guess. Also, drugs like Lipitor.
If the data source is NYT headlines, something that could explain the dip is that there are other things dominating the news cycle other than “X died this week”
Had to check when Kirk Douglas passed away, 2020. Is Jimmy Carter now the oldest/most famousest person alive?
Don’t forget the lasting effect of the economic downturn as a possible factor for the 2015 dip. Perhaps older assigning editors had take more buyouts, so the (older) people that they thought important suddenly weren’t so much anymore. Also, the NYT obit desk is noted for writing obituaries in advance for notable people. If that practice was cut back due to budgetary restraints and the well went dry, it might have resulting in more obits of people in mid-career who still had agents to phone in their deaths, rather than long-retired notables who had long faded from public view. It’s still not unusual to read an NYT obit about a very old and faded notable whose passing months earlier flew under the radar.
2016… Mmm I’ve gone digging in the comments and am yet to be any clearer.
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I pulled NYT headlines for the last 50 years and looked for mentions of prominent (famous) people dying with an age given.
Pulled data with Python, graphed with Google Sheets.
More details here: [https://marchanalyst.com/page/prominent-deaths.html](https://marchanalyst.com/page/prominent-deaths.html)
Too lazy to look it up, how does this track with average life expectancy?
What was the cause of that earlier age death dip around 2016-2017?
Side note I used to take the calls and type up the obits for NYT in an overnight call center in Buffalo. Some thought nothing of spending 5k on one and the half balked at the 4 line price. I used to say to my mom all the time I was consistently published in the Times. She wasn’t amused.
What the hell happened in 2015-2016?
Would be interesting to plot birthdate of deaths. Is prominence because a set of people were the right age to ride the wave of media creating prominence? Or is it just proportionally related to birth rates? Or is media expanding their definition of prominence?
If you use median, it would avoid the potential skewness introduced by a few very young “prominent” who died in a year, which I suspect happened in 2016. You should also report the N in each year.
Less smoking by prominent people is my guess. Also, drugs like Lipitor.
If the data source is NYT headlines, something that could explain the dip is that there are other things dominating the news cycle other than “X died this week”
Had to check when Kirk Douglas passed away, 2020. Is Jimmy Carter now the oldest/most famousest person alive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_living_centenarians
Yep, I guess so.
Don’t forget the lasting effect of the economic downturn as a possible factor for the 2015 dip. Perhaps older assigning editors had take more buyouts, so the (older) people that they thought important suddenly weren’t so much anymore. Also, the NYT obit desk is noted for writing obituaries in advance for notable people. If that practice was cut back due to budgetary restraints and the well went dry, it might have resulting in more obits of people in mid-career who still had agents to phone in their deaths, rather than long-retired notables who had long faded from public view. It’s still not unusual to read an NYT obit about a very old and faded notable whose passing months earlier flew under the radar.
2016… Mmm I’ve gone digging in the comments and am yet to be any clearer.
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