Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Sterbetafel

377 words

My colleague Annika is going to a lecture on insurance maths. Not too interesting, but she manages to bring the most amusing bits of information back from it. Today the lecturer told them about various risks that insurances have to account for. In the case of life-insurances (and a few others) death is an important factor for insurances and they’re keen too know when people are likely to die.

The lecturer revealed that there are statistics about the probability for people to die at a certain age. Those aren’t too surprising. You’re a bit more likely to die just after birth than a bit afterwards. You’re less likely to die if you are a woman, who live a shocking six years longer than men on average. And your probability of dieing increases as you get older. Getting a Sterbetafel from the internet also confirmed more details that the lecturer mentioned: Once you’re thirty the risk of death increases exponentially – thus giving a nice straight line in the little graph we made (, , the horizontal axis noting the age and the vertical being the probability of dieing in ‰):

Graph for death statistics

In addition there’s curious hump in the graph for the 23 year old boys which was also mentioned in the lecture. Our first guess were car accidents but apparently it’s got more to do with suicide. After adding Selbstmord to today’s Google history which already contained Todeswahrscheinlichkeit and the strange word Sterbetafel (which apparently is common in insurance circles) at the time, I had also learned that the number of suicides is about 50% higher than the number of traffic deaths – meaning that you’re more likely to kill yourself voluntarily than to die in traffic (!) – that it has risen a lot in the past 20 years and that it’s mostly older people who kill themselves.

On the other hand, keeping in mind that we’re using a logarithmic scale for the graph, that little extra hump isn’t all that large. Indeed, it’s rather hard to see when using a linear scale.

So, 23 is the dangerous age! It’s also an excellent film and – after seeing that at latest – and it also gives one of my favourite posters a completely new meaning.

April 20, 2005, 21:29

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