How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

by Vaclav Smil

Calculating the baseline, the average population-wide or sex- and age-specific risk of overall mortality, is easy. In 2019, overall mortality (crude death rate) of well-off (developed) countries clustered at around 10/1,000, with actual rates ranging from 8.7 for North America to 10.7 in Japan and 11.1 for Europe. That annual mortality of 10/1,000 (with 1,000 people subject to dying for 8,766 × 1,000 hours) prorates to 0.000001 or 1 × 10-6 per person per hour of exposure. Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of mortality in all affluent countries and they account for nearly a quarter of that total (3 × 10-7). Seasonal influenza carries a risk an order of magnitude lower (usually about 2 × 10-8 and up to 3 × 10-8), and even in the violence-prone United States the risk of homicide has recently been just 7 × 10-9 per hour of exposure, half the risk of death attributable to falls (1.4 × 10-8). But, as already noted, the frequency of the latter kind of accidental death is highly skewed, with people over 85 years of age having a risk of 3 × 10-7 compared to just 9 × 10-10 for people 25–34 years old.[43]