Hi friends,
I hope you don’t mind — this week’s read is a little morbid but should be very interesting. Happy Easter!
The Short Read: Dying outside America
Takeaways:
Relax when you (or loved ones) travel.
Don’t judge how scary things are based on cable news.
—
It is my sense that a decent number of people feel that traveling abroad is a dangerous thing to do.
So this week I looked at ~14,500 unnatural deaths of Americans abroad, as recorded by the US State Department. My suspicion was that car accidents led the pack, given that ~1% of all deaths in America are attributable to car crashes. I would guess this is also an undercount given that perhaps not all cases are reported to the US authorities (c.f. terrorism and homicides).
Your most likely cause of death while traveling is probably not pictured here. In 2017, only about 6% of American deaths fell into the categories above — the other 94% were attributable to disease (communicable and non-communicable). So while there are mitigating factors (you wouldn’t travel if you’re sick, you’re younger than the average person who dies each year in America), I would still speculate that disease comes out on top.
Lastly, of course, these numbers should not scare you!
If we ignore the variance among destinations and length of trip, we’re talking about only ~14,500 deaths out of the ~610,000,000 trips that occurred in the same time span†. That is about a 1 in 50,000 chance of dying.
This is nearly equivalent to the baseline probability of death every day for the median American (22 in 1,000,000). That is to say it is about as risky as waking up and living a day in the life of an average American. Or, you could say it is as risky as driving cross-country (and back).
Further, if we restrict ourselves to only conflict-related deaths (those you’ve probably heard about on the news), we’re looking at about 1/4th of that (e.g. driving Miami → St. Louis or living 6 hours in an average American’s skin). And, while it isn’t pulled out in this visualization, a large portion of those were due to specific conflicts before 2010.
It goes without saying that for most of us that level of risk wouldn’t even register on our mental models. Don’t fall prey to the availability heuristic — travel is safe, and hopefully we’ll be able to enjoy it again, unfettered, soon.
†Extrapolating 20% of the 2019 levels for 2020.
The Links
Lake Nyos disaster* While we’re on a morbid topic, this week I learned about this fascinating and horrific phenomenon called “lake overturn.” Lake overturn occurs when the dissolved CO2 in a lake suddenly erupts. In this particular case in 1986, the CO2 was enough to blanket the nearby town and farms, killing 1746 people and at least 3500 animals.
Breakdown of how five tech giants interact across revenue streams* [$]
Lagniappe
I read The Inner Game of Tennis a few weeks ago based on the recommendation of my good friend and fellow Substacker (Substackian? Substackateer?) Wes De Silvestro.
I highly recommend it. It is very much a book about tennis, but not really a book about tennis.
It also compliments one of the Recc’s first Lagniappes (which, at the time, was called “Your weekly recommendation”): Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. After reading the Meditations for the second time in one year, I consider required reading.
Graph(s) of the week
[WSJ] Good to remember that this is not just different expectations about policies and vaccination — degree-holders have fared much better in the labor market due to their higher prevalence of jobs that can be done remotely.
Keep the faith,
Harrison