List of causes of death

[Merni]

I was looking for a list of "causes of death" that show up in the "People" tab (out of curiosity), and I couldn't find one. So I thought "What the heck, I could probably do this with the Daily Dump and some programming," and here we are.

Data (hopefully) correct as of Daily Dump on 5.7.2021

Cause	Number of nations with cause	Total percentage points	Average % for nations with cause	Average % overall
Old Age	214506	13861114.5	64.62	62.13
Heart Disease	158019	2820022.6	17.85	12.64
Murder	107081	786603.1	7.35	3.53
Lost in Wilderness	104708	610479.4	5.83	2.74
Acts of God	85952	406336.6	4.73	1.82
Cancer	85026	1378655.2	16.21	6.18
Exposure	53326	557606	10.46	2.50
Suicide While in Police Custody	48091	28383.6	0.59	0.13
Accident	37114	50014.3	1.35	0.22
Animal Attack	28542	35432.6	1.24	0.16
Disappearance	20684	631618.2	30.54	2.83
Work	18695	330862.9	17.70	1.48
Ritual Sacrifice	18085	215876.5	11.94	0.97
War	15093	33063.4	2.19	0.15
Capital Punishment	15082	111238.6	7.38	0.50
Bungee Jumping	13838	16244	1.17	0.07
Scurvy	12408	22631	1.82	0.10
Nuclear Spill	11738	7448.9	0.63	0.03
Involuntary Euthanasia	8592	385036.6	44.81	1.73
Sunburn	3785	11567.2	3.06	0.05
Vat Leakage	1686	5341	3.17	0.02
Malnourishment	1067	3259.1	3.05	0.01
Space Shuttle Mishap	114	18.6	0.16	0.00

• The "total percentage points" column is the sum of each nation's % for that cause of death.
• The "Average % for nations with cause" is exactly that, calculated by total percentage points / number of nations with that cause.
• The "Average % overall" includes even nations without deaths from that cause, calculated by total percentage points / total number of nations.

Python code used to generate the first three columns: here. The other two were calculated with LibreOffice.

[Fauxia]

Thanks for this Merni, very cool!

Nice to know that only 30% of people in the world end up being taken from their beds in the middle of the night in their sleep (although in Fauxia, that number is 51.2% )

[Jutsa]

I had no idea space shuttle mishaps were a thing.

Very, very many thanks for putting this together, Merni.

[Merni]

Nice to know that only 30% of people in the world end up being taken from their beds in the middle of the night in their sleep (although in Fauxia, that number is 51.2% )

That's 30 % in nations where disappearances occur -- over all nations it's only 2.83 %

[Chan Island]

I had no idea space shuttle mishaps were a thing.

Very, very many thanks for putting this together, Merni.

I was about to say the exact same thing lol.

[Valentine Z]

Ooh, very nice! And yes, Space Shuttle Mishap is a very, very rare thing to happen.

A bit of data from myself:

These are still discrete values, but I put the number of bins to be higher so as to prevent them from sticking.

[Jutsa]

I feel like I should create a nation that is dedicated to getting as high a space shuttle mishap death percentage as possible.

Too bad I don't feel strongly enough about it to actually do such a thing.

[Merni]

Ooh, very nice! And yes, Space Shuttle Mishap is a very, very rare thing to happen.

A bit of data from myself:

(Image)

(Image)

These are still discrete values, but I put the number of bins to be higher so as to prevent them from sticking.

So, is the implication then that there's no correlation between scientific advancement and space shittle mishaps?

(Edit: Also, did you really make over 200000 API queries for that? )

[Valentine Z]

Ooh, very nice! And yes, Space Shuttle Mishap is a very, very rare thing to happen.

A bit of data from myself:

(Image)

(Image)

These are still discrete values, but I put the number of bins to be higher so as to prevent them from sticking.

So, is the implication then that there's no correlation between scientific advancement and space shittle mishaps?

(Edit: Also, did you really make over 200000 API queries for that? )

Hehe, space shittle. Could be, yeah. Though it does seem like more mishaps happen in the slightly primitive nations. Maybe their idea of space shuttle means a catapult, or a car retrofitted into a rocket. Not necessarily cavemen, just no understanding of rocket science.

And yes, I really did! Thankfully, one nation = one API call, but even then, yeah, it took 3-5 days. I had to start all over for the most recent one because my clumsy fingers overwrote the entire data in progress (120,000 / 220,000+ nations). Fick, I thought. People asked if I could have used the daily dump, which is a no because it does not have the data I wanted.

[Trotterdam]

It would make sense for space shuttle mishaps to happen most in nations with middling science. Too low scientific advancement, and you won't be launching any space shuttles to begin with. Too high scientific advancement, and they won't be having mishaps.

However, I don't think that's how it actually works. It's probably tied to choosing #361 option 1, rather than stats.

[Valentine Z]

It would make sense for space shuttle mishaps to happen most in nations with middling science. Too low scientific advancement, and you won't be launching any space shuttles to begin with. Too high scientific advancement, and they won't be having mishaps.

However, I don't think that's how it actually works. It's probably tied to choosing #361 option 1, rather than stats.

Yeah, Scientific Advancement was just chosen as an example because it seems close enough to space shuttles. I could see how it might look like with other stats - not necessarily a relation, but more of "Hmm, fascinating!"

With only ~100 nations that have this type of death, no wonder not a lot of people heard of it. Then again, IRL, you don't often see deaths from space shuttles.

[Honeydewistania]

It would make sense for space shuttle mishaps to happen most in nations with middling science. Too low scientific advancement, and you won't be launching any space shuttles to begin with. Too high scientific advancement, and they won't be having mishaps.

However, I don't think that's how it actually works. It's probably tied to choosing #361 option 1, rather than stats.

There is that issue that deals with space program nations who banned computers, taht seems like a recipe for space shuttle disaster

[Trotterdam]

Then again, IRL, you don't often see deaths from space shuttles.

To be fair, you don't often see space shuttles. Spaceflight is a pretty hazardous profession for the tiny minority of people actually engaged in it.

How many nations were included in this survey? Adding up all the percentage points in the table and dividing by 100 gives 223088.539 nations, clearly demonstrating an accumulation of rounding errors.

Still, that suggests that worldwide, 1 in 1200000 people are dying from space shuttle mishaps. If we scaled that to the real-life world population (and accompanying birth/death rates), that would amount to approximately 50 dead astronauts per year. I'm pretty sure we don't even have 50 people a year trying to get into space, let alone succeeding or failing.

Another death cause that interests me is Scurvy. Does it correlate to the new Food Quality score? Does it correlate to legalized piracy? (The latter can be checked with the new q=notables shard by looking for "rum-swilling pirates" and "teetotalling pirates". My data suggests these are found in about 9.07% and 2.26% of nations, respectively.)

[Valentine Z]

Another death cause that interests me is Scurvy. Does it correlate to the new Food Quality score? Does it correlate to legalized piracy? (The latter can be checked with the new q=notables shard by looking for "rum-swilling pirates" and "teetotalling pirates". My data suggests these are found in about 9.07% and 2.26% of nations, respectively.)

I can definitely look at this in my own thread if you would like me to. I really don't mind! ^^

I got the Death Types, Government Expenditure %, and the whole shebang from the Nation overview. As for the pirate bits, err... don't have the list of policies or the shards (even if I get them now, it would have been out of sync with my data for many weeks).

[Merni]

Hehe, space shittle.

Oops.

How many nations were included in this survey? Adding up all the percentage points in the table and dividing by 100 gives 223088.539 nations, clearly demonstrating an accumulation of rounding errors.

All nations which were included in the Daily Dump on 5.7.2021, i.e. 223099 of them. And yes, there would probably be an accumulation of rounding errors, since I had LibreOffice round off everything to two decimal places (it looked pretty ugly otherwise). I'll upload the Python code to Github when I get to my computer, then you can generate the data yourself and calculate it without rounding if you so desire.

Edit: Here it is. This generates a CSV file with just the cause of death, number of nations and total percentage points. I calculated the other two columns with LibreOffice.

[Trotterdam]

223099

Hmm, interesting. That means that there should be exactly one nation that doesn't have any deaths from either Old Age or Involuntary Euthanasia. (Assuming that the two are in fact mutually exclusive - the latter does come from the Geronticide policy, right?) Wonder what kind of hellhole that is.

And yes, there would probably be an accumulation of rounding errors, since I had LibreOffice round off everything to two decimal places (it looked pretty ugly otherwise).

No, I don't think they're your rounding errors. The game itself doesn't always give numbers that add up to exactly 100% for each nation.

[Merni]

223099

Hmm, interesting. That means that there should be exactly one nation that doesn't have any deaths from either Old Age or Involuntary Euthanasia. (Assuming that the two are in fact mutually exclusive - the latter does come from the Geronticide policy, right?) Wonder what kind of hellhole that is.

Assuming that isn't caused by an error in my program, I can probably try to find that nation

Editafter Python ran out of memory multiple times trying to parse a 200000+ member XML tree: It's the nation Nadir Dystopia, which from its causes of death seems to be weird to say the least
From the dump:

<DEATHS>
 <CAUSE type="Capital Punishment">23.9</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Ritual Sacrifice">1.2</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Heart Disease">0.5</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Acts of God">0.3</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Disappearance">70.4</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Accident">0.1</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Malnourishment">0.1</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Exposure">0.1</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Work">0.2</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Scurvy">0.4</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Cancer">2.6</CAUSE>
</DEATHS>

[Luna Amore]

Hmm, interesting. That means that there should be exactly one nation that doesn't have any deaths from either Old Age or Involuntary Euthanasia. (Assuming that the two are in fact mutually exclusive - the latter does come from the Geronticide policy, right?) Wonder what kind of hellhole that is.

Assuming that isn't caused by an error in my program, I can probably try to find that nation

Editafter Python ran out of memory multiple times trying to parse a 200000+ member XML tree: It's the nation Nadir Dystopia, which from its causes of death seems to be weird to say the least
From the dump:

<DEATHS>
 <CAUSE type="Capital Punishment">23.9</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Ritual Sacrifice">1.2</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Heart Disease">0.5</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Acts of God">0.3</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Disappearance">70.4</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Accident">0.1</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Malnourishment">0.1</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Exposure">0.1</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Work">0.2</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Scurvy">0.4</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Cancer">2.6</CAUSE>
</DEATHS>

What a beautiful nation.

[Trotterdam]

Huh.

While that nation doesn't have any involuntary euthanasia, voluntary euthanasia is legal, and is in fact one of the very few things that are legal in that nation. Which makes me realize that voluntary euthanasia isn't included among the game's death causes. Nor, for that matter, is suicide outside of police custody. (And the suicide in police custody cause is most likely a euphemism, anyway.)

It also doesn't have either Theocracy or Atheism, nor either Gun Control or (compulsory) Gun Ownership, nor Child Self-Rearing, nor No Smoking or No Drugs (but it does have Prohibition / no alcohol), nor No Automobiles. Economic freedoms in general are better than the other kind as there's not Autarky, Socialism, or No Gambling.

[Valentine Z]

So not to overstep on Merni's toes, I did something similar, except with absolute values which is my own calculation. Basically, Absolute [Death Type] is the percentage of that Death Type, multiplied by NS Stats' Death Rate. Assume that Death Rate here is "Deaths / Year" just because the Stats said so. I still think it means "Per Day" because it is an Index, not really numbers. Day it is.

So here there are no percentages, just absolute numbers. For example, a combined 4000 people died from Nuclear Spills, per day, across the 232271 nations. I honestly can't comment on whether that is a low rate, or a high one.

Mind you, this is across 230,000+ nations. So mean means (hehe) for example, 22 people died from old age per country per day.

[Trotterdam]

So not to overstep on Merni's toes, I did something similar, except with absolute values which is my own calculation. Basically, Absolute [Death Type] is the percentage of that Death Type, multiplied by NS Stats' Death Rate. Assume that Death Rate here is "Deaths / Year" just because the Stats said so. I still think it means "Per Day" because it is an Index, not really numbers. Day it is.

It's not really either. Logically, deaths per year/day should scale with population (unless it's deaths per capita per year/day, a commonly-used statistic in real life, but obviously one that should give a value less than 1), although of course we know that population in NationStates really has nothing to do with what your nation is like (nations with high death rate don't grow any slower than ones with low death rate).

In principle, you can estimate "realistic" death rate by calculating (population / average lifespan). This is only really accurate when the population is stable (birth rate is equal to the death rate, and neither have drastically changed recently), which is not currently true in either real life or NationStates (both of which currently have growing world populations), but it's a pretty good first-order approximation.

According to some quick facts off Wikipedia, 62 million people died in 2006 out of a world population of 6.6 billion, and... Wikipedia doesn't give the average lifespan for the same year, but it's slightly over 70 for 2019-2020 (and "lifespan" is by nature something that takes more than one year to happen), so let's go with that. Using these numbers, my estimate as explained in the previous paragraph (6.6 billion people / 70 years = 94 million deaths per year) is only 150% times the correct value (the same number is also an estimate of the birth rate, for which it's 60% times the correct value).

[Valentine Z]

So not to overstep on Merni's toes, I did something similar, except with absolute values which is my own calculation. Basically, Absolute [Death Type] is the percentage of that Death Type, multiplied by NS Stats' Death Rate. Assume that Death Rate here is "Deaths / Year" just because the Stats said so. I still think it means "Per Day" because it is an Index, not really numbers. Day it is.

It's not really either. Logically, deaths per year/day should scale with population (unless it's deaths per capita per year/day, a commonly-used statistic in real life, but obviously one that should give a value less than 1), although of course we know that population in NationStates really has nothing to do with what your nation is like (nations with high death rate don't grow any slower than ones with low death rate).

In principle, you can estimate "realistic" death rate by calculating (population / average lifespan). This is only really accurate when the population is stable (birth rate is equal to the death rate, and neither have drastically changed recently), which is not currently true in either real life or NationStates (both of which currently have growing world populations), but it's a pretty good first-order approximation.

According to some quick facts off Wikipedia, 62 million people died in 2006 out of a world population of 6.6 billion, and... Wikipedia doesn't give the average lifespan for the same year, but it's slightly over 70 for 2019-2020 (and "lifespan" is by nature something that takes more than one year to happen), so let's go with that. Using these numbers, my estimate as explained in the previous paragraph (6.6 billion people / 70 years = 94 million deaths per year) is only 150% times the correct value (the same number is also an estimate of the birth rate, for which it's 60% times the correct value).

Yeah, a more complex calculation is always welcome, and I might give it a try sometime soon. ^^

[The Free Joy State]

Assuming that isn't caused by an error in my program, I can probably try to find that nation

Editafter Python ran out of memory multiple times trying to parse a 200000+ member XML tree: It's the nation Nadir Dystopia, which from its causes of death seems to be weird to say the least
From the dump:

<DEATHS>
 <CAUSE type="Capital Punishment">23.9</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Ritual Sacrifice">1.2</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Heart Disease">0.5</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Acts of God">0.3</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Disappearance">70.4</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Accident">0.1</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Malnourishment">0.1</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Exposure">0.1</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Work">0.2</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Scurvy">0.4</CAUSE>
 <CAUSE type="Cancer">2.6</CAUSE>
</DEATHS>

What a beautiful nation.

Isn't it, though.

The Free Joy State has some work to do...

[Merni]

So not to overstep on Merni's toes,

Oh, my toes are somewhere way out there... all of you are welcome to post your own analyses of deaths here!

So here there are no percentages, just absolute numbers. For example, a combined 4000 people died from Nuclear Spills, per day, across the 232271 nations. I honestly can't comment on whether that is a low rate, or a high one.

(Image)

Mind you, this is across 230,000+ nations. So mean means (hehe) for example, 22 people died from old age per country per day.

I'm rather surprised that "Accident", "War" and "Malnourishment" aren't much higher than they are... I get NS stats are partially satirical, but still 66% more people dying from scurvy than accidents is a bit weird.
Even if you look at my original table, "Malnourishment" is incredibly low and accidents are less than niche things like "Lost in Wilderness" and "Exposure".

(Also, isn't scurvy generally a consequence of malnourishment?)

[Trotterdam]

I'm rather surprised that "Accident", "War" and "Malnourishment" aren't much higher than they are... I get NS stats are partially satirical, but still 66% more people dying from scurvy than accidents is a bit weird.
Even if you look at my original table, "Malnourishment" is incredibly low and accidents are less than niche things like "Lost in Wilderness" and "Exposure".

Huh, yeah. Particularly since "Accident" is ridiculously vague as a death cause. Realistically, you'd want to separate out at least a few of the more common ones (car accidents) as separate statistics.

In fact there already are a few things that I might consider "accidents" that are treated as separate death causes: Bungee Jumping, Space Shuttle Mishap, perhaps Nuclear Spill and Vat Leakage too... but these are all extremely niche. (Actually, does Work count as an accident? It could be interpreted as either accidents resulting from unsafe workplace environments, or death by exhaustion from overwork.)

(Also, isn't scurvy generally a consequence of malnourishment?)

Realistically, yes, though it's more a matter of eating the wrong things rather than just not eating enough in general.

In popular culture, though, scurvy is strongly associated with pirates and other sailors, which is why I'm curious about how it's really coded.