Agents of Our Own Demise

An interesting stat from Wired...

In a recent study published in the journal Operations Research, a decision analyst at Duke's School of Business, crunched data from the CDC to assess how many deaths in the US are due to personal choices—things like smoking, overeating, or unsafe sex.

The results: A remarkable 55 percent of deaths for people age 15 to 64 can be attributed to decisions with readily available alternatives. In other words, most people are the agents of their own demise. That's a vast difference from a century ago, when, Keeney estimates, a scant 5 percent of deaths were brought on by personal decisions.