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> This is not true for any cohort.

I think it is, for a pretty reasonable slicing of the data. Here[1] you can find a table on pages 33-34 that contains cause of death by age cohort - the 15-24 group has only a single row that beats motor vehicle accidents, and it is "accidents", which motor vehicle accidents is considered a subset of.

I think part of the confusion from the table you linked to is that it doesn't contain motor vehicle deaths, and they are hidden in a weird way - in the 15-24 cohort, motor vehicle deaths are a substantial subset of all of the top 3 causes - unintentional injury, suicide, and homicide.

> By the way, the aviation insurance industry uses the per-journey statistic, not the per-mile.

That's perfectly reasonable for insurance purposes; a lot of the risk is concentrated in the takeoff and landing, so risk per journey is a more stable measure than risk per mile. But as a person who doesn't want to die, that's a nonsensical choice - I don't fly across the country because I wanted to take one journey; I fly across the country because I wanted to get somewhere that was 3000 miles away.



> think it is, for a pretty reasonable slicing of the data. Here[1]

You missed the reference.

> group has only a single row that beats motor vehicle accidents, and it is "accidents", which motor vehicle accidents is considered a subset of.

Right, but then you have to ask why? You might find a dataset which further breaks the cohort down into "Male" and "Female" categories; because when you do that, you'll see the data does not line up between the two at all. There will, last time I checked, be about an 8x difference between the two.

This highlights the fact that the driver of the vehicle carries the risk, _not_ some inherent property of the vehicle itself. Ask yourself this question: if we took cars away from young men, would they be any less prodigious when it comes to fatally injuring themselves? History and psychology suggest that they wouldn't fare any better.

> in the 15-24 cohort, motor vehicle deaths are a substantial subset of all of the top 3 causes - unintentional injury, suicide, and homicide.

Suicidal behavior is not a risk factor that you can then translate to vehicles, neither homicide for the reasons I stated above. Finally, when you compare total vehicle fatalities for the cohort to the accidental death category for the same cohort, you realize it's around 30% of the overall deaths. When the 15-24 group injures themselves, it most often _does not_ involve a vehicle.

> a lot of the risk is concentrated in the takeoff and landing

Aircraft bodies are only rated for a certain number of "pressure cycles." There's genuine risk baked right into the airframe.


Shit, I trimmed a paragraph at the end and dropped the reference with it. That's supposed to be https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_06.pdf




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