It will cause people to become much much much more conservative and safety oriented.
You already see this in practice - you can't buy real chemistry sets, kids are never left alone, safety equipment for riding a bike, etc, etc, etc.
Basically everywhere people say "When I was a kid we used to xxxx", and today they don't. It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.
>It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.
Unintentional injuries were responsible for 39.4 deaths per 100 000 in 2011 [1], behind heart diseases (191), malignant neoplasms (185), chronic lower respiratory diseases (46), and cerebrovascular diseases (41).
The age-adjusted unintentional injury death rate "was relatively unchanged, from 38.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 1985 to 37.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2004" [2].
EDIT: while unintentional injury death rates have held their ground, overall death rates have been in decline. Hence, unintentional injuries are rising as a proportion of deaths (though they have a good distance to cover before they can tap on disease's shoulder).
>you want to check the accident rate relative to the non-accident rate
You are right - that the "risk of dying decreased by 60 percent from 1935 to 2010" in the U.S. [2] while the unintentional accident death rate remained constant so, yes, the fraction of deaths caused by accidents would have increased. My mistake.
>You should check statistics only for under age 30.
Injury deaths for ages 0 to 29 actually average 36 per 100 000 per year, less than the population average of 39. Granted this is a quirk of injury death rates being lowest for 4 to 12 year olds (average 6 per 100 000 per year) - this is the only age group for which injury death rates are below 10 per 100 000 per year. It then climbs to a local maximum of 75 at age 21, a level not seen again until age 74. A second local minimum occurs at ages 30 to 34 (average 56 per 100 000 per year) and a third at 56 to 67 (average 51 per 100 000 per year).
And presumably the non-accident death rate below 30 is even lower (relative to the population average).
Basically if an under 30 dies it's becoming more and more likely that it's a result of accident rather than anything else. And this causes people to become more and more cautious. i.e. it used to be that people had a real chance of death anyway, so taking a (physical) risk is not that big an increase in risk, but now it's a larger relative risk.
When I was a kid, I should have lost my fingers for playing with fireworks. Roman candle wars, bottle rocket barrages... in hindsight I'm surprised we all made it uninjured to graduating highschool.
You already see this in practice - you can't buy real chemistry sets, kids are never left alone, safety equipment for riding a bike, etc, etc, etc.
Basically everywhere people say "When I was a kid we used to xxxx", and today they don't. It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.