-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBMTO: N48 04'14.8'' E11 36'41.2'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204
57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 18:28:34 +0000
From: Russell Turpin <deafbox@hotmail.com>
To: fork@xent.com
Subject: Delaying death (Re: 2001 Ig Nobel Awards)
Gordon Mohr:
>My faves are the (apparently legit) research on "death elasticity", that
>people postpone their death to qualify for improved estate tax changes. ..
There is actually something quite fascinating here. There
is other evidence that people apparently live longer when
there is some near event to which they look forward. This
study merely shows that even something as stupid as
estate tax change might qualify as such an event. The
interesting thing is that this phenomena presents itself
with regard to deaths (a) where there seems to be very
little voluntary aspect, e.g., heart attacks, not suicides,
and (b) very little in way of a causal mechanism has been
proposed. Were I an epidemiologist, I would propose a
project to identify the kinds of death where this phenomena
plays the largest role, with some hope of identifiying
possible causal mechanisms.
Russell
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:12 MDT