Lack of, of perceived lack of, control at these important decision points could possibly be tackled with a combination of the teaching of better decision making skills (esp avoidance of bias) at an early age, with policy directed at the other social determinants of health (access to healthy food, clean water, minimisation of the economic imperitives leading to high risk behaviour, etc).

Dr Keeney is right in his fundamental assertion, and yes, there will always be genetic predispositions minimising the effect size of these behaviour change interventions, but the principle is still clear.

What will be necessary is the optimal allocation of resources to tackle this principle based on the cost-effectiveness of behaviour change strategies in adults vs children (it is much higher in children for reasons of both success rate and size of benefit). Vaccination is always more cost-effective than treatment.

“Research activities […] that cut across intellectual traditions produce
the most innovative ideas.”

Through my company and research website, MyNetResearch.com, we are afforded an excellent opportunity to see research conducted on our ’social’ networking platform. The synergies and innovation that arise certainly embody the thought that the network (the whole) is more than the sum of its parts.

When you find researchers from every conceivable specialization collaborating, you come up with the most interesting innovations. Modeling these ‘network effects’ will provide operations management folks and social scientists with fertile ground for much productive research in the future.

My reason for including the 1900 — 1950 information in the paper was to make the point that we currently have much greater personal control over our own mortality than in the past. I certainly did not mean that my estimates of past control in 1900 and 1950 were precise, which I think was indicated in the section with that material.

On reliability of the data, it came directly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is the national center in charge of the statistics. Hence, I assume it is about the best there is.

To deal with the lack of precision of estimates of the percentage of deaths under individual’s control, I tried to get the spirit with qualitative terms, such as “it seems reasonable that perhaps 5% of the deaths in 1900 could be attributed to personal choices”.

For the 1950s fatalities, the fact that obesity was much less prevalent, fewer elderly had smoked heavily for a long time and there were fewer elderly, and some information was not widely understood about the relationships between weight and/or smoking and death, I had a couple paragraphs of reasoning that ended with “Because the prevalence of these causes would probably have been less than half as great in 1950 and fewer would be attributable to personal decisions because of a lack of information, the percentage of fatalities attributable to personal decisions in 1950 maybe about half, say 22%, of the 2000 percentage.”