Was 2016 especially dangerous for celebrities? An empirical analysis

This analysis seems to assume that the concentration of celebrities among the population is roughly fixed, which is weird. It clearly isn&#x27;t.<p>The whole concept of mass market celebrity is largely the product of American post-WWII prosperity and the explosion of a consumer class. It was rare prior to 1950 and arguably peaked around the early 2000s, when mass media went into steep decline.<p>Most &quot;celebrities&quot; alive today would have been active (or the topic of public discussion) during that period. So should we really be all that surprised that, as the Boomer generation rapidly approaches peak mortality, celebs are also dying in greater numbers?<p>The article concludes that this year was a &quot;once in a century&quot; outlier. On the contrary, I predict an even more grim 2017. Regardless, this analysis is incomplete without at least a cursory discussion of the distribution of celebrity birth years. Line that up with an actuarial table and <i>then</i> tell me how anomalous 2016 was.

It&#x27;s not just the number of celebrities, it&#x27;s the number of <i>beloved</i> celebrities. Prince, George Michael, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Muhammad Ali, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher in one year? That kind of clustering of groundbreaking, generation defining celebrity is what made 2016 seem especially rough.

I&#x27;ve been wondering if it isn&#x27;t just that more celebrities have died (which I thought was unlikely), but that the celebrities dying are surprisingly young.<p>Like when Kirk Douglas eventually dies, the likely reaction will be, &quot;Wait, he was still alive?!&quot; But it seems we&#x27;ve had lots of celebrities in their 50&#x27;s and 60&#x27;s dying, which is young for rich people.<p>So maybe it&#x27;s not death, just unexpected death. I think it hits home more for people when a young person dies, even if &quot;young&quot; in some cases is in their 50&#x27;s.

One thing this doesn&#x27;t necessarily account for is factors like population growth (particularly the the baby-boom) and the explosion of popular culture and celebrity notoriety through mass media. Are there simply considerably more people considered &quot;celebrities&quot; since say the 1950&#x27;s than before?

I&#x27;d think that after a celebrity does, there would be an increase in the number of edits &#x2F; length of an article. Wouldn&#x27;t this skew the numbers, increasing the &quot;celebrity&quot; statistic for everyone that has died that year (and hence making the year seem more extraordinary than it is)?<p>It would be interesting to do the same analysis for 2015 and previous years, using wikipedia snapshots at the end of each year, and see if those years also appear extreme.

This analysis assumes that if I take measurements using Wikipedia regarding celebrities who died in 2005 now the results would be the same as if I had taken those same measurements in 2005. This is obviously not true. I would argue that the most recent year will always appear to have more deaths than normal using this analysis because more attention is paid to celebrities immediately following their death.<p>The simple fact that this analysis results in such extremely wild numbers for the chance of 2016&#x27;s celebrity deaths occurring, shows that is probably flawed.

Here&#x27;s another take on the same question from a group at MIT Media Lab: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;macro.media.mit.edu&#x2F;2017&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;macro.media.mit.edu&#x2F;2017&#x2F;</a>

The last two plots could be correlated with GDP. E.g. dips circa 2002, 2008, and 2011. If the author is reading this: Can you make your data available? Thanks!

I wonder if &quot;a year&quot; can be divided other than from Jan to Dec, in a way to that would cause even worse results.

Totally thought this was going to be about security breaches. (Also dangerous for celebrities I imagine -- though I guess it can be a career making breach for some)

Say goodbye to the boomer celebrities, and hello to the Trump years.

Honestly it all boils down to social media: These days you can easily be <i>bombarded</i> if some guy from a long-forgotten one-hit wonder band member died.