Have more famous people died in 2016? | Hacker News Reader

Have more famous people died in 2016?

bbc.com

41 pointsKC8ZKF42 comments

I've heard a lot of pet theories about this year, but mine is this: nationwide/worldwide popularity is a relatively new thing that was initiated largely by the advent of the TV.

TV was standardized in 1941, but World War II interrupted the rise of TV pop culture.

We're really starting to enter the years where people who had widespread popularity due to TV and movies are starting to die; 2016 is really just the beginning of a trend that will continue from now on.

I think there will probably be another bump around 2060 or so, when people who were really popularized by the internet start to die.

Indeed, the article mentions this (or at least the first part):

> He thinks that the increase isn't particularly surprising, because we're now half a century on from the flourishing of both TV and pop culture in the 1960s, which massively expanded the overall pool of public figures.

I think it's the stature of the celebrities that died, not their quantity. While many celebrities are noteworthy, most known only to a niche audience or didn't significantly affect people's lives.

In 2014, the only legend was Robin Williams.

In 2015, BB King, Leonard Nimoy and Terry Pratchett died, but all had niche audiences.

In 2016, a lot of legends died: Bowie, Prince, Fidel Castro, Muhammed Ali. Each of those was truly transformative for their audiences and society as a whole. And that's leaving out Leonard Cohen, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee and Nancy Reagan, each of whom had about the stature of 2015's most noteworthy deaths.

>In 2014, the only legend was Robin Williams.

If you don't count Shirley Temple, Joe Cocker, Mickey Rooney, Jack Bruce, Richard Attenborough, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others.

I never heard of Joe Cocker, Mickey Rooney, Jack Bruce and I heard of Shirley Temple just a couple weeks ago (in a discussion about how she's not as well known outside the US)

These people are definitely not as POP as Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Muhammad Ali

OTOH, also saying that Nancy Reagan has the same stature as Robin Williams seems utterly wrong

I was born when Reagan was closing in to the end of his mandate, so that's probably why Nancy for me doesn't ring any bell. Likewise, Shimon Peres is much more noticeable, probably due to both timing and geographical proximity (I live in Europe)

I guess that the "legendary stature" of such figures is qualified by lasting several decades and being well known across borders, attributes shared by only few

On topic: there might indeed be an increase behind this trend, but if deaths are a poisson process, I'm not surprised at all that this year has seen a clustering of them

In my experience, Shirley Temple is much more well-known than Prince, but I guess this might not be representative of the wider population

Pratchett was the UK's best selling author of the 90s. He sold many million copies. Star Trek is also really popular. I wouldn't say that these were niche audiences.

Agreed about stature, I'd add a social historical element to it. These people represented the cream of some sort of golden age of occidental post war cultural wave. There can only be one Micheal Jackson because you need to be a child prodigy turned to adulthood when the music industry shifts to mass market through CD, and music videos.

All these people leaving feel like cultural parents.

And Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2014

i think some of it is also Facebook echo chamber related. At the end of 2015, a lot of my metalhead friends were sharing the news of the death of Lemmy from Motorhead. A couple weeks later, it was an entirely different group of friends that were mourning David Bowie.

This trend will continue forever until we start decreasing the amount of celebrities we create.

Or the ones people pay attention to (particularly postmortem).

I was pondering this today. Will we come to a point where the death of a celebrity will become blasé because it's an everyday occurance?

Is this a baby boomer thing? Seems like there will be a period soon where lots more people will be in retirement or dying. You'd expect boomer era celebs to also be dying in line with normies.

Perhaps their stats are better looked at after normalizing for age and lifestyle. Weekly views of seasonal trend is probably better than arbitrary Q1 vs remaining year. Might see there's just an overall uptrend. Also would be worth looking at celeb vs. non-celeb death rate.

Partly correct imho. These arent dead boombers but people who boomers care about. As news these days is generally aimed at boomers, we hear more about these deaths than the deaths of celebs that appeal to other generations. When a reality tv or twitter superstar dies, and the do, tv news wont even mention it.

> These arent dead boombers

Anyone born during 1945-1962/5 is a boomer. So the oldest would be about 70 now. We are seeing the less healthy cohort drop off e.g. rock musicians, athletes in fields that need to abuse their bodies to the point of ill health etc.

>As news these days is generally aimed at boomers

Enough already. No boomer myself (born in the eighties), but we have been hearing this crap and people blaming the boomers for like 3+ decades.

News today is not "generally aimed at boomers", except if Kanye and the Kardasians are of interest to boomers...

According to neilsons, the average age of viewers for the top-rated us news channel (fox) is over 65. Ill believe you when cnn stops running commercials for stool softener and medicare suppliment insurance.

Kanye's breakdown wasnt mainstream news until he started associating with trump ... a boomer.

They've just announced the death of George Michael.

Here's an 80's tv show where he appears alongside Morrissey and Tony Blackburn to discuss music.

http://www.post-punk.com/morrissey-george-michael-talk-about...

He's spot on about Paul Morley too.

guy was a genius

....and we can add George Michael to the list...

Fastlove :(

As an American, I think that this year feels more significant because there are more names recognized by Americans. That list is very UK-centric, which isn't a surprise considering the source of the article.

Of the list, for years 2012-2015 I only recognized around a third of the names but for 2016 I recognized about half.

Americans have a very disproportionate effect on the internet as a whole, so I'd expect that having more American-recognizable names would distort impressions about the celebrity fatality rate.

I have twice (four years apart) got into arguments with colleagues who have attempted to use the phrase 'pre-prepared' -- it's disappointing to see the beeb legitimise this aliteracy.

Obituaries get attention... I don't know how to test the hypothesis that more famous people died than average... we would have to have a defined quantity of famous people... or perhaps number of famous obituaries vs. population... I suspect the % of "famous" people goes up over time. Imagine all the reality TV stars...

The percentage of famous people that everyone knows goes up every year, so each year you are more likely to know the famous people who died. Also, by the time you're in your 40s or 50s, most of the famous people you knew when you were a kid are starting to die of old age.

In music for instance, there was a huge wave of "classic rock" musicians who became really big starting around 1965 through the late 70s. These people are at least in their 70s now, which means they are starting to die of old age. Except Keith Richards. I'm starting to wonder if he's immortal.

I remember watching the Stones on TV for Live Aid in 1985, and it looked like Keith Richards was one foot in the grave then (if you read his biography, it's pretty clear why - he lived pretty hard). I guess it's fitting that he's beaten the odds so far. I love the memes around the idea that Richards is immortal.

Percentage of what? If you can show that the rate of people attaining celebrity is outpacing the rate of population growth, I will accept the claim.

I interpreted the claim as "penetration of famous people" - same percentage of people are famous but the percentage of the population that has heard of each one goes up.

I wonder whether celebrities are less likely to be confined to a small niche now than in the past. I assume they are less constrained by geography, but audiences are more fragmented by the Internet, etc.

Assuming a constant proportion of the population is famous and that more and more people know of a typical famous person over time, eventually every famous person would be known to everybody.

Compare death rate of celebs to population would account for growth in % celeb. You might want to create other cohorts out of population to compare, e.g. age range buckets, lifestyle buckets, race, geographies, etc.

The definition in this case was how many deaths had a 'prepared' obituary. news organisations will write obituaries in advance for 'famous' people, in order to be prepared if they die unexpectedly; they simply print the obituary they have on file. There are people whose job it is to update these documents and add new ones. It seems like a reasonable, if slightly loose, metric.

Here's a 2016 celebrity death list...

Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Glen Fry, Natalie Cole...

http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/celebrity-...

Found a simple way to test... IMDB allows us to query against death year.

2016 = 3,636 people with IMDB pages to date have died (http://www.imdb.com/search/name?death_date=2016&ref_=nm_ov_d... -- doesn't include all politicians or other famous folks, but certainly some of those people had IMDB pages at this point.)

2015 = 4,064 (My guess is the higher numbers were due to more time for data entry / updates.)

2014 = 3,793

2013 = 3,764

2012 = 3,917

2011 = 3,780

2010 = 3,676 (Someone can do math on this, but I don't see a huge swing in the last 7 years.)

2000 = 2,395

1990 = 1,856

1980 = 1,555 (Possibly due to some data not being entered once we start getting "way far" back.)

Another view... http://www.imdb.com/search/name

1920s = 2,185 http://www.imdb.com/search/name?death_date=1920-01-01,1929-1...

1930s = 3,608

1940s = 5,805 vs 2,556,000,053 total world population in 1950 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762181.html

1950s = 7,381 vs 3,039,451,023 (+6.92% growth in deaths of famous people / all people vs previous decade)

1960s = 10,977 vs 3,706,618,163 (+21.95%)

1970s = 14,044 vs 4,453,831,714 (+6.48%)

1980s = 17,662 vs 5,278,639,789 (+6.11%)

1990s = 21,722 vs 6,082,966,429 (+6.73%)

2000s = 30,883 vs 6,848,932,929 (+26.27% -- an especially brutal decade for celebrities) http://www.imdb.com/search/name?death_date=2000-01-01,2009-1...

2010s to date = 26,823

(2010s normalized at current rate = 38,319 vs 7,584,821,144 projected... or +12.04% vs previous decade)

Lots of things going on here... IMDB in the past didn't record a lot of international movies -- certainly part of the lower numbers compared to modern records. But there is a growth in celebrity over time. Celebrity death rates seem to vary quite a bit though. Welcome anyone checking my math... I haven't had coffee yet and this is far from scientific. (=

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