Risks

Humans are very poor at judging "relative risk". That is, we have a hard time "internalizing" the information we know is true, regarding how likely a particular event is.

Newspaper publishers grow wealthy on this principle: they highlight the sensational because they know most people are concerned about dying in some grisly manner. The truth is, however, that we are far more likely to perish from a heart-attack, cancer or stroke than from any imaginable grisly death.

Relative risks of dying

These data are culled from a variety of official sources (National Institutes of Health in the US, and National Insurance Institute (Bituach Leumi) in Israel), and represent the years 2000-2005. N.B.: today's risk (2008) of death by terrorism in Israel is much lower than it was during the period for which these data were gathered).

The risks

	USA	Israel
Cause of death	Risk per 1M per year
Heart disease	2409.4
Cancer	1940.5
Stroke	560.6
Accidents	368.9
Diabetes	252.6
Flu	222.3
Traffic	156.1	73.0
Suicide	108.8
Firearms	103.6
Murder	62.8	2.3
HIV	48.6
House fire	9.8
Other land/sea transport	6.3
Terrorism	2.0	31.0
Airplane crash	0.5
Dog attack	0.1
Shark attack	0.0

Comparison

Likelihood of violent death in Israel: 106.3, in USA: 220.9. That is to say, one is more than twice as likely to die a violent death in the USA as compared to Israel. This, despite the fact that the so-called "intifada" was at its peak during the years for which the statistics were compiled.

In either place, the most common cause of death is disease, not violence. Even there, Israel is better: the average life span is several years longer in Israel than in the US.

One is thirty times more likely to be murdered in the US than in Israel (barring terrorism). One is also twice as likely to die in a traffic accident in the US. Partly that is because the driving age is higher in Israel, and also because (in general) drunken driving is much less common.