However, this calculation has many difficulties. It is often useful to reduce complicated facts to simple unidimensional measures for comparison. For that matter, statistical measures should differentiate between associations and causation. Among the figures cited, there were several misleading measures along these lines. For instance, although perhaps cigarette smokers ought to allocate 12 minutes of their lives per cigarette, a lung cancer death is typically far harder than an automobile accident death.
None is satisfactory, but all are useful for separating grossly different risks.
Perhaps it is the pollution. New York just has many poor people and bad neighborhoods. A statistical analysis that excludes such correlated hazards is surely non-trivial. There are likely advantages to being married, but perhaps inability to find or keep a wife indicates other problems. Then there is the presumption of linear additivity.