Anyways I don't have an answer just postulating that unless you would need to have a distribution of current (and past) celebrities and their ages as well to account for that factor. Something you could probably do with that Wikipedia analysis actually.
would it make sense to make many random draws of non-celebrities who died and compared the age of that group against the celebrity group?
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.
Most "celebrities" 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?
The article concludes that this year was a "once in a century" 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 then tell me how anomalous 2016 was.
I was in a bookstore the other day and saw Anna Kendrick's memoir. I don't have anything against her at all, but she's a 31 year old actress who hasn't had a big role that produces her legacy, maybe in another decade or two, but now?
Every person of at least minor celebrity status comes out with a biography these days, and then goes on a big publicity tour on all the talk shows, and now there's more and more talk shows on more and more network, cable, and internet networks. There seems to be a whole industry centered around people in media reinforcing themselves to an absurd degree now.
Then again maybe we just forgot if this happened in the 70s and before and this has always happened, who knows!
Manufacturing a mega celebrity takes a certain degree of monopolization of attention. But the days of three-network-television and two-station radio markets are gone. We don't, as a society, watch and listen to the same stuff anymore. It started with cable in the 90s, but it's accelerated with the internet.
I don't know who Anna Kendrick is, but if she's anything like the rest of the "celebrities" I'm supposed to know, she's a Q-list reality show extra with a hyperactive agent. The internet has globalized and democratized the market for attention, which means greater competition, more niches, shorter shelf lives, and fewer monopolies.
My 5yo regards her as the definitive Cinderella, for instance.
Edit: Oh yes, and was the star of a movie that took $290m worldwide, from a budget of $29m.
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.
Heck, even the simple increase of eyes on article seems like it'd increase the edits. Then there is the potential for reporting on something to cause people to add / amend the relevant articles.
Still, since it plausibly could be a factor it is something that should be ruled out.
Like when Kirk Douglas eventually dies, the likely reaction will be, "Wait, he was still alive?!" But it seems we've had lots of celebrities in their 50's and 60's dying, which is young for rich people.
So maybe it's not death, just unexpected death. I think it hits home more for people when a young person dies, even if "young" in some cases is in their 50's.
The simple fact that this analysis results in such extremely wild numbers for the chance of 2016's celebrity deaths occurring, shows that is probably flawed.
