A 1991 study reported that left-handed people die on average nine years earlier than right-handed people. Could this really be true?
In this notebook, I explored this phenomenon using age distribution data to see if we can reproduce a difference in average age at death purely from the changing rates of left-handedness over time, refuting the claim of early death for left-handers. I used pandas and Bayesian statistics to analyze the probability of being a certain age at death given that you are reported as left-handed or right-handed.
This notebook uses two datasets: death distribution data for the United States from the year 1999 (source website here) and rates of left-handedness digitized from a figure in this 1992 paper by Gilbert and Wysocki.