Abstract
There are two seemingly conflicting goals in modeling human death: to describe the actual survival curve accurately and to explain mortality in etiological terms. These two goals have never been achieved by a single model (Wood et al., 1992). Here we present a simple model of human death that successfully addresses both of these goals. We apply this model to the survival curves of France, Japan, Sweden and the United States thereby proving the goodness of fit of the model. The calculation results for Japan are shown to be fully explained in relation with the major changes in mortality trends the country has experienced.
