The Hazard Potential of Items and Individuals  NOZER D. SINGPURWALLA George Washington University Abstract: This is an expository talk. We introduce here the notion of a "hazard potential" for items and individuals that can experience failure and show how this notion can be used to generate new families of life distributions. We then show how the notion can explain interdependencies among lifetimes. The hazard potential is to be interpreted as an unknown  resource that all items are endowed with upon inception and failure occurs when the resource gets depleted. The on-parametric feature of the hazard potential arises from the observation that the hazard potential of all items has an exponential distribution with scale one. The result generalizes in the multivariate case.