Dangerous (US) jobs.

[dagibbs]

With the recent attacks on Planned Parenthood sites, I was wondering about most-dangerous-jobs in the US. There's lots of good data, generalized normalized to deaths/100,000 workers/year.

Some of the top jobs are the ones we kind of expect will be in the list: fishery workers, loggers, or miners (I assume that is what "misc. extraction workers" means), at about 131, 97, and 57 deaths per 100k/y. Some are a bit more surprising, such as aircraft pilots at about 70.

Interestingly, military doesn't seem to be in the stats. Perhaps the military isn't tracked by the US department of labor?

Then I thought about another job... and did a bit of math. This job works out to having about 1600 deaths/ 100k worker-years.

This very deadly job? President of the United States. (4 assasinations over 239 person-years of work. Risky business. And that's assuming that all of the deaths due to illness while in office were not job-related. )

Comments

[foms.livejournal.com]

Anecdotal analysis?[g]

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I can't commit on the US labor bureau's statistics, which is what was quoted for the non-presidential numbers. For my data, I used a complete, up to date, dataset with 100% of the relevant data, collected over a period of time exceeding 200 years. Now, I did choose to exclude deaths due to illness, which might be considered massaging my dataset -- but including them would, actually, have doubled the stats to 3200 deaths/100k worker-years. So, I feel that such data massaging does not invalidate my results.

[foms.livejournal.com]

Very longitudinal but the number of presidents is forty-four and the number of eligibles is something over four hundred and forty million. You did not study a large percentage of the pool. There may be some weird confounder in selfselection for the job.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

In none of the cases do they examine the pool of potential people that could be employed for those jobs -- they only look at the people actually holding the jobs. Just as we don't examine the deaths of all the people who could have been loggers in looking at the deaths of people who are loggers, we don't examine those people for deaths of people who actually have the job of president of the USA.

[foms.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I wonder about the numbers for those who do those jobs informally. In their own wood-lots, for instance, or their own micronations (though, they would not be Presidents of the USA unless they named the micronations plagiaristically, they would still be Presidents in the USA from the point of view of the USA).

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

One could generalize "President of the US" to "Heads of State for nations of the world over, say, the past 500 years."

Of course, defining "Head of State" vs, perhaps, "Head of Government" gets tricky. (For the US, do you consider the house majority leader, the senate majority leader, the president, or all three? For Germany, do you consider the president, or the prime minister? For England, do you consider the monarch, or the prime minster? For Canada, do you consider the monarch, the governor general, or the prime minister?) But, even trickier, how do you define "nations" -- especially given the issue of micronations that you raise.