In one of our early posts, Mark talked about the risk of dying, or rather death statistics. For example, in 2010 about 400 people died in the US by falling from a ladder. Want to know why? Because Minnesota has too many lawyers, that’s why. Don’t believe me? Have a look:
The more lawyers, the more deaths.[1]
Interestingly, even more people (718) died by falling out of their bed. And who’s fault is that? The lawyers' in Puerto Rico, of course. The correlation is almost perfect! [2]
Of course, none of these charts prove anything – I have them from a cool (to a nerd like me) website call Spurious Correlations. The host, Tyler Vigen, takes a bunch of data points, and plays around with the correlations between them, and then allows you to make charts like the ones above. Fits very well into our risk theme – lots of data on various hazards, with truly silly pairings, such as “the more nuclear energy the US produces, the more people drown in a swimming pool.”[3] Good for a bit of fun, check it out!
Note:
[1] The correlation here is 0.81, so pretty high
[2] 0.96
[3] But I did say in the linked post that nuclear energy is uneconomical. Who know what other nefarious things it does…