Why Having Fewer Lawyers Saves Lives

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…