A front-page New York Times headline declares, "After Plant Explosion, Texas Remains Wary of Regulation."
Less wary of regulation, apparently, are the New York Times reporters and editors, who engage in a misleading use of statistics to try to advance their case for additional regulations (though the Times acknowledges somewhere in the middle of the article that "it is impossible to know whether tougher regulations would have prevented the disaster," and toward the end that the fertilizer plant that exploded "fell under the purview of at least seven state or federal regulatory agencies.")
The misleading statistic comes earlier on in the article, right at the jump from page one to an inside page, where the Times tells readers, "Texas has also had the nation's highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade."
Well, the geniuses at the Times might consider that one reason that Texas is at or near the top of the nation in terms of workplace fatalities is that it is at or near the top of the nation in terms of the number of workers and how many hours they work. If you adjust for that, and take the rate of workplace fatalities — that is, the number of fatalities from workplace injuries per 100,000 full-time workers, Texas isn't worst in the nation, but somewhere in the middle, 33rd according to this ranking. As I looked at the ranking, it also occurred to me that the fatality rankings might measure not only how dangerous the work or workplaces are, but also how long it takes an injured worker to get treated at a good hospital. The state with the fewest workplace fatalities, Massachusetts, is relatively compact and has a lot of good hospitals, while the state that is the worst on the list, New Mexico, is relatively sprawling (I recall from a long-ago bus-ride from Albuquerque to Cimarron) and isn't exactly an internationally known center of excellence in health care.
If the editors at the Times are too innumerate to understand this concept, they might think of it in terms of automobile accident fatalities. California has the most traffic fatalities. Does that mean that California's roads and drivers are the most dangerous? No, not any more than Texas' workplace fatalities mean that Texas' supposedly lightly regulated workplaces are the most dangerous. It just mean that California has more drivers, and more vehicle miles traveled, than other states. If you use a rate — deaths per 100,000 vehicle miles traveled — California's rate of 1.0 in 2009 puts it somewhere in the middle of the pack. Again, the safest state for traffic is Massachusetts, with a rate of 0.6 (again, given the lousy reputation of Boston drivers, this makes me think this is a measure more of access to health care and quality of health care post-accident than safety on the road or in the workplace). The most dangerous for the year 2009 was Montana, with a fatality rate of 2.0.
If one wanted to get really careful about these statistics, one might also adjust for occupation or industry. A Dallas Morning News article about the matter paraphrased Karen Puckett, director of outreach and workplace safety for the workers' compensation division of the Texas Department of Insurance, as saying "it's unfair to cast Texas as a dangerous state without looking at per-capita injury rates in individual industries. Puckett said that comparing Texas, which has booming construction, oil field and logging operations, to, say, Connecticut, where the insurance industry is a major employer and with only moderate construction and virtually no logging or oil field industries, creates a distortion."
This would be a good paper for some economics doctoral student — look at workplace fatalities by state and other variables, such as number of state regulatory personnel or number of words of state health and safety regulations, along with number of doctors or hospitals per square mile (or some other measure of health care access or quality). The Times thesis is basically that the lack of regulation is the cause of the workplace fatalities, but it doesn't offer up much by way of proof other than that Texas is lightly regulated and has the nation's highest number (but not the highest rate, which the Times doesn't mention) of workplace fatalities.