Reading an academic article yesterday, I came across an interesting statistic that I hadn't thought about before: 4 of our 43 presidents have been assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), a rate of almost ten percent. And it turns out that fifteen presidents have been the subject of assassination attempts.
So just how dangerous is being president relative to other jobs in the US? According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data (PDF), the occupations with the highest death rates in 2004 were logging workers and aircraft pilots/flight engineers, with a death rate of 92.4 per 100,000. That means that their risk of death is approximately .1% per year.
If we set aside all presidential deaths due to natural causes, four presidents have been killed in 217 years of US history, which is an assassination rate of approximately 2% per year. That means being president is twenty times more dangerous than the most dangerous occupations in 2004.
Maybe it's time we give the president a raise.
(Note: Some may say that presidents are safer in the post-Kennedy era, but Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush all survived close calls during the last 35 years, so it's hard to know whether things have really improved.)
Update 7/11 11:30 AM: The error pointed out by Ben in comments has been corrected.
One correction, the rate for pilots is 92.4 deaths per 100,000 person-years (technically, it lists 109 deaths among what then must be 117,965 persons at risk in the calendar year 2004), which works out to:
92.4/100000=0.000924=0.0924% ~ 0.1% (not 0.01% as in your original post)
I'm sure there's a more sophisticated statistical analysis we might do here, but I'm pressed for time.
Posted by: Ben | July 11, 2006 at 11:10 AM
Hey Brendan, did Google stop indexing your site or something? I'm trying to Google brendan-nyhan.com for wall street journal editorial page and getting only other sites. Like http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brendan-nyhan.com&q=%22wall+street+journal%22+editorial+site%3Abrendan-nyhan.com&btnG=Search , which is a link you gave in another post to search your blog for posts on the topic, doesn't return anything any more.
Posted by: Noumenon | July 12, 2006 at 09:45 AM
Sadly, yes - Google dropped me in March, and except for a brief one-week reappearance, I don't seem to exist in their database. I don't know why. They certainly index content a lot more obscure than this blog. Anyway, in the meantime, please use the Technorati and Rollyo site search boxes on the left to look for past content.
Posted by: Brendan Nyhan | July 12, 2006 at 10:06 AM