Timothy Taylor pulls some nuggets from an article by Carol Leon Boyd in the Monthly Labor Review.
BLS reported about 23,000 industrial deaths in 1913 among a workforce of 38 million, equivalent to a rate of 61 deaths per 100,000 workers. In contrast, the most recent data on overall occupational fatalities show a rate of 3.3 deaths per 100,000 workers.
That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t show up in GDP growth rate statistics.
There is much more at the link.
“That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t show up in GDP growth rate statistics.”
Doesn’t it? I can see why this wouldn’t show up in per capital GDP growth rates, but more production from more (not dead) people should improve measured growth, no?
Doesn’t it show up? A worker that dies would no longer produce and no longer add to GDP. Every death should pull back against GDP growth so a decline in deaths would should up.
There are less dead workers, but some of that improvement can be attributed to…. regulations!
It can? Studies I have read have not been favorable to OHSA
There is that one thing about the death rate going down by 95%.
Do you know when OSHA came into being? Look at a trend of death rates from 1940 to the present. Now look up the OSHA date. Do you notice anything?
It shows up but is countered by falling population growth but it is per capita that matters most to people anyway. More relevantly it shows up in life expectancy.
As LFPR is <100 it still hits per captia as well.
I wonder how the figures would change if the health impacts of modern sedentary work were factored in.
Isn’t a dead worker mean less GDP in the future? Better yet doesn’t a dead worker not stop their production but potential their off-spring as well?
In terms of the global economy, isn’t one of the biggest drags is the working population for developed economies stagnant?