OSHA workplace inspections

It turns out that the same invisible hand guiding Americans toward finishing 26.2 miles of voluntary suffering also guides OSHA inspectors toward workplaces with the grim determination of tax auditors, and they have been moving in perfect synchronisation for eight years as if choreographed by some bored celestial administrator. One might expect workplace safety and recreational endurance to exist in entirely separate universes, separated by the kind of distance that usually requires a physicist to measure. Instead they correlate at 0.949, which is the kind of number that makes you wonder if the universe is playing a joke or if we're just very good at finding patterns in noise.

Both numbers cratered in 2020 for the same unsentimental reason: the events they counted were cancelled. OSHA couldn't inspect closed workplaces; marathons couldn't count runners who weren't allowed to line up at a start. The correlation measures the thoroughness with which covid erased in-person gatherings.

What we have stumbled upon is not evidence that marathoners cause workplace safety or vice versa, but rather a reminder that large, complex systems tend to move together in ways that seem coordinated only in retrospect. The real story is not the correlation itself but our irrepressible need to notice it, name it, and feel briefly clever about the noticing. Both numbers are probably just riding the same economic wave, which is less magical but considerably more honest than most explanations we arrive at when we're not looking very carefully.