The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

by Tim Harford

The United States has a notoriously high infant mortality rate for a rich country—6.1 deaths per thousand live births in 2010. In Finland, by comparison, it is just 2.3. But it turns out that physicians in America, like those in the UK’s Midlands, seem to be far more likely to record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, than as a late miscarriage. Perhaps this is for cultural reasons, or perhaps it reflects different legal or financial considerations. Whatever the reason, some—by no means all—of the high infant mortality rate in the United States seems to be the result of recording births before twenty-four weeks as live when in other countries they would be recorded as miscarried pregnancies. For babies born after twenty-four weeks, the US infant mortality rate falls from 6.1 to 4.2 deaths per thousand live births. The rate in Finland barely shifts, from 2.3 to 2.1.[2]