MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
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MIT has been first and foremost a government research lab since Conant (an MIT grad) was FDR's wartime science advisor and reformulated the institute (just compare the small size of the student body vs overall research staff, or consider that education brings in only 14% of the institute's revenue). Your education is essentially subsidized by the Pentagon.
The 1970s reforms shuffled the pieces around the board but didn't make a substantive change (they did improve academic freedom, though). Through the 1990s MIT was really more policy rather than corporate focused but now there is more private sector involvement can you really say it's any better?
Not to overly pick on your comment, since you did say that it can be ethical, of course. But i've seen this sentiment that military work is unethical echo'd a bunch of times here lately, and I think it's an incredibly naive perspective.
Those who oppose collaborating with the military do so because “America military hegemony” has been used for all kinds of horrors, including recent events like the Iraq War. There’s nothing naive about not wanting to be party to at least half a million civilian casualties and the destabilization of the Middle East.
You can make some Real Politik argument about the ends justifying the means, if that’s what you truly believe, but you’ll have to do so more explicitly and account for things like Vietnam and the Iraq War. The reductive abstraction of “stability” you pose know longer holds the same kind of sway it once did among most people.
https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/6
Do you see how it goes down since 1950? The fact that the US has been involved in conflicts is not evidence that the US, on balance, creates more violence.
Does that mean the US military has made no mistakes? No, of course not. It's made plenty. But the world is a real place where decisions are made by people, and order is imposed by force. Someone is going to impose it. Surveying the landscape of world powers today, i'll take the US over anyone else, any and every day. And that is the only decision that matters. Talking about civilian deaths de-contextualized from the reality of the alternatives is exactly what I mean by 'naive'.
The alternative to the Iraq War was not having the Iraq War, which by any sane account was the correct course of action. Half a million people didn’t half to die, but they did, because a lot of people embrace a kind of unquestioning idea of authority as “good,” to which you seem to subscribe.
>And that is the only decision that matters.
You’re free to define the scope of your ethics however you like, but again, these kind of simplistic appeals are increasingly untenable to most people. And many would probably categorize your adherence to their logic as “naive.”
You'll get no disagreement from me there. Like I said, and you seem to want to ignore, the US has done bad things. The question isn't "has this entity ever done anything wrong", the question you have to answer is: from the pool of available options, who's best?
> You’re free to define the scope of your ethics however you like, but again, these kind of simplistic appeals are increasingly untenable to most people. And many would probably categorize your adherence to their logic as “naive.”
It's your appeal that's simplistic. You're taking the world as you'd like it to be, rather than how it actually is. Someone has to have power. And if it's not the people you support, who's it going to be?
You can't just decide to make weapons when Hitler shows up. You need to be ready before Hitler shows up.
> But designing weapons to, say, better fight the Iraq War?
I'm no fan of the Iraq war. However, if we are going to fight the Iraq war, i'd certainly like us to have say, better targeted munitions, and I think Iraqi civilians would too.
> Furthering drone strike technology?
I'm a huge fan of drone strikes, so yes, to that one. That isn't to say i'm a huge fan of their indiscriminate use, of course. But if you're going to do some targeted killings, why not use drones? It exposes our soldiers to less risk, and allows for better, dispassionate targeting aided by automated tools. I think that's a great thing.
Now, I do disagree at the margin with some of the policy choices about how drones have been used. But if someone is going to have the best drones, you'd better believe I want that someone to be the USG.
> Given that there was no need for that at all, I can't say that's ethical.
You're conflating the choice to go to war with the technology to facilitate that war. They are not the same thing. The choice to to war was a mistake. But once the choice has been made, ensuring that victory is swift and precise is absolutely ethical.
If you make weapons, you are a killer. If there were really a hell, you would be going to it.
Be you a blacksmith who crafts swords in the 10th century or a software developer who makes military drone software in the 21st.
That you celebrate the use of drones, which save the life of one American at the expense of many innocent non-Americans, shows how utterly morally bankrupt your views are.
Military drones are an evil, allowing the US to wage wars and kill innocents in "collateral damage", otherwise known as mass-murder, without the PR backlash of losing soldiers.
In addition, these weapons that are being built are there mostly to reduce the cost of war on our end, while increasing it to others, namely the civilian casualties of the Iraq war (yes, I will continue bringing that up. It doesn't matter if you're not advocating for it; it is a direct result of what you are advocating). That is completely immoral.
Yes, it really is. If you are unarmed, you have no power. All power comes from the threat of violence. Any power not directly derived from that threat is derived from it indirectly.
> In addition, these weapons that are being built are there mostly to reduce the cost of war on our end, while increasing it to others, namely the civilian casualties of the Iraq war (yes, I will continue bringing that up. It doesn't matter if you're not advocating for it; it is a direct result of what you are advocating).
Do you think the military builds new weapons to try to target civilians better? Or do you think, when they "work on drone technology" that they are trying to build better, more precise targeting system that will have less collateral damage? I think the latter. And I think it's especially the latter if 'ethical' people are the ones working on it. If 'ethical' people choose not to build weapons, who's left building them?
And at that point, I no longer believe you are trying to engage in a serious discussion. The US is very, very far from "unarmed", so to use that as a justification shows that you're not taking this in good faith.
Let me guess though, instead you're going to respond to this by saying "LOL YOU THINK THE US IS RELATIVELY UNARMED!?", completely ignoring the strategic positioning questions related to armaments, and any nuanced notion of military geopolitics. Tell me again which of us is non-serious.
I think you got the correlation backwards here. You imply that we use drones because we had to do so many targeted killings that it would mean a huge risk for the soldiers. To me, it appears the other way around: The only way you can have so many targeted killings is because you're not putting your own people at risk anymore.
One scenario, you have maybe a hundred of your own soldiers killed in battle. The other scenario, you have thousands and thousands of foreign civilians killed by not-so-targeted killings. Of course the government will always have to side with its own citizens, so they relabel the civilians as terrorists to prevent cognitive dissonance.
I disagree. Creating these weapons, especially things like drones which make it much, much easier to go to war, and removes the penalty of having your own citizens die in combat, conflates those two things. If it's easier to go to war, and your side doesn't have to suffer casualties, you will go to war more often. Thus, these things are unethical, as you are facilitating war.
You are correct. However, now that drones exist, working on them is going to be about making them more targeted. Making them less likely to kill civilians, and more efficient about what they do. In large part, I agree with the targeted killing of the individuals targeted by drone strikes. What I would like to do is make the weapons and targeting systems of those drones better at reducing collateral damage. That seems like an important goal to me, and a perfectly ethical one.
This question is misleading, as the goal is never to pick the nicest tyrant and is certainly not to backstop their power. While USG is a stabilizing force in the world with regards to its peers that also have significant armaments, it also acts as a destabilizing force towards those it can assimilate with impunity.
It's not that designing or building weapons is wrong by itself. The problem is further advancing the offensive capabilities of the already-uncontested leader of the race - a leader which continually opts for routine use of those capabilities when it is easy. The infrastructure for remotely piloting drones halfway around the world isn't going to help defend in a mortal war against China, but it does make nicer day jobs for those roflstomping the latest economically-deviant backwater.
Coupled with the domestic political fuckery from the military-industrial-surveillance complex, the current answer is to just say no. If you want to build weapons, do so in the privacy of your own shed - you'll be better prepared to defend yourself when this overstretched empire collapses.
For the American empire. Less so for the rest of the world.
It needs to be considered acceptable to tell your boss no on ethical grounds.
To make this concrete, we want there to be one bin for "putting live viral payloads in to vaccines destined for a foreign country," and another bin for "annoying shoppers with eye-level advertisements," and maybe another bin for "improving the efficiency of infrastructure." Ideally, irrespective of where the profit motives lied it would be impossible to recruit anybody for sufficiently nefarious purposes, with the recruitment difficulty scaling with how much harm they knew they were going to do to the world.
The question you have to ask is: If it's not you who has the best weapons, who is it? If it's not you devising military strategy, who is? The answer is someone else. Probably someone who likes those things more than you. Is that the sort of person you want to have that kind of power?
You're skipping the important part of the argument here, and going directly from the premise to your desired outcome without arguing why that will happen.
If what you describe were the unconditional outcome, how is it that our world is not gradually becoming more cruel and inhuman? I mean, there certainly are cruel and inhuman aspects to it, but for the most part, we live in a world that's vastly more prosperous and sophisticated than any other epoch before that, and also less violent. You included the link to Our World In Data yourself to prove that point.
Obviously, there are other aspects that contribute to the success of a society besides its military engagement. This can arguably be seen in how the influence of the US is slowly diminishing even though they have the largest military expenses by a wide margin.
Because not everyone makes the same naive choice to bury their head in the sand and say "moral people don't build weapons". There is a long tradition of great scientists making the only moral choice and choosing to develop weapons for the powers they trusted the most. Those people made the extremely hard, but ultimately correct choice to build weapons of war for imperfect powers. They did so because they knew that if they didn't, someone else would. And that someone else might be building them for an even less ethical power.
I think the key difference between our points of view is how strictly we want to define "being ethical". I'm pretty strict about the definition. At the same time, I'm okay with being labeled unethical from time to time.
Something about supporting the military when it means resisting oppressive authoritarian hegemony, for instance, seems pretty ethical to me.
Second, the USA is not only stabilizing peace, but from time to time disrupts it. Sometimes a war is waged without proper consideration. I think Iraq is the best example, but the intervention in Afghanistan wasn't necessary either.
Third, even if you say the above were just mistakes, and the leaders of the USA had good intentions, weapons are a product just like everything else, and so they're sold. The USA has a list of "good" and "bad" states, but circumstances change very quickly nowadays. Also, once you sell a weapon, even to a "good" state, you lose control.
On the other hand, there are some military applications that are actually meant to save lives rather than taking them. One good example is clearing land mines - I guess no engineer would have any problems helping in constructing a robot that would disarm mines and other explosives.
And this is an extremely critical moral choice, because it's the only real one. Any other choice is just burying your head in the sand and saying the world doesn't exist.
There is an enormous conventional arms market though. These are guns, pistols etc. Their sole aim is to kill people, plain and simple. You could justify it by saying some of those people deserve being killed, but as a creator of the weapon you can't know that, you have no control on how it's used. That's why many people would have moral objections against the production of conventional weapons.
That's not entirely true, especially if you are working for a military. You don't have total control over how it's used, but you can decide which government you work for.
Right. Anything unethical about building photon torpedoes for the federation? No.
What I find interesting is that in some cases, the broad outcomes of a particular weapon being designed are predictable. Gunpowder is widely credited with destabilizing the feudal social order because it put military supremacy in the hands of the peasantry. Modern drones could well be used to sustain a new social order much in the way that heavy armor and stirrups sustained the feudal one. Whether that's a good thing of course depends on other ethical considerations, but if I had the opportunity to work on a weapons system, I would think much more about those kinds of implications than who would be using it - it seems best to assume the answer to that question is, "everyone".
You and every Tom, Dick and Harry. And that's okay why?
Thanks to everybody who read the editorial and commented! We're glad that it's generating some discussion.
We're interested in writing another piece on MIT and the military. A lot of these comments contain useful information and we'd love to hear more tip from you all for future pieces -- if you have any information regarding the topic (regardless of how trivial or how well-known you think the information is), we'd really appreciate it if you could email opinion@the-tech.mit.edu.
Further, if you're affiliated with MIT and you're interested in writing a letter to the editor in response to this piece, we'd love that as well -- please email letters letters@tech.mit.edu.
Thanks so much everybody!
But for anything that requires sacrifice like MBS not giving an endowment, they suck it up. This is what sucks as wishy washy populism as it doesn’t reflect any insight into an orginizarion’s leadership’s values.
MIT is likely concerned with increasing its power. Thus is part of the establishment. Doing lots of great things, but part of the establishment.
Thus their total cop out over Aaron Schwartz back to when they didn’t admit their first black professor until 1956 (http://diverseeducation.com/article/7136/).
There’s a really popular and well respected engineering school that has a big problem with sexual assault. They issue statements and sponsor marches and stuff. But drag their feet on any actions like removing organizations that frequently have members commit sexual assault.
I just consider most of the statements from universities PR and virtue signaling unless it’s acompanied with allocation of resources.
Almost all organized groups exist in order to increase their power/influence. Those who try to destroy centers of power without either redistributing power or accumulating it for themselves are destroyers, nothing more.
My goal is to redistribute power from people of my “kind” to people in my geography, roughly evenly. I think that’s fundamentally different from “increasing my own power” although I do admit it’s not wholly different.
I think your statement is just too reductive. There are corporations, federations, partnerships, syndicates, all of these organizations have vastly different power centralization properties.
(also not clear if you're referring to MIT or some other 'well respected engineering school').
It's also pretty well documented that Apple does at least as much as, and usually for more than, any other major consumer electronics company to make its suppliers improve working conditions and wages.
I'm curious how Apple compares to whoever made the computer the author used to type that article, or whoever made the author's mobile phone.
Here's more discussion of the Koch strategy to put money into universities, including MIT, in an effort to buy ideological support for their political goals (which are to destroy government to cut billionaires' taxes.)
http://www.unkochmycampus.org/
From Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-2...
From the Chronicle of Higher Ed: https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2017/12/21/the-chronic...
MBS's crimes in his country and in Yemen (and US complicity) should be sharply criticized by people who think they represent the front of progress for human civilization.
I am not surprised about MIT's behaviour by the way. As long as top-level education stays private and has to hunt for funding, things like this will always happen.
The Saudis are a particularly unsavory monarchy (torture, arbitrary imprisonment, lack of basic political rights, foreign assassinations, sponsorship of terrorism, direct military attacks on foreign civilians, etc.), but not fundamentally different from many historical donors.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/georgetown-university-...
A large endowment doesn't guarantee that an institution is wealthy enough to refuse money.
It's certainly not helped that our government has taken aim directly at universities with sizable endowments[1]. The recent tax bill hits hard and has directly impacted MIT's ability to provide financial aid and pursue humanitarian research[2].
1. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/01/16/tax-college-...
2. http://news.mit.edu/2017/letter-regarding-new-federal-tax-bi...
When I was at Dartmouth during the great recession a decade ago, they were gloating that they were nevertheless still making gains on the endowment, as the rest of the world crashed.
Though curiously, MIT's own estimation of the new tax says it'll only cost $10M. If MIT really made $2.1B in one year on just investments, an extra $10M seems pretty manageable. (though this also seems far less than the 1.4% cited, so not sure what's going on).
Here's where MIT mentions the $10M in new taxes: http://news.mit.edu/2017/letter-regarding-new-federal-tax-bi...
Presumably the tax is on future 2018 earnings, not 2017 earning.s
So overall much of the funding is from less than ideal sources from an ethical point of view. It does create some issues from time to time.
"Universities and the federal government became partners in research after World War II. MIT was one of the biggest beneficiaries. The National Institutes of Health initially set the overhead reimbursement rate at 8 percent and it eventually rose to 20 percent for all universities. In 1965, Congress permitted schools to directly negotiate their rates with the federal government, setting ballooning rates on their course."
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-m...
You are probably right that much of the money may technically not be part of the endowment but I'm not sure that the technicalities of what constitutes an endowment is very useful if they are still the main funder of the university.
If universities include up to 90% "overhead" that can be deposited into their general budgets with no requirement that it supports scientific endeavors then what do we really mean when we say the DoE / DoD don't contribute to the endowment? We mean they weren't "donations" basically? The article wasn't really about donations / endowment so other than using a slightly wrong word its not really relevant to the discussion anyway.
Furthermore more than half of MIT's R&D funds come from the government so this isn't exactly an edge case. Its the rule not the exception.
Overhead for me is around 50% depending on source, and everyone here is motivated to spend as much of that on research as possible. It would be very inefficient to put that money in the general fund. Much better to fund one more PhD student than bank $50K.
Louis CK (RIP our opinion of him, but still) put it pretty well once, something along the lines of "slavery built everything we love. We just throw human death and suffering at a thing until it's done. There's no end to what you can do when you don't give a fuck about a certain group of people. You can have candles and horses and be a little kinder to eachother, or you can leverage the endless suffering of someone really far away so you can leave a mean comment on someone's youtube video while you take a shit."
Please allow me to change your opinion on this. The comparison being made there is the ( number of suicides at Foxconn / number of Foxconn employees ) vs number of suicides in China / population of China. At first glance, this looks like a valid comparison. But it is not. It is actually comparing apples to oranges. The real comparison is against number of employees who choose to commit suicide at their employers premise / number of employees. A useful way to paraphrase this is:
Lets say Google has 100,000 employees. How many Google employees commit suicide at the Googleplex per year? Not how many google employees commit suicide overall.
When phrased this way, it becomes clear that other companies have much lower suicide rates than Foxconn.
That's what is critical to compare. It turns out Foxconn's suicide rate is massively higher than equivalent Chinese employers and the inference is the alleged egregious mistreatment of Foxconn laborers by Foxconn is the cause.
Note that one of the attempts catalogued on Wikipedia states that one Mr. 刘 "threw himself from the sixth floor of a dormitory building". That would tend to imply that the statistics cover the workers while they're on or off the job -- the statistics are for suicide attempts on campus, but the employees live on campus.
And that would tend to imply that the appropriate comparison is indeed "how many people commit suicide anywhere?", not "how many people commit suicide in the office?".
If you have a bunch of companies trying to keep their shit together while barely able to make their product and then someone kills himself simple because the situation is no longer worth living - then it is a sad thing.
If the product is one of the most successful things in human history the suicide is a design goal.
If we don't stand up to it and at least voice our objection we will all be treated like that eventually - regardless of corporate success or personal productivity.
The only other role is that of the psychopath pressuring those who do the work in order to meet the suicide quota. If you don't meet the suicide quota your workers are not working hard enough or you are paying them to much. It's simple business logic nothing personal.
It applies to low wages for illegal immigrants too. Once they're in our country, we feel responsible for them. Before they got here, we don't care at all how little they earn. Some people even go so far as to want to kick them out to save them from earning low wages. Really it just saves us the guilt but makes it worse for the individual.
And if someone lives on corporate campus but commits suicide off of a bridge in town, not counted?
A very large proportion of Chinese factory workers (including a majority of Foxconn workers) live in company-owned dormitories located on or near the factory site. Most Chinese factory workers are internal migrants from poorer northern and central provinces. These workers generally prefer dormitory accommodation, because it allows them to save a larger proportion of their salary towards their future plans.
You would only be comparing like-with-like if Google provided on-site housing at the Googleplex to a majority of their workers.
Google employees don't live at the Googleplex so that's not valid.
If you want to compare them to other companies you would either need to include suicide off campus of the other companies or exclude suicide off-shift at Foxconn.
Just a few examples of great things accomplished without great human suffering or slavery- space race, Internet, Inca Trail, Bilbao Museum.
This was literally the result of the Cold War.
> Internet
Partially the same as above, also, there's no denying that they're isn't any suffering because of the Internet.
> Inca Trail, Biblao Museum
These mostly came about because of mechanization or better technology…
Explain how slavery built the Internet or triggered the space race.
A tremendous amount of things in the past were created by skilled artisans, workers, farmers etc.
And in those cases where people had to do difficult work and suffered, that was because there were no other ways of accomplishing that work.
It's not that there was some cabal of evil leaders making life hard for the masses, it's that in order to accomplish things like mining and large scale public works without machines, hard manual labor was necessary.
Of course we could have just not done any of this, but then we would still be hunter gatherers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Slave_labor
"More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon"
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#NASA_career
"American authorities then chose to use von Braun and his German team's experience with missiles to create an orbital launch vehicle. Wernher von Braun had such an idea originally proposed in 1954, but it was denied at the time.[60]"
That's not accurate. Skilled workers built those.
> Or all the generals we revere who sent thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had not much to gain from the war to their deaths.
Who exactly? That does not sound representative.
The skilled workers did the difficult parts. Getting the materials to the construction site and other (often dangerous) tasks were done either by children or peasants that had either been forced or attracted by false promises. In addition the churches and kings often didn't pay the promised money. Just read some history books. The top guys always wanted to keep as much to themselves as they could. No difference to now. They could be even greedier back then because the little guy had no rights.
Doing it by choice creates all sorts of ill psychological effects. It means I have to convince myself to keep doing it, and as a result I'll try to convince myself of things like "it's fair" or "I like this" or so on. I think I might actually be happier as a slave than a wage slave doing the exact same shitty work and ridiculous hours as a slave because at least I can be honest with myself about the situation.
Normally wage slavery is better - because it means that the employers can't enforce quite as shitty conditions or long hours as a actual slave. But it's not clear to me that that is happening here, and even if it is happening here if you understood your argument to rely on it.
And to be clear, we are well beyond "asshole boss" or anything legal in the western world. We are considering a situation where you are treated identically to a slave except that instead of being forced to work via beatings and supplied food, you are supplied just enough money to eat - buying everything at the company store - and forced to work by "well otherwise you starve to death".
(By food I also include things like shelter and so on...)
That's why such work is a good thing, not a bad thing. It saves people from starving to death. Which is what happens periodically during famines in extremely undeveloped countries, such as most of history.
There are people in the world who are functionally chattel slaves who happen to receive a nominal wage, but this is not what the term “wage slavery” typically refers to; that term (and perhaps your argument, though I am not sure) equivocates wage labor with chattel slavery. I and others believe the difference is vast, important, and moral.
Not at all. The repudiation of slavery built everything we love. The Confederacy went to war with the Union to protect its failing economy. Their loss in the Civil War resulted in the utter destruction of the slave economy and what it produced.
The slave plantations could barely sustain themselves, and they started to war because they wanted to protect their fragile economy from competition.
The free north industrialized and economically buried the slave south. The rebel army didn't even have shoes - they went barefoot. The slave economy couldn't even produce shoes.
Of course there was trade and investment going back and forth between the states, after all, it was one country. But the idea that the wealth of the north depended on "enormous profits" from slavery is just not credible.
There's a reason that slavery died out in the northern states by 1800 or so. It didn't pay. It didn't produce enormous profits. It was an economic loser.
Slavery has failed every time it went up against free labor. It just can't compete.
You're not listening very hard then.
In actual fact mbs is a force for reform. He is perusing reform both because it is plainly in the best interest of his empire and because this is a trend that goes all the way to the beginning with for example the introduction of television to the masses despite huge resistance from religious bodies. Anyone who claims to favor reform and simultaneously condemns mbs knows nothing about the history or international politics of Saudi Arabia. I have been watching mobs and his behaviour indicates very positive direction indeed. Do your homework. Astoundingly the people at MIT seem to have not done theirs.
You bring up some interesting points. I'm not remotely familiar with MBS, so this is just pointing out why in general you shouldn't expect a reformer to look like a reformer.
Lincoln by his own words absolutely looked like a bastard who didn't give a damn about slavery, and nevertheless set in motion events to free slaves. And, of course, to get enough popular support, he couldn't be too outwardly anti-slavery. That's inherent in statecraft: to get things to change, you expect to have to play the people who don't want them to change.
And if a reformer is fooling the people whose agenda is to stymie reform, you should expect a less interested third-party to be fooled. So if MBS was a reformer, it shouldn't be surprised that educated people might study him quite carefully and not remotely catch on that he's enacting reforms.
Likewise, it's just as possible he is a total bastard, the MIT students are right, and you're getting suckered.
Again, I haven't read up on MBS at all, this is just a practical reality to keep in mind when you're evaluating a reform-oriented politician or official.
The US president? Israel? The new US national security adviser to the president? An enormous number of existing sanctions currently imposed by the US, EU, and UN?
Here's an example of this other take: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/1...
Attacking Apple for providing well above market pay for jobs that rescue chinese laborers from brutal and dangerous rural farm jobs just makes the writer sound entitled.
This cites some numbers from the CDC, looks like in America farms are dangerous, can’t imagine what it’s like in China. It says farmers are 2x as likely as police and 5x as likely as firefighters to die on the job. My intuition is formed from knowing that logging is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, I kind of assumed farming wasn’t so far off.
In the United States, agriculture is one of the most dangerous occupational categories. Fatality rate is 7x higher than all workers in private industry, and injury rate is 40% higher than all workers. Additionally, exposure to farm chemicals results in long term health effects.
In China, safety standards are poor in agriculture and often unregulated, so no reliable statistics exist. That said, with reduced mechanization and poor working standards, injuries and deaths are likely far higher.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf
I wasn't able to find a source but my understanding is that being a farmer is many times more dangerous on a percentage basis than being a police officer, and that's only counting fatal accidents. I would bet good money that the rate of disfiguring/crippling injury is way higher.
Also, being a police officer, overall, isn’t as deadly as people think. Specific areas are though.
Anecdotally, my grandfather died some time after being burned in a conflagration related to cleaning something with gasoline, and none of his children became farmers. One daughter went to college and became a computer programmer, another started a delivery business, his son went to work for a VA hospital, and his wife sold the farm and became a nurse after her husband died.
It's hard to imagine conditions that predate your parents' time, and most people at this point are probably more than one generation away from their farming ancestors.