Quotes About Statistics

For a developing country, average long-run growth of 5 percent a year per capita is excellent, and 7 percent is stellar.

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9 percent of the private-sector workforce from a high water mark of 38 percent in the fifties.

Another thing this spokesman tells me is that more Kansans need to go to jail. In Kansas, he says, the "rate of incarceration went up forty-four percent in the nineties. In the rest of the nation, it went up 71.7 percent. So we are not putting people in jail" at the same rate as other states.

believe that at least twenty percent of autopsies nationwide reveal that the initial theory of the cause of death is wrong.

Stats are stats but if you want to be sure you're going to have, say, three children with no problems, you should start at around 23.

It's no secret that anybody who knows the music business knows that the numbers are substantially different in Christian music than they are in country music.

My interest is not data, it's the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers.

If you look at some of the people in the Hall of Fame, my numbers are compatible.

I love Messi with the ball at his feet: he scores goals and does all the rest, too. But Cristiano's numbers can't be ignored. It's a cruel comparison. Both of them deserve respect.

I am completely obsessed with numbers and data. I have become a scientist in later life.

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.

I think my numbers speak for themselves.

It's true that I have always been very comfortable with numbers.

People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them.

I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics.

Do you carry a gun? No. I own one. You think I should carry it? Statistically it will shorten your life, not lengthen it. The unpleasant truth is that if someone is trying to kill you there is not a whole lot you can do about it. Your only real safety would be in disappearing. And even with that there are no guarantees.

The law didn't care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal.

I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are.

The plural of anecdote isn't fact.

Leftists bruit about statistics on accidents where children are killed with revolvers. But these data are wildly exaggerated by including the shooting deaths of young, teenaged gang-bangers, whose deaths are certainly purposeful.

The year before, 279,000 Apple IIs were sold, compared to 240,000 IBM PCs and its clones.

To Joseph Priestley, he provided a bit of math for one of their friends to ponder: "Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20,000 a head . . . During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all.

In one generation, young men have gone from 61 percent of college degree recipients to a projected 39 percent; young women, from 39 percent to a projected 61 percent.

Every day, 150 workers die from hazardous working conditions. And 92 percent are male.