Quotes About Statistics

Figure 1: The incidence of banking crises Source: Own calculations, based on the reported numbers of major bank failures in OECD economies, from Reinhart and Rogoff (2010)

There are over 1,200 species of bat in the world and not one of them is blind. There are 4,800 species of frog in the world but only one of them goes 'ribbit'. Eight times as many people belong to the National Trust as to the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties combined. Every human being starts out life as an arsehole: it's the first part of the body to form in the womb.

80% of plane crashes occur in the first three or last eight minutes of a flight.

You are 14% more likely to die on your birthday than any other day. 51

Pandemics often come in waves, and the cumulative "morbidity" rate—the number of people who get sick in all the waves combined—often exceeds 50 percent.

In 1918, the world population was 1.8 billion, and the pandemic probably killed 50 to 100 million people, with the lowest credible modern estimate at 35 million. Today the world population is 7.6 billion. A comparable death toll today would range from roughly 150 to 425 million.

During the course of the epidemic, 47 percent of all deaths in the United States, nearly half of all those who died from all causes combined—from cancer, from heart disease, from stroke, from tuberculosis, from accidents, from suicide, from murder, and from all other causes—resulted from influenza and its complications.

During the course of the epidemic, 47 percent of all deaths in the United States, nearly half of all those who died from all causes combined—from cancer, from heart disease, from stroke, from tuberculosis, from accidents, from suicide, from murder, and from all other causes—resulted from influenza and its complications. And it killed enough to depress the average life expectancy in the United States by more than ten years.

Today's world population is 6.3 billion. To give a sense of the impact in today's world of the 1918 pandemic, one has to adjust for population. If one uses the lowest estimate of deaths—the 21 million figure—that means a comparable figure today would be 73 million dead. The higher estimates translate into between 175 and 350 million dead.

Of developed countries, Italy suffered the worst, losing approximately 1 percent of its total population.

The United States ranks 14th in the world in education. Even if we subtract Sarah Palin's test scores, it only bumps us to third. Damn you, Finland!

People of each generation in the twentieth century "were three times more likely to experience depression" than people of the preceding generation.

I have no faith in political arithmetic.

I don't even want to talk about "female sexuality" until there is a control group. And there never will be.

The ownership of computers in the home is far less than the statistics show, because usually when the computer breaks down once, that is the end of it for a long, long time. They do not have the money or incentive to get the computer repaired.

I can buy baseball cards to view an entire career on the back of a little square of cardboard. But nobody sells major league father cards with key statistics on the back ("Had a great season in 2005: set career highs in unforced expressions of affection and averaged 87 minutes of quality time per day.")

Our own statistics about violence, depression, drug abuse, divorce, and crime indicated that although ours was one of the wealthiest societies in history, it may also be one of the least happy societies. Why would we want others to emulate us?

The rich get richer and the poor grow poorer. Yet, from a statistical standpoint, this is recorded as economic progress.

In the half century after 1950, the global economy grew sixfold. Annual economic growth averaged 3.9 percent per year, far outstripping the estimated historical averages for the industrial age up to that point (1820–1950) of 1.6 percent per year and for the "early modern," post-Columbian world (1500–1820) of 0.3 percent per year

Mr. Hogan is not tall himself, at five feet ten inches

Nobody should be allowed in the professional media without at least a year of statistics," she

He didn't know if that was good or bad: concealed-carry people actually committed fewer felonies per year than cops did 

What struck me first was the UN's estimate that 850 million people in the world lacked basic literacy. I had to read the number three times to convince myself that it was not too large to be true. The world's population was around 6 billion people. That meant one out of every seven human beings lacked the ability to read or write a simple sentence.

The UN report was not yet done depressing me. The next section revealed that over 100 million children of primary-school age were not enrolled in school. One hundred million. Mao once said that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.