Quotes About Statistics

Children of those who have been incarcerated are five times more likely to go to prison than children of parents who have never been incarcerated. The sins of the father visiting the child.

Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate.

If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we'd have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they're erratic. People do crazy things that don't make sense.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.

Moreover, statistics can be deceiving: the growth of jobs in the US in the 90s was due to many part-time jobs, with no benefits and generally low pay.

For the first time ever, overweight people outnumber average people in America. Doesn't that make overweight the average then? Last month you were fat, now you're average - hey, let's get a pizza!

Gun sales have spiked every time Democrats win elections since 1980.

Like many places across the country, Wisconsin lost more than 100,000 jobs from 2008 to 2010. Unemployment during that time topped out at over 9%.

It wasn't enough for Teddy to know that his family could not be counted in the statistics of poverty—among those who did not rely on government subsidies of any kind: they went to work; they owned their own home; their sons did not go to jail; their daughters got married before they got pregnant; there were few drug addicts and alcoholics among them—and those who succumbed did so in the privacy of their homes and not on the street disgracing everybody.

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he was not the first general to welcome statistics he wanted to hear—but the numbers emerged from an intricate origami of war bureaucracy: South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and American. The truth was bent at every fold for reasons that went beyond propaganda to self-interest, sycophancy, and wishful thinking.

And Johnson was a convert. Body counts were the first thing he asked for in regular war briefings. He bragged that his general in Vietnam killed thousands of enemy personnel for every one man he lost:

More bombs had been dropped in North and South Vietnam by the beginning of 1968 than had been dropped over Europe in all of World War II, three times more than were dropped in the Pacific theater, and twice as many as in Korea.

Two hundred and fifty American marines and soldiers were killed, and 1,554 wounded.75 Another 458 ARVN soldiers were killed and an estimated 2,700 wounded. The Front's losses are estimated to have been between 2,400 and 5,000—the difference between the official counts of both sides, both known to lie about such numbers. When

The ratio of men killed in battle is becoming more favorable to our side. From a little better than two to one last January, the ratio has climbed to more than six to one in favor of our side."20 Westy argued that the ratio so heavily favored allied forces that in time the mounting toll would buckle Hanoi's resolve.

The famous United Nations statistic from a 2002 report—more books are translated into Spanish in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand—suggests at the very minimum an extraordinarily closed world.

the global climate models (whether downscaled to regions or not) have failed to predict changes in the statistics of regional climate…

At the time of their deaths, three out of five Russian men, I am told, are found to have a blood-alcohol level exceeding what one needs to qualify for a DWI.

We have learned that nobody beats the market (except for a handful of "unicorns")! And by using low-cost market-mimicking index funds, we can outperform 96% of mutual funds and nearly as many hedge funds.

Shiller found that when he adjusted for inflation, US housing prices have been nearly flat for a century! He exploded one of the biggest myths of our time: that home prices keep going up and up. "Unless there's a bubble," he told me. And we all know what eventually happens to bubbles.

That's right: statistics show that fewer than 10% of people who buy a book ever read past the first chapter.

That's obvious, right? And there have been recent studies, including one by Vanguard in 2012, showing that in rolling ten-year periods over the past 80 years in the US, UK, and Australian stock markets, lump-sum investing has outperformed dollar-cost averaging more than two-thirds of the time.

For the 20-year period from December 31, 1993, to December 31, 2013, the S&P 500 returned 9.2% annually, but the average mutual fund investor averaged just over 2.5%, barely beating inflation.