Quotes About Statistics

That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, muck later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process.

the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth.

growth," 60 percent of India's workforce is self-employed, and 90 percent of India's labor force works in the unorganized sector.11

In psychology, there's something called the broken-leg problem. A statistical formula may be highly successful in predicting whether or not a person will go to a movie in the next week. But someone who knows that this person is laid up with a broken leg will beat the formula. No formula can take into account the infinite range of such exceptional events.

Consider the case of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Its elderly residents have unusually low end-of-life hospital costs. During their last six months, according to Medicare data, they spend half as many days in the hospital as the national average, and there's no sign that doctors or patients are halting care prematurely. Despite average rates of obesity and smoking, their life expectancy outpaces the national mean by a year.

Whereas today people often understate their age to census takers, studies of past censuses have revealed that they used to overstate it.

The risk of a fatal car crash with a driver who's eighty-five or older is more than three times higher than it is with a teenage driver

Still, I told myself, you really can't make much of one study of one Friday the thirteenth in one town.

Yet given how much surgery is now done—Americans today undergo an average of seven operations in their lifetime, with surgeons performing more than fifty million operations annually—the amount of harm remains substantial. We continue to have upwards of 150,000 deaths following surgery every year

the studies show no connection.

As recently as 1945, most deaths occurred in the home. By the 1980s, just 17 percent did.

What's the shortest time you've seen and the longest time you've seen for people who took no treatment? Three months was the shortest, she said, three years the longest. And with treatment? She got mumbly. Finally she said that the longest might not have been that much more than three years. But with treatment, the average should shift toward the longer end.

The goal is to use explicit, logical, statistical thinking instead of just your gut.

Discussion had brought La Crosse's end-of-life costs down to half the national average. It was that simple—and that complicated.

It was estimated that, nationwide, upward of forty-four thousand patients die each year at least partly as a result of errors in care.

A study led by the sociologist Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive and then followed the patients. Sixty-three percent of doctors overestimated their patient's survival time. Just 17 percent underestimated it. The average estimate was 530 percent too high. And the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.

and it's no accident that seven times as many women as men have had the operation.

The risk of a fatal car crash with a driver who's eighty-five or older is more than three times higher than it is with a teenage driver. The very old are the highest-risk drivers on the road

According to the principle of indeterminism, the particles behave in a way that is defined only statistically, and within the limits of this indeterminism, they allow themselves to act in ways that are indecent or simply horrifying from the viewpoint of classic physics, because they violate the laws of behavior; but as this is happening within an interval of indefiniteness, they can never be observed in the act of breaking those laws.

A study of what happened as various states adopted no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s and 1980s found that in the first five years following adoption, wives' suicide rates fell by 8 to 13 percent, and domestic violence rates within marriage dropped by 30 percent.

But the Newsweek claim was wrong even back in 1986. And by 2002 Hewlett's "nowadays" was already three decades out-of-date. More women than ever before are marrying for the first time at age thirty, forty, fifty, and even sixty.

By 1952 there were two million more working wives than there had been at the height of World War II.

More than half of Spanish women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single. The rate of marriage in Italy is much lower than in the United States. Japan shares with Scandinavia the distinction of having the highest percentage of unmarried women between age twenty and forty of anywhere in the world.44

But there have only ever been fewer than two hundred billion human beings