Quotes About Statistics

rely on accumulated data rather than on individual anecdotes

According to the official numbers, shelters take in somewhere between six million and eight million dogs and cats every year and euthanize about half of them. And this is an improvement. While it was back in the 1970s that the HSUS began trying to raise awareness

The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)

Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence.

In 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, there were no interstate conflicts at all.

Slavery and other forms of bondage, of course, have not been obliterated from the face of the earth. As a result of recent publicity about the trafficking of people for labor and prostitution, one sometimes hears the statistically illiterate and morally obtuse claim that nothing has changed since the 18th century, as if there were no difference between a clandestine practice in a few parts of the world and an authorized practice everywhere in the world.

Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.)

And contrary to an earlier belief, winning the lottery does, over the long term, make people happier.

These upheavals were driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police. Yet as with terrorism and school shootings, the numbers are surprising. A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.

and here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity, for they show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all

Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

Third, don't confuse an anecdote or a personal experience with the state of the world. Just because something happened to you, or you read about it in the paper or on the Internet this morning, it doesn't mean it is a trend. In a world of seven billion people, just about anything will happen to someone somewhere, and it's the highly unusual events that will be selected for the news or passed along to friends. An

Among Western democracies, the United States leaps out of the homicide statistics. Instead of clustering with kindred peoples like Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany, it hangs out with toughs like Albania and Uruguay, close to the median rate for the entire world.

Figure 10-1 shows that the world population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline.

That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

three-quarters of all the deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments, which Rummel calls the dekamegamurderers: the Soviet Union with 62 million, the People's Republic of China with 35 million, Nazi Germany with 21 million, and 1928–49 nationalist China with 10 million.

we tend to think that "we approach death by one year for every year we age, but during the twentieth century, the average person approached death by just seven months for every year they aged.

Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013," Norberg writes. "After having lived, loved and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.

And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

Yes, well into the 19th century, in Sweden, one of the world's wealthiest countries, between a quarter and a third of all children died before their fifth birthday, and in some years the death toll was close to half.

Figure 12-5 shows that in 1970 the chance that an airline passenger would die in a plane crash was less than five in a million; by 2015 that small risk had fallen a hundredfold.

Imagine the tragedy; then try to imagine it another million times. That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

for an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.

Most hunter-gatherer tribes have plenty of people in their seventies and even some in their eighties. Though a Hadza woman's life expectancy at birth is 32.5 years, if she makes it to 45 she can expect to live another 21 years.