Quotes About Statistics

If you ignore all the years in which an indicator of some problem declines, and report every uptick (since, after all, it's "news"), readers will come away with the impression that life is getting worse and worse even as it gets better and better. In the first six months of 2016 the New York Times pulled this trick three times, with figures for suicide, longevity, and automobile fatalities.

According to the National Safety Council, the horse-associated fatality rate was ten times the car-associated rate of modern times [in 1974, which is more than double the per capita rate today—SP].45

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic

Plane crashes, in contrast, get lavish coverage, but they kill only about 250 people a year worldwide, making planes about a thousand times safer per passenger mile than cars.

The average would have been longer still were it not for the calamity of AIDS, which caused the terrible trough in the 1990s before antiretroviral drugs started to bring it under control.

The population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion, which is about two and a half times the population in 1800, four and a half times that in 1600, seven times that in 1300, and fifteen times that of 1 CE. So the death count of a war in 1600, for instance, would have to be multiplied by 4.5 for us to compare its destructiveness to those in the middle of the 20th century.9

Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. People rank tornadoes (which kill about fifty Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than four thousand Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television.

The problem with dystopian rhetoric is that if people believe that the country is a flaming dumpster, they will be receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: "What do you have to lose?" If the media and intellectuals instead put events into statistical and historical context, they could help answer that question.

As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 People Escaped Extreme Poverty Yesterday every day for the past twenty-five years.33 But they never ran the headline, because there was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history—a billion and a quarter people escaping from squalor—has gone unnoticed.

Probabilites are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.

The cause of the onset of overgeneralization [of regular past tense forms to irregular verbs] is not a change in vocabulary statistics, but some endogenous change in the child's language mechanisms.

But proving that incarceration deters people (as opposed to incapacitating them) is easier said than done, because the statistics at any time are inherently stacked against it.

With a constant probability of ending every year, a war is most likely to end after its first year, slightly less likely to end within two years, a bit less likely to stretch on to three, and so on.

The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.

The impression that the Muslim world indulges kinds of violence that the West has outgrown is not a symptom of Islamophobia or Orientalism but is borne out by the numbers.

Half of the world's homicides are committed in just twenty-three countries containing about a tenth of humanity, and

When you scale by population size, only one of the 20th century's atrocities even makes the top ten. The worst atrocity of all time was the An Lushan Revolt and Civil War, an eight-year rebellion during China's Tang Dynasty that, according to censuses, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire's population, a sixth of the world's population at the time.13

Also, as Nils Petter Gleditsch and Halvard Buhaug have pointed out, even though an increasing proportion of the world's armed conflicts have involved Islamic countries and insurgencies over the past two decades (from 20 to 38 percent), it's not because those conflicts have increased in number.

Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there's a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two.

I love to crunch numbers. I look at how many fairways I hit, how many greens I hit. I plan my way around the golf course.

Children in father-absent homes are four times as likely to be poor.

Gengis Kan, conquistador de gran parte de Asia, es el ancestro del ocho por ciento de los hombres de Asia Central,

Two-year-olds, statistically speaking, are the most violent of people.

En términos estadísticos, los niños de dos años son las personas más violentas que existen.