Quotes About Statistics

In the 1950s married couples represented 80 percent all households in the United States. By the beginning of the twenty-first century they were less than 51 percent, and married couples with children were just 25 percent of all households.

In the U.S. there are 45,000 shopping malls employing 10.7 million people. The average American family of four metabolizes four million pounds of material every year to support their lifestyle. That's 11,000 lbs. a day, 7.5 lbs. a minute.

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you. — RITA MAE BROWN

The interesting thing about averages is that they hide the truth very effectively.

The scary truth is 96 percent of mutual funds fail to match the market, and the 4 percent that do, they're always changing.

There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time.

dramatically the number of homicides. This had spurred a

Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants.

based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban

Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.

theoretician, his reputation secured in probability-density functions

Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort. Statistics tell us that by the end of the first year at least 40 percent of them will be out of business.1

We estimate that by 2050, more than 10 percent of the U.S. population will be 90 years or older—chronologically—and 18 percent will be over age 80.

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]

They hired a PhD student from the statistics department at the University of California at Berkeley to help them, but he quit after they asked him to study the market for pork belly futures. "It turned out that he was a vegetarian," said Jamie. "He had a problem with capitalism in general, but the pork bellies pushed him over the edge.

Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.

The trouble, Danny suspected, was that "the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don't communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real—that they are just something on somebody's mind.

Our players aren't our problem. But we are what our record says we are.

The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games.

The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population.

Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away- far, far and away- the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. [Eric Walker]

Morey had no way of knowing that people with a gift for using numbers to predict things would overrun professional sports management and everyplace else high-stakes decisions were being made