Quotes About Statistics

Some countries that I go to are still trying to deny that it's happening. In India, 2.1 million people are living with HIV AIDS. India manufactures most of the drugs that are used to cure HIV around the world, which is an amazing, amazing fact that most people don't know.

You can't just take and sample size a few hundred people and decide that what you think 200 - almost 200 million people are going to vote and go do. It's a complex country.

Most arguments about income inequality are based on static analysis.

The median price paid by millionaires for their most recent acquisition was only $31,367.

There is a reason why the top 1 percent of the income producers in America pays 37 percent of the entire federal income tax bill, why the top 5 percent pays 57 percent, the top 10 percent pay 68 percent, and the top 25 percent pay 85 percent. High-income producers are the only ones who earn enough money to do so! The bottom 50 percent of the income producers contributes less than 4 percent of the total tax bill.

The Toyota make was found to be number one in market share among both engineers and millionaires in general.

TABLE 3-3 INCOME AND WEALTH CONTRASTS 2:

All variables are independent.

President Obama keeps telling us that he is "creating jobs." But more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job.

Seldom is the claim made that black Americans alive at this moment are worse off than if their ancestors had been left in Africa. Any attempt to make that case with statistics on income, life expectancy, or numerous other variables would collapse like a house of cards.

Statistics compiled from what people say may be worse than useless, if they lead to a belief that those numbers convey a reality that can be relied on for serious decision-making about social policies.

At a minimum, history shows how dangerous it can be, to a whole society, to automatically and incessantly attribute statistical differences in outcomes to malevolent actions against the less successful.

Alternative explanations for these changing patterns of racial differences—such as racism, poverty or inferior education among blacks—cannot establish even correlation with changing employment outcomes over the years, because all those things were worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948 was far lower and not significantly different from the unemployment rate among white teenagers.

Today, poverty in America means whatever government statisticians in Washington say it means.

Among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked full-time and were from 40 to 64 years old—that is, beyond the child-bearing years—men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000.

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten

The civil rights vision relies heavily on statistical "disparities" in income and employment between members of different groups to support its sweeping claims of rampant discrimination.

Back then, the rule of thumb was that housing costs—whether rents or mortgage payments—should not take more than one-fourth of a person's income. In 1901, housing costs took 23 percent of the average American family's spending. By 2003, it took 33 percent of a far larger amount of spending.

These were neither the first nor the last times when statistical disparities led people to jump to conclusions about villainy being the cause. False assumptions as to causation are more than intellectual errors, and their consequences go far beyond economic losses.

An estimated one out of every five Africans is a Nigerian.

In short, statistical disparities are commonplace among human beings. Many historical and cultural reasons underlie the peculiar patterns observed. But the even "representation" of groups chosen as a baseline for measuring discrimination is a myth rather than an established fact. It is significant that those who have assumed that baseline have seldom, if ever, been challenged to produce evidence.

Moreover, even in the absence of accumulating personal experience, it was difficult to believe that soaring murder statistics reflected simply better record keeping, since it had always been hard to ignore a dead body.

As late as 1951, out of the 16 million people in the northern region, only one had a full university degree-and he was a convert to Christianity.

One third of all Scots in the mid-nineteenth century moved from one county to another