> 80 percent of payday loans are taken out within two weeks of a previous payday loan That statistic sounds misleading. Suppose you have one guy who takes out

> 80 percent of payday loans are taken out within two weeks of a previous payday loan That statistic sounds misleading. Suppose you have one guy who takes out a payday loan every two weeks (in a cycle of debt, causing more harm than good), and six guys who take out a payday loan once a year (helping with emergencies, causing more good than harm). In that scenario, two things are simultaneously true: - 80% of loans cause more harm than good. - For 6/7 people, the loans cause more good than harm. Of course the story is more complex than that. It could be that the harm to the one guy is much larger than the benefit to the other guys. But anyway looking only at the 80% number is missing a lot of the story.