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The population of the US is (or was at a recent instant in time, since it's never static) 308,745,538 , and not 208,745,538 as he claims. All of his statistics
by ajays 15y ago
The population of the US is (or was at a recent instant in time, since it's never static) 308,745,538 , and not 208,745,538 as he claims. All of his statistics are off by ~50% throughout the rant. And it just goes downhill from this basic error.
- mikeknoop 15y agoYou're actually right. His citation has the correct statistic in the first paragraph (replace 2 with 3).
- babebridou 15y ago> The 112,000 or so tickets given each day add up to over 41 million tickets per year – that’s 19.5% of the populous! Between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6 American citizens will be ticketed for speeding this year [...] This struck me as a misleading use of statistics, because Pareto likes to say hi everytime we try to correlate a repeatable event and a global population. Most of those tickets will actually go to the same drivers, and Pareto's Law even gives us handy empirical proportions. 80% of the tickets will probably go to the same 20% subgroup. This means that we have ~8 million tickets to distribute more or less randomly/statistically (over let's say ~8 million american citizens), and then ~2 additional millions get the rest of the tickets, for a total of 10 million ticketed people per year, or roughly 3-5% of the population. Which is still huge and doesn't exactly change the author's point.
- cjdavis 15y agoHis first population based result - "If each <truly awful crime> had one perpetrator we’d be talking about 3.3% of the population" - uses the correct population. After that he's using 208.