One Out Of Four, Most Used Statistic

“Why all these groups, advocates, activists, propagandists, and other agitators fixate on the “one out of four” statistic is anybody’s guess.”

They heard about the “80/20 rule”, confused four to one with one in four and bingo!

If you had put ‘born in poverty’ first and ordered the rest of the list differently, it would be been immediately obvious that everything else is an inevitable consequence of being born in poverty. Alternative conclusion: 75% of Americans are perfectly healthy, wealthy and wise.

Perhaps the definition for all of these maladies is that the bottom 25% qualify? As in, the shaken baby syndrome diagnosis is given to the 25% most shaken babies! Like poverty! Hmmm… only, isn’t poverty set much higher?

You forgot to say women, children and minorities are most severely affected.

Good Lord! Imagine being in that 25% with all that going on.

Interesting catalog of maladies, sir. Since you list 23 bullet points it seems to mean 5.75 conditions will [on average?] apply to me. Do I get to choose?; or are they blindly assigned?

Quite courageous of you to assign a 3 per cent fault rate to the distaff side of society. That might be a trifle high for peaceful co-existence purposes, so good luck.

The student binge drinking statistic sounds like the most likely to be false. Unless they meant that one in four doesn’t binge drink.

The failure of my first marriage to be rescued through counseling may have been attributable to the entirety of the issues under discussion; faults of mine. One of the very worst was my discovery of the “fault of the month.” I would come home to a scene of discontent, not just in the winter, either, and as the glaze of the day wore off – helped by Beefeaters on the rocks with a little water and a twist, learn that I had this or that fault.

Comparing notes on faults du jour at the office i found i wasn’t alone, and often the newly discovered faults were the same. It was MS Magazine, which rather than having the naked lady of the month, which may not have been that interesting to its readers, had the fault of the month.

Any male with any experience in a long term relationship with a woman MUST subscribe to the pictogram you’ve so kindly shared with us. But there is no margin of error. Are you kidding?

Long ago at a business dinner with colleagues who were comfortable with each other, the question of the family crazy-person came up. Was there such a person within a generation? Everyone at the table had one. Maybe one in four?

One out of four blogs is worth visiting.

If you set the poverty level at the first quartile for income then 1 out of 4 in poverty is inevitable regardless of absolute income. Everyone could be a billionaire and there would still be poverty at a 1 in 4 rate — a bureaucrat’s dream.

Going down the list, it struck me that I never noticed that many of the one in fours are conditional on other things, in particular the phrase “will get…”

In general, how is “will get X” determined? Does it fall out of mortality statistics? Or is like a camera picture, at a given moment, 1 in 4 people are X, some getting X, some losing it?

One out of every four dollars is spent by the Federal Government.

I know that 1 out of 5 has been used by Second Harvest a few years ago. As in “1 out of 5 children in our area go to bed hungry at night.” The stat comes from a study where they asked some kids if they had ever been hungry when they went to bed. Apparently, 20% of the kids said they had.

I remember going to bed hungry. I could either eat the tuna casserole or be hungry. And then there was the growth spurt during junior high where I was always hungry, even if I ate all day.

…will, if men who get mumps, will have painfully swollen testicles (the very loud killer!!!)