Statistics_Data_Facts

This week we take a look at the number of horses versus the number of motor vehicles in the United States during the early to middle 20th century.  At the turn of the 20th century, there were over 21,500,000 horses in the United States, while just 8,000 registered motor vehicles (this includes trucks, buses, and automobiles). In just 30 years the tables had turned. The number of horses had now fallen to just shy of 19 million, while the number of motor vehicles had increased over 3000 times, and was now a staggering 26.5 million, with no sign of slowing down. It took another 20 years for the number of vehicles to double, as well as for the number of horses to halve.  Update on 29/08/2024: Now, there are 283 million vehicles registered in the United States, roughly 0.85 vehicles per person. What about the equine population? It's actually on the rise. Reports put the American horse population at 9.2 million in 2003, a 33% increase over the 6.9 million reported ten years bef...

Two years ago we looked at the five largest companies in 2008 vs 2018. In 2008 Exxon Mobil was again first, while in 2018 Microsoft was leading the pack with a market capitalization about two times the market cap of Exxon Mobil 10 years earlier.  Fast forward to 2020, and Apple is #1 with an impressive market cap of over 1.5trillion dollars. For comparison sake, the top 5 largest companies in 2010 had a combined market cap of just over 1.4trillion dollars or $163 billion less than only Apple has today. The sum market cap of the top 5 largest companies in 2020 is 4.3 times the sum from just 10 years ago. In contrast, the sum market cap of the top 5 largest companies in 2018, was 2.3 times the sum of those in 2008.  Many have speculated that we are in a stock market bubble, especially considering the huge impact of COVID-...

In the US Northwest, rain can damage the fruit on cherry trees. So helicopter pilots are paid to fly oνer the orchards, using their downdraft to dry the fruit as it ripens. Here's a 17-minute video of a helicopter pilot describing her experience.  You can read more on her blog  aneclecticmind.com

This week we take a look at the number of sexual partners women have before their first marriage.  American sexual behavior is much different than it used to be. Today, 58% of Americans think premarital sex is okay, compared to 29% in the 1970s. Forty-three percent of women had just one premarital sex partner in the 1970s. Three decades later, this was down to 21%. Following in the wake of the sexual revolution, the 1970s have been characterized as a decade of carnal exploration. But this doesn’t seem to have been the case for the vast majority of women who ultimately tied the knot in that decade: almost two-thirds of them had at most one sex partner prior to getting married. Even in the 1980s, slightly over half of the women reported having a maximum of one sex partner before walking down the aisle. Things looked very different at the start of the new millennium. The fall of women having no premarital sex partners is as noteworthy. In the 1970s  more than 1 in 5 of new brides...

This week we take a look at the average age of first-time mothers and share of women over 25 who have completed some college or more over the years in the United States.  As you can see the average age of first-time mothers has increased from 22.1 years old in 1970, to  26.9 in 2018. One of the most prominent contributors to this rise has been the ever-increasing share of women who pursue high educational attainment. According to this article in the New York Times ,  "women with college degrees have children an average of seven years later than those without". On that front, the percentage of women who have completed some college or more has gone from a low of 18% in 1970 to an impressive 62.6% in 2018 (and 63.5% in 2019, which I did not include in my graph). On the contrary, the share of women who have not completed High School is down to an all-time low of 9.5% in 2019 compared to 39.8% back in 1970.  What are your thoughts on...