A few factoids for you to use and be amused by.

• 15th: Where liberals claim the US ranks in life expectancy.
• 1st: Actual life expectancy rank if you control for deaths due to traffic accidents and homicides. That’s right, the US ranks number one among OECD countries with a mean life expectancy of 76.9 years.
• $12,680: Annual family health care insurance premium in 2008, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. If employer-based, a 70/30 employer/employee cost split is typical.
• $9,827: The annual hidden tax imposed by defensive medicine on a typical family of 4 in the US.
• $43 Million: Total contributions by attorneys to the 2008 Obama for president campaign.
• 1300%: Increase in TV ad spending by Malpractice attorneys from 2004 to 2008.

Read more »

Cash for Clunkers was a poorly managed program that wasn’t well thought out, and it’s ridiculous that it was run by someone with no auto experience. Hot Air’s article titled Big winners in Cash for Clunkers: Toyota, Honda, and Nissan points out that foreign car makers gained share while American auto makers lost some market position.

This would be undesirable if those Hondas, Toyotas, and Nissans were manufactured offshore. However, according to the Japanese Automobile Manufacturer’s Association in 2007 (apparently the latest year for which data is available):

• 63% of Japanese-brand autos sold in the US were manufactured in the US.
• 424,000+ people were employed by Japanese auto makers in the US.
• 1.6 Million US-made “Japanese” vehicles were exported from the US.

If these numbers are to be believed, is it still valid to say there are foreign cars and American cars? A related question: are the supply chains of GM, Ford, and Chrysler located exclusively within the US? Are the parts makers exclusively based in the US? How many make parts for multiple auto brands?

The slump in auto buying impacted Honda and Toyota as well as GM and Chrysler, and if the metrics above are any indication US employees and suppliers of so-called Japanese car makers were feeling the squeeze as much as those of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. A significant portion of the cash for clunkers funds spent on Hondas, Toyotas, and Nissans will remain in the US.

Any statistics professor will tell you there’s no such thing as the “law of averages”, but as today’s Washington Times points out there is a “Flaw of Averages”, which is also the title of a new book by Sam L. Savage, a consulting professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University and a fellow of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge.

The problem with predictions based on averages? Risk and uncertainty aren’t factored into plans.

“In everyday life,” said Mr. Savage, “the flaw of averages ensures that plans based on average customer demand, average completion time, average interest rate and other uncertainties are below projection, behind schedule and beyond budget.”

When people use a single number, usually a historical average, to predict the future, they invite systematic errors and generate unintended consequences, mostly negative…

Probability, risk, and uncertainty can be difficult concepts for people to grasp. The best plans take a range of outcomes into account, with each assigned a probability of occurrence (of course as humans we tend to poor estimation of probabilities.) The process can start with the simple questions of (1) What are our assumptions and (2) What if we are wrong?

Keep all of this in mind the next time you’re tempted to predict the future based on a poll taken in the past

A new survey by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that the GOP has been unsuccessful to date in capitalizing on President Obama’s declining popularity. The nationwide poll of 2,010 adults was conducted between August 11-17, 2009

While the headline of the release is “More See White House and GOP Leaders at Odds”, the poll shows that Obama and the Democratic Party’s drop in favorability hasn’t resulted in favorability improvements for Republicans. The growing perception is that Washington is failing to deal with critical issues, and

While more people continue to blame Republican leaders than blame Obama, the percentage saying the president is at fault (17%) is higher now than in June (12%) and much higher than in February (7%)

According to Pew the percentage of Americans who believe that Republican leaders are most to blame has remained between 27% and 29% through the February to August period.

This is the most telling graphic, however:

Despite the precipitous fall in Democratic Party popularity, GOP popularity has flat-lined at 40%. Note the September 2008 post-convention jump: was it due to the fresh voice of Sarah Palin? What can be done to recreate that lost momentum?

(Graph Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press)