Fun with numbers
By A few statistical arcana for your Saturday morning.
Does anybody remember laughter?
As I’m sure all of us remember there was a massive economic crisis in the mid-1890s, which resulted in a contraction in per capita GDP very comparable to that seen during the Great Depression. Per capita GDP went from $6400 to $5500 between 1892 and 1894 (2017 dollars). It was a $66,800 in 2023 (2017 dollars), so the claim that the US was wealthier than the 1890s than it is today seems perhaps not exactly correct, but this is reactionary history not the other kind.
In all the perverse celebrations of the White Sox’s historical negative achievement, it hasn’t been much noticed that the Detroit Tigers have pulled off one of the most remarkable turnarounds in baseball history. The Tigers played .466 ball for the first three quarters of the season (55-63 on August 10), and since then have been a lot better than the 1927 Yankees (.738, 31-11). Is this the biggest turnaround ever between the first three quarters and the last quarter of a major league season? It must be.
Relatedly, the White Sox are currently 43 games behind the next closest team in the AL Central standings, which has also got to be a record for the biggest standings gap in MLB history, although I haven’t checked.
With Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday coming up on Tuesday, I’d like to note one of my personal statistical hobbyhorses, which is the common belief that improvements in life expectancy over the past century are overwhelmingly a product of declining infant and child mortality. This badly understates improvements in adult life expectancy over the time. Example: No president between John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover lived to the age of 80. That’s 22 straight presidents. Since LBJ died at the age of 64, it seems very likely that every president after him (ten in a row) will reach that milestone. An odd quirk in this historical trajectory is until Hoover all of the longest-lived presidents were among the first six (both Adams’s, Jefferson, and Madison), and the second president was the only one to reach 90. Since then, Hoover, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, and Carter have gotten there.
All this is a reminder that until the late 19th century medicine was basically sorcery, and usually did more harm than good (Washington was almost literally bled to death by his doctors etc.) so three cheers for antibiotics, anesthesia (yikes) etc.