You need 3.5% of people actively engaged to change society. That's it. Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth studied hundreds of campaigns over...
Posts by Mike P. Sinn
99 posts
The FDA revoked monoclonal antibodies because they became "less effective" against new variants. Not ineffective. Less effective. Your regulatory...
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The Question Does the government represent the people? It's a simple question. You'd think after 200+ years of democracy, someone would have checked...
The IRS already knows how much you owe. Your employer tells them. Your bank tells them. Everyone tells them everything. Then they make you spend 13...
On Roatan (and many developing regions), people spend 40 times more buying bottled water than it would cost to just build a water plant. Why don't...
War costs you $74,259 over your lifetime. That's not a metaphor. That's actual money taken from things you could use. Here's the math. War is when...
A novel coronavirus that kills people appeared in Wuhan, China. This city happens to contain the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of five labs on...
Guess what holds the solution to every problem in the world? It's the human brain! The brain is the most important organ in the body, according to...
The FDA's Mandate is Not to Maximize Lives Saved The FDA is called that because it's an acronym, which is when you take the first letters of several...
What We Don't Know You're only 2 lifetimes away from George Washington. Modern scientific medicine is newer than your country. It's been applied for...
Prior to 1971, productivity growth was very closely tied to wage growth. However, around 1971, there was a stark and sudden decoupling between...
The Fed is printing money and giving it to Zombie Companies. These are firms that don't survive by producing value for customers. They survive by...
Two Types of Inflation People typically just use the word inflation by itself, but there are actually 2 main types and it’s essential to be specific....
The four richest counties in America all surround the Pentagon. This is either a remarkable coincidence or weapons are very profitable. I checked the...
In 2020, the Federal Reserve created $4 trillion in new money. Where did it go? The St. Louis Fed's data shows the top 1% gained exactly $4 trillion...
Your conscious mind is the intern who thinks they're running the company. Your senses pull in 11 million bits per second. That's the bandwidth of a...
The Math on Revolution The American Revolution was fought to give people the right to vote on things. Ironically, most Americans didn't vote for it....
Democracy: The Only Get-Rich-Quick Scheme That Actually Works Democracy comes from the Greek words "demos" meaning people and "kratos" meaning power....
Most voters believe their candidate will win. Both sides think this. Simultaneously. Despite the mathematical impossibility. This is wishful thinking...
Between 2009 and 2018, the estimated median capitalized research and development cost per product was $985 million, counting expenditures on failed...
When the government creates new money, how is it possible to distribute it without someone just getting a bunch of free money for nothing? The answer...
Every Econ 101 textbook teaches three things: Incentives govern behavior When something costs more, you get less of it Every policy has unseen...
The US suicide rate jumped 40% over the last 20 years. Turns out when you replace vegetables with fried oil and your immune system with constant...
From a strict utilitarian perspective, rescuing a cat from the pound creates net negative utility of -99. Euthanizing the cat creates net positive...
Why isn’t a share of stock just a worthless piece of paper? The fundamental value of owning a share of stock in a company is that it entitles you to...
For 10,000 years, life expectancy was 28. GDP per capita was $100. Then around 1800, both numbers suddenly decided to go vertical. It's like humanity...
As of 2020, the cost to you for a stamp is $0.55. Junk mailers enjoy a 65% discount as the USPS bulk mail rate given to them is only $0.19. The...
A 10-kiloton nuclear weapon kills 1.3 million people. There are 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world. The math is third-grade level. The reasoning...
You paid 23andMe for your genetic data. The FDA then restricted what 23andMe can tell you about your own DNA. It's like buying a book and having the...
At least 75% of your genome is useless junk. Evolution is not an engineer. It's more like a hoarder who never throws anything away because "I might...
First two years of Trump: stocks up 21%. First two years of Obama: stocks up 71.2%. That's 3.4 times faster. I checked the math on my fingers and...
The opioid crisis is called a "crisis" because calling it "a predictable consequence of untreated mental illness combined with prohibition-driven...
When the United States declared independence in 1776, about 2.5 million people lived in the original 13 states. That's fewer people than currently...
Over the last 60 years, democracies doubled. Autocracies got cut in half. The world currently has 58 democracies and 13 autocracies. That's progress....
In 2017, humans produced $127.8 trillion worth of stuff (GDP). That's a lot of stuff. Where do we keep it all? Divided by 7.3 billion people, that's...
American adults spend 11 hours per day staring at screens. That's more time than you spend sleeping, which seems backwards for a species that claims...
Reuters polled 60 economists in March 2018 about steel and aluminum tariffs. The percent who supported them: 0%. That's zero as in the number that...
Between September 11, 2001 and December 31, 2016, 3,222 Americans died in terrorist attacks. This includes the attackers themselves and excludes...
44 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's or related dementia. That's roughly the population of Spain, except they're all slowly forgetting who...
How Much Do You Spend on Weapons? Here's what your government spends on military equipment. The chart tracks how much various countries spend on...
There are infinite ways to spend your most valuable resource: time. How do you decide the most cost-effective way to spend it? Convert the returns of...
Autistic children get gastrointestinal problems more often than other children. Scientists noticed this and wondered if fixing gut bacteria might...
Americans spend $60 billion annually trying to have less food on their bodies. Gym memberships, weight-loss programs, diet soda. It's like reverse...
Your odds of dying: From an opioid overdose: 1 in 96 From cancer: 1 in 7 Cancer is 14 times more likely to kill you than opioids. I checked the math....
People who developed dementia spent 17% of their sleep time in REM, compared to 20% for people who didn't get dementia. That's only a 3% difference,...
The Numbers The US spends 37% of all global military spending. The US represents 4.4% of the world's population. Some people think these numbers...
The Math The entire US Federal Budget is $4.4 trillion. The US population is 328,316,410. Divide $4.4 trillion by 328 million people and you get...
The average American household pays $10,489 in "personal taxes" each year. This represents 14% of average household income. That covers: Federal...
The US spends more than $500 million per victim on anti-terrorism efforts. However, cancer research spending is only $10,000 per victim. Evolutionary...
Many Americans believe Iran is a suicidal, psychopathic nation eager to kill as many Americans as possible. The historical data suggests otherwise....
The financial sector receives more of the average paycheck than any other sector of the economy. Its share of the economy totals $2 trillion dollars....
Should You Vote? The Selfish Answer: No, You Might Die Your vote has less than a 0.00001% chance of deciding a national election. Your drive to the...
Eating one kilogram of farmed catfish causes 20,000 times more suffering than drinking one kilogram of milk. Not "more suffering." 20,000 TIMES more...
Numbers cannot lie. A world without disease, starvation, violence, and suffering is the ultimate destination of humanity. Getting there will require...
Vote! Voting on Comments (The Easy Kind) This website has voting buttons. They're rectangular and respond to clicking, which is a technology humans...
I Am Biased Political Labels Are Intellectual Prisons People call me libertarian, progressive, utilitarian, and occasionally "that guy who won't shut...
The Empiricist Movement What This Is A list of organizations that believe in checking whether things actually work before declaring victory. This is...
Crowdsourcing Utopia The Problem: Dying People are dying. Also, they're sad. Some are lonely. Others are hungry. This happens despite living on a...
Dear Decent American Citizen, If you’ve read any of my articles on thinkbynumbers.org, you know that there are a lot of things going on in this world...
The War on Drugs is called a "war" because wars are traditionally things you can win. This one is different. The Math Is Simple Every minute someone...
The mythology of effective Keynesian centralized economic planning is born of the same mother as the mythology of creationist intelligent design....
GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product, which sounds medical but isn't. It's the value of all final goods and services produced within a country. The...
Penn psychologist Jonathan Baron wrote a political platform based on a simple question: What if you tried to help people instead of signaling tribal...
Americans were asked to estimate wealth distribution. Then they were shown the actual numbers. The gap between perception and reality was larger than...
Anheuser-Busch got caught watering down beer to boost profits. I decided to investigate using science, which is like regular investigation but with...
http://youtu.be/XXm2yaoWyN8 On September 10, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared war on Pentagon bureaucracy and waste. He told...
Humanity's vital signs, updating in real time. Think of it as a heart rate monitor for the species, except the patient keeps making questionable...
Someone made a list of every problem humanity has. ALL of them. Every single thing that's wrong with the world. Then they cross-referenced how the...
Humanity has approximately 47 different fields dedicated to suffering: medicine, psychology, religion, politics, economics, law, art, literature,...
The felicific calculus is an algorithm for calculating the degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to cause. The algorithm is...
Pain exists because millions of years ago, a monkey that didn't feel pain touched something hot and died. His cousin, who DID feel pain, screamed and...
Your vote in a presidential election has approximately the same probability of changing the outcome as winning the lottery seven times in a row,...
In 1906, Francis Galton went to a county fair and watched people guess the weight of an ox. The average guess was 1,197 pounds. The ox weighed 1,198...
2013 Budget Plans: New Look, Same Great Waste Obama's 2013 budget: $3.80 trillion. Romney's proposed budget: $3.79 trillion. The difference: $10...
"All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging...
It is commonly claimed that government spending is good for the economy, but the statistics show the opposite. Most recent studies find a negative...
Two Facts About Suicide Terrorism Fact 1: 95% of suicide terrorist attacks are targeted at occupying foreign militaries. Fact 2: 0% of suicide...
The Wall Street banks that funded Obama in 2008 switched to Romney in 2012. What Is TARP? TARP is the Wall Street bailout program. President Bush...
Suicide terrorism is not primarily Islamic fundamentalism The data are clear: 42% of suicide terrorist attacks from 1981 to 2000 were perpetrated by...
GOP Candidate Ron Paul has produced a detailed budget containing over $1 trillion in first-year reductions. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt...
Your brain decided you would read this sentence 10 seconds before "you" did. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute discovered they could predict...
How Democracy Is Supposed to Work The word "representative" in representative democracy implies that the representatives represent you. Like how a...
The Pentagon paid $1.1 trillion over a decade to contractors who defrauded the government. After being convicted of crimes, they got more money. The...
Required viewing for anyone who does not yet understand the complicated mechanism by which the banking system transfers wealth from those at the...
Image by Ed Hall (halltoons) Americans built 14 million houses nobody needed. At a median price of $160,000, that's $2 trillion in wasted resources....
Illustration by The New York Times Here's a thing humans claim to want: happiness. Here's another thing humans do constantly: argue about who should...
What Voters Actually Want According to Rasmussen Reports, voters have opinions about corporate welfare. Shocking, I know. In a democracy, what the...
Bill Cosby claimed to be "hip." Mathematics, however, tells a different story. A story involving trigonometric functions and the fundamental...
The Iraq War cost $3 trillion. That's enough to end world hunger for 100 years. We chose differently. Here are the numbers. A trillion is a very big...
The Obama administration allocated $19.2 billion to help doctors buy iPads. More specifically, they gave up to $44,000 per doctor to switch to...
Time Magazine, Vol. 152 No. 19 About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So,...
Here's a fun game called "Spot the Fiscal Conservative." Three of the four major Republican candidates for president would add trillions to the...
The average American household paid $2,000 to bail out AIG. Your bill arrived without your consent. You paid it anyway. It's like when someone orders...
Toxic Assets In 2008, Wall Street financial institutions gave loans to people who couldn't pay them back. This is called "bad business." The...
The Associated Press ran a story titled "Obama plans to slash deficit in half." This is technically true. It's also technically misleading. The...
This study by the Federal Reserve examines the effects of government intervention and the absence thereof in two similar financial crises which...
"These are extraordinary times. We can't worry about the national debt now. We'll deal with that later." This is what people defending massive...