25 Mind-Blowing Facts, Statistics, and Stories You Need to Know

Every once in a while, it’s fun to do something a little different and this is going to be one of those times. So, as someone who has read well over 1,000 books in his lifetime (probably closer to 2,000 than 1,000, although I don’t have an exact count) on politics, marketing, economics, health, and human behavior among other topics, it occurred to me there are a staggering number of interesting little factoids, stats, and little stories in those books that people would be interested in reading.

With that in mind, it seemed like a good idea to compile them into a curveball of an article (initially, this piece was around 50 items deep and 5,000 words in length, so I cut it down to 25 of the best items). This may not be our typical article at Culturcidal, but if you read through this, you will find it to be both entertaining and very informative.

1) "The old folks (in 1955) were propped up by Social Security, funded by 8.6 workers for every retiree. Able-bodied men were expected to work, and almost all of them did. The unemployment rate in July 1955 was 4.0 percent. If a household was headed by adults in their thirties or forties, odds were overwhelming (above 80 percent) that at least one adult worked forty hours a week—this was true even for families whose head didn’t go to college. Good breadwinner jobs for white-collar and blue-collar men allowed 80 percent of wives with young children to stay at home. America was fairly equal, economically, and inequality was shrinking. The average household was within striking distance of the top 10 percent of households, with income about 33 percent lower (these days, the shortfall is about 60 percent)." -- Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

2) "The (gentleman) that Dante mentions was a Florentine man, Sassol Mascheroni. As so often happened in those days, the punishment was more gruesome than the crime. Sassol had murdered a cousin hoping to inherit from his uncle. Once caught, he was rolled through the city in a barrel full of nails and then beheaded -- which gives some idea of how seriously such a crime was taken in Dante's era." -- The Anatomy of Evil

3) "The oldest recorded example of fiat money was jiaozi, a paper currency issued by the Song dynasty in China in the tenth century. Initially, jiaozi was a receipt for gold or silver, but then government controlled its issuance and suspended redeemability, increasing the amount of currency printed until it collapsed." -- The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

4) "A great deal of evidence suggests that antidepressants don’t work well anyway. Meta-analyses of research have revealed that SSRIs have no clinically meaningful advantage over a placebo, and those studies that do show any clinically meaningful advantage over a placebo do not take into account that people taking the drugs also engage in supportive weekly visits with the physician overseeing the medication, which is a significant treatment in and of itself. There is also little evidence that antidepressants work better for more severe depressive conditions. The few studies that have shown antidepressants to have a small degree of superiority over placebos were poorly designed and, as a result, unreliable. Ultimately, antidepressants have not been shown to affect the long-term improvement of depression or suicide rates, and chronic exposure to SSRIs." -- Boundless: Upgrade Your Brain, Optimize Your Body & Defy Aging

5) "There are varying accounts of how much our hunter-gatherer ancestors walked daily. Estimates run from 12,000 to 17,000 steps per day. If information about the past can be gleaned from the study of contemporary Indigenous tribes with hunter-gatherer habits, the number may be around 15,000 steps per day. Any way you look at it, most of us are falling far short of that. According to the America on the Move study (published in 2010, but we’re willing to wager things haven’t changed much since then, and perhaps got even worse during the COVID-19 pandemic), Americans only take an average of 5,117 steps daily (about 2.5 miles). That’s well below today’s widely accepted health recommendations. By comparison, Australians average 9,695 steps daily; the Japanese, 7,168." -- Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

6) "Figures released in 2006 showed that when classical music was piped over loudspeakers in the London Underground, robberies dropped by 33 percent, assaults on staff by 25 percent, and vandalism of trains and stations by 37 percent." -- Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

7) "Thalidomide was reborn, though, in 1998, when it was approved for the treatment of leprosy and, more excitingly, multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. In the 1950s, the drug cost pennies. In 1998, the reborn thalidomide cost $6 per capsule. Only six years later, that price had risen almost fivefold, to $29 per capsule. The cost of making the drug is minuscule. In Brazil, a government lab sells it for $0.07 each. The average annual cost for a cancer drug prior to 2000 was less than $10,000. By 2005, this figure had reached between $30,000 and $50,000. In 2012, twelve of thirteen new cancer drugs approved were priced above $100,000 per year. That tenfold increase in twelve years is far in excess of reasonable." -- The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

8) "Black-and-white television production left for Japan. So did cameras, transistor radios, and toys. Our trade went into deficit in 1971. We have not run a surplus since 1975." -- The Conservative Case Against Free Trade

9) "When Dr. Banting discovered insulin in 1921, he licensed the drug to pharmaceutical companies without a patent because he fervently believed this life-saving miracle should be made available to everybody who needed it. Yet, insulin—now available in many different formulations—is estimated to have cost the U.S. health care system $6 billion in 2012, driven in part by steep price increases. Between 2010 and 2015, these newer insulins increased in price from 168 to 325 percent. In 2013, Lantus, a long-acting form of insulin, earned $7.6 billion, making it the world’s bestselling diabetes drug. Various other insulins took another six of the top ten spots on that list." -- The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally

10) "Following a massive earthquake on December 26, 2004, a tsunami sent huge waves of water rushing inland, killing over 230,000 people across fourteen nations. Subsequent assistance totaled over $14 billion. Yet even while the goal of aid agencies might have been to relieve suffering, many recipient governments took it as an opportunity to enrich themselves. To distribute aid, Oxfam shipped twenty-five four-wheel-drive trucks to the region. The Sri Lankan government impounded the trucks and insisted that Oxfam pay a 300 percent import duty. For over a month (the first critical month after the tsunami) the trucks sat idle and people went without food and shelter. Eventually, Oxfam paid over $1 million to have its trucks released. Before giving to a charity many people like to assess how much of their donation goes to help people versus how much is spent on overhead. Oxfam America, for instance, gets three out of four stars from Charity Navigator, an organization that rates charities. Oxfam spends 6 percent of its revenue on administrative expenses and 14 percent on fundraising. The remaining 80 percent is spent on programs, that is, helping people. Unfortunately, 80 cents on the dollar is not the effective amount of help provided. Remember those trucks and the 300 percent import duty—if such cases are the norm (and they usually are) the actual aid benefit may only equate to 20 cents on the dollar. If even as careful a charity as Oxfam is being shaken down, then it makes us wonder what is happening to the rest." -- The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

11) "First, let’s step out of our timeline to the year 1815 when the Mount Tambora volcano erupted in what’s now part of Indonesia. It is the only eruption in the last thousand years that merits a 7 out of a maximum 8 rating on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI).* It caused tsunamis and earthquakes, darkened the skies, and unleashed enough ash to cover a one-hundred-square-mile area to a depth of twelve feet. The effect on global climate was profound—1816 was known as “the year without summer.” And, among other things, it was thought to have brought on famine." -- The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

12) “On Google, the top complaint about a marriage is not having sex. Searches for ‘sexless marriage’ are three and a half times more common than ‘unhappy marriage’ and eight times more common than ‘loveless marriage.’ -- Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

13) "The average US house price in 1915 was $3,500. In 2021 it was $269,039. That is compound annual growth in the price of the house at a rate of 4.18% over 107 years." -- The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization

14) "Twice a year, many of us take part in what Dr. Walker calls 'a global experiment on 1.6 billion people in about seventy countries.' That’s his description of daylight savings time, when clocks move forward an hour each spring and back an hour each fall. Many of us complain when we lose an hour of sleep on the night in March when this switch occurs. But we all know that it’s trivial, right? As Dr. Walker says, “How much damage could just one hour of lost sleep really do?” Actually, a lot! By studying daily hospital records, researchers discovered 'a 24 percent increase in heart attacks' the following day, says Walker, and a similar surge in traffic accidents. 'In the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, there’s a 21 percent reduction in heart attacks the following day. To me, that’s so striking because that’s just one hour of lost sleep opportunity.' Unbelievable, isn’t it? Just one hour of lost sleep for one night causes that much harm. Doesn’t it make you wonder what might happen if an entire country were chronically sleep deprived? Well… in 1942, the average American adult slept for 7.9 hours a night, and that figure has since plunged to about 6.9 hours. That’s almost a 13 percent reduction in how much we sleep." -- Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love

15) "In the late 1950s, Captain Joseph Kittinger was a pilot in the Air Force tapped for experimental aviation and skydiving duty in New Mexico. He wasn’t a household name. In fact, hardly anybody knew the first thing about him until August 16, 1960, when he donned a red, duct-taped pressure suit and boarded an open-sided gondola tethered to an onion-shaped helium balloon. He flew that rig nearly twenty miles high until he reached the thin atmospheric line where everything goes from blue to black. He’d traveled to a place where the horizon did not exist. He was above and beyond all previously known limitations. Suspended at 102,800 feet, he unclipped his harness and stepped into space. His free fall lasted nearly five minutes. His maximum velocity was 614 miles per hour. He plummeted over eighty thousand vertical feet before his primary chute opened. This was no Red Bull-sponsored party. It wasn’t a television show. Kittinger wasn’t an entertainer, he was an explorer. A seeker of a new realm for the world—his flight and his jump helped make manned space flight possible..." -- Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within

16) "For example, a 1982 study of 240 criminals found that this small group was responsible for a half million crimes over an eleven-year period—an average of 190 crimes a year. Another study of various state prisoners found that 25 percent of them committed 135 crimes a year, while 10 percent committed 600 crimes a year. A California study of convicted males found that just 3.5 percent of those males committed 60 percent of the crimes committed by the whole group. Numerous other studies came to the same conclusion: a tiny cohort of chronic offenders is disproportionately responsible for the vast amount of predatory violence. This is the crime that is predictable and can be most effectively prevented by the intervention of our criminal justice system. The identity of these career offenders was not a mystery. They started committing crimes as juveniles—for which they are never held accountable—and kept on committing crimes as adults. They continued committing crimes whenever they were let out of prison on bail, parole, and probation. As a general rule, the recidivism rate of this hard-core element remained stubbornly high and started dropping appreciably only after they reached forty years old." -- One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General

17) "In 2009, Sports Illustrated estimated that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years after their playing careers are over, and 78 percent of NFL players are facing serious financial distress just two years after their retirement." -- The One-Day Contract: How to Add Value to Every Minute of Your Life

18) "In a recently published longitudinal study spanning more than sixty years, researchers were flummoxed by what they found. The personalities of nearly everyone in the study were completely different than the researchers expected. The study began with data from a 1950s survey of 1,208 fourteen-year-olds in Scotland. Teachers were asked to use six questionnaires to rate the teenagers on six personality traits: self-confidence, perseverance, stability of mood, conscientiousness, originality, and desire to learn. More than sixty years later, researchers retested 674 of the original participants. This time, at seventy-seven years old, the participants rated themselves on the six personality traits and also nominated a close friend or relative to do the same. There was little to no overlap from the questionnaires taken sixty-three years earlier. As the researchers state, 'We hypothesized that we would find evidence of personality stability over an even longer period of 63 years, but our correlations did not support this hypothesis.'" -- Personality Isn't Permanent: Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story

19) "The Aché people, hunter-gatherers who lived in the jungles of Paraguay until the 1960s, offer a glimpse into the darker side of foraging. When a valued band member died, the Aché customarily killed a little girl and buried the two together. Anthropologists who interviewed the Aché recorded a case in which a band abandoned a middle-aged man who fell sick and was unable to keep up with the others. He was left under a tree. Vultures perched above him, expecting a hearty meal. But the man recuperated, and, walking briskly, he managed to rejoin the band. His body was covered with the birds’ feces, so he was henceforth nicknamed ‘Vulture Droppings’. When an old Aché woman became a burden to the rest of the band, one of the younger men would sneak behind her and kill her with an axe blow to the head. An Aché man told the inquisitive anthropologists stories of his prime years in the jungle. ‘I customarily killed old women. I used to kill my aunts... The women were afraid of me… Now, here with the whites, I have become weak.’ Babies born without hair, who were considered underdeveloped, were killed immediately. One woman recalled that her first baby girl was killed because the men in the band did not want another girl. On another occasion, a man killed a small boy because he was ‘in a bad mood and the child was crying’. Another child was buried alive because ‘it was funny-looking and the other children laughed at it.’" -- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

20) "In 1970, the year after I was born, well over 60 percent of American adults ranked as middle class. That year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. By 2015, America’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more Latin American. Middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent." -- Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution

21) "In the 1920s heart disease was rare in the United States. The American Heart Association was quite a small entity, and there were not many cardiologists because they simply weren’t needed." -- Understanding the Heart: Surprising Insights into the Evolutionary Origins of Heart Disease—and Why It Matters

22) "In a survey that has so far tested fourteen thousand volunteers, Konrath has found that college students’ self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index*) have actually been in steady decline over the previous three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979—and that a particularly pronounced slump has, it turns out, been observed over the past ten years. ‘College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of twenty or thirty years ago,’ Konrath reports. More worrying still, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is that, during this same period, students’ self-reported narcissism levels have, in contrast, gone in the other direction. They’ve shot through the roof." -- The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

23) "Neurologist Walter Freeman won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine in honor of his work—lobotomizing mentally ill people by jabbing a spike behind their eyeballs. Some reports say he performed this technique around 2,500 times, often without anesthesia. He took a practice that had previously required drilling into the skull and turned it into an outpatient procedure. At first, he used an ice pick, but eventually, he developed short, thin metal spears he drove through the back of the eye socket with a mallet. The technique made formerly unruly mental patients calmer, as you might imagine severe brain damage would. It became a popular way to treat patients in mental facilities, and Freeman drove a van he called the lobotomobile around the country to teach the technique wherever he could. Somewhere close to twenty thousand people were lobotomized in this way before science corrected itself. Freeman was criticized by many in his heyday, but for two decades his work continued, and it earned him the highest accolade possible. Even the sister of President John F. Kennedy was lobotomized. Today, the ice-pick lobotomy is condemned by medicine as a barbaric and naive approach to dealing with mental illness. Just two decades later, the science caught up to Freeman and revealed that what he was doing was unnecessary from a medical standpoint and horrific from a moral one. His license to practice was revoked, and he died an outcast. The same community who lauded him in one era rejected him in another." -- You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

24) "On October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to deliver a speech on behalf of the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party. When Roosevelt was walking out of the Gilpatrick Hotel on his way to the Milwaukee Auditorium, John Schrank, a saloonkeeper who had been stalking Roosevelt for weeks, pulled out a .38 caliber Colt Special and shot Roosevelt once in the chest, missing his heart. The bullet was deflected by a steel eyeglass case and a fifty-page manuscript jammed into Roosevelt’s jacket. Unlike Garfield and McKinley, Roosevelt had the advantage of a diagnostic test that revealed a bullet lodged between his third and fourth ribs. Remarkably, before going to the hospital—and with blood seeping into his shirt—Roosevelt delivered a ninety-minute speech. 'Ladies and gentlemen,' he began, 'I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot. But it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!'" -- You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

25) "Today the longest-lived fully documented human in history was the smoking, port-drinking, chocaholic Madame Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who died at 122 years old." -- Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life

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