In Perspective: Fun Facts 1: Harper's Index = brilliant

Monday, 16 October 2006

Fun Facts 1: Harper's Index = brilliant

Here is the first in a [possibly never-ending] series of Fun Facts from things like Harper's Magazine's Index.
The latest posted Harper's Index for September 2006 (Digg) has some interesting facts, as usual.

For example:

Percentage of Americans in 1983 who thought it was “possible to start out poor in this country . . . and become rich”: 57

Percentage who think this today: 80

Percentage of U.S. income in 1983 and today, respectively, that went to the top 1 percent of earners: 9, 16

Here is some from August 2006's Index:

Number of AK-47s that have gone missing after being sent by the Pentagon to Iraq last summer: 26,000

Percentage of Americans in May who believed that democracy would take hold in Iraq: 54

Number of the fourteen other nations surveyed where a majority believed this: 3

And June's Index:

Ratio of the average manufacturing wage in the United States to that in Mexico, before NAFTA took effect in 1994: 6:1

Ratio today: 8:1

Flashback to April 1998:

Minimum number of the 10 biological materials suspected in Iraqi warfare research that were supplied by U.S. firms: 9

Months after Martin Luther King Jr. publicly called the U.S. the “world's greatest purveyor of violence” that he was killed: 2

Number of complimentary doughnuts Bob Dole receives each week as part of his Dunkin' Donuts contract: 60

Number he distributed to reporters waiting outside Monica Lewinsky's Watergate apartment last February 2: 48

If anyone else has some other interesting trivia from the Index or elsewhere, feel free to post it in a comment.