
Data Underload
189 postsI wondered how common it is for someone to get a divorce. While I’ve touched on the topic before, I’ve never calculated it directly, so I gave it a go.Read More
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention track cause of death over time, under several classifications and groupings. Among 1- to 19-year-olds, regulations decreased motor vehicle deaths, but deaths by firearms increased and became the leading mechanism in 2018. Read More
Oftentimes what we’re doing isn’t so important as who we’re spending our time with. Based on data from the American Time Use Survey, this is a simulated day for 100 people. Read More
In high school, we spend most of our days with friends and immediate family. Then we get older and get jobs, get married, and grow our own families to spend more time with co-workers, spouses, and kids. Here’s how things change, based on a decade of data from the American Time Use Survey, from age 15 to 80. Read More
Social media apps are on a lot of phones these days, but some tend towards a younger audience and others an older. Some are common across the population. Here’s the breakdown by age for American adults in 2021, based on data from the Pew Research Center. Read More
Among 15-year-old students, here’s how 77 countries compare in reading, math, and science. Higher scores are better. Read More
Childcare is expensive in the United States. So as you would expect, higher-income households tend to use non-parental childcare more, whereas lower-income households tend more towards only parental care. Here are the percentages, based on 2019 estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics. Read More
When talking to someone new, the conversation often leads to your family when you were growing up. Do you have siblings? Older than you? Younger? I thought I’d try answering the questions for everyone in the United States. The chart below shows the distribution of kids younger than 18 by birth order and number of kids in the household. Read More
In the 1970s, the most common household type in the U.S. was a married couple with kids. But over time, as people wait longer to get married and have fewer kids (if any), it’s grown more common to live alone or with non-family. Read More
Baby names gain sudden popularity for various reasons. Maybe a celebrity with a unique name gains traction, or a character in a movie strikes a chord with audiences. Maybe an athlete reaches the peak of fame, and expecting parents have similar dreams. I wondered how these trends changed over time. So using data from the Social Security Administration, I found the most trendy baby name every year since 1930. Here...