Customer Reviews

U.S. by the Numbers: Figuring What's Left, Right, and Wrong with America State by State (Capital Ideas for Business & Personal Development)

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This book should be well worn and highlighted thoroughly within weeks, then placed right on the shelf next to the dictionary and thesaurus as an invaluable reference guide. US By the Numbers contains invaluable, concise, and well organized information complete with visually appealing and easy to comprehend graphs to emphasize their points. This book is not just for statisticians, policy wonks, or professors - it is a must read for entrepreneurs, voters, and students.

We are inundated by polls these days, gauges of what we feel about everything from our culture to tax rates to how our state and nation are doing relative to other states and nations. U.S. by the Numbers blasts through these feelings with cold hard facts presented in a compelling and easy to follow format.

Edmonds and Keating provide an amazing array of statistics on every aspect of American life from children's TV viewing habits, to tax rates, to healthcare spending, to education levels, to abortion rates. Readers can quickly find out how their state ranks in hundreds of categories making U.S. by the Numbers required reading for voters looking to sort out fact from fiction this election year.

The facts presented also blow gaping holes in conventional wisdom: States with the lowest per pupil spending and largest classrooms often have the best education results. States with the smallest police forces per capita are often the safest. In fact, far more often than not, the states that spend the most nearly always have not only the least, but worse results.

Most disturbing are the statistics involving our nation's capital, the District of Columbia: DC taxes are the highest in the nation - 76 % higher than the US average. DC's welfare spending is highest in nation - 196 % higher than average. DC's spending per pupil is 3rd highest in nation yet student proficiency ranks in the bottom 10 when compared to the 50 states. DC spends more money per capita on police protection than any state yet the crime rate is the worst in the nation.

Readers of any political stripe will come away from U.S. by the Numbers wondering just where all their hard earned tax dollars are going.

Rock solid analysis of the economy, the nation and each state from a free market, conservative point of view. Lot's of great numbers, charts and graphs.

I found this book very disappointing. It's too predictable in the demographics covers. It never ventures beyond the core themes in the field. Its conclusions are mundane and stereotypically leftist. The charts and graphs look pretty but, in general, are not all that functional. Some of the commentary is crackpot conspiracy grist (see page 98 where they argue that the Federal Reserve Bank policy of trying to contain inflation is an instrument of economic oppression). And, occasionally, the charts just simply distort the truth. For example, on page 200, there is a graph charting the sex, race, and education of Democrats. And, on page 202, there is a similar graph charting the sex, race, and education of Republicans. However, the scale of each of these differs: the scale of the Republican one is smaller. At a glance, it looks as though Democrats are statistically more educated than Republicans (which the numbers refute). Perhaps, I quibble over this last point, but I found the leftist bias of this book incredibly annoying. And, by the way, NO, I am not a Republican. I suppose Progressive Democrats, Green party advocates, free trade protesters and other partisan intellectual lightweights might enjoy the sermon but I would have preferred something that was more objective this.