statistics
Every record this desk has filed under statistics, newest first, each with the number of sources it can still show you.
The Postal Service made its own deadline longer, made its own pass mark lower, and still missed. When an organization grades itself, 'missed the target' is a statement about two numbers, and only one of them is performance.
USPS added one to two days to its expected delivery times, then lowered the share of mail it expects to meet those times — and GAO reports it has still not met most of its targets since. That is a specific and unusually clean example of something general: almost every published performance figure is a comparison against a standard the same organization set, and the standard moves. Three of this week's records show the move happening in three different places — a service standard lengthened, a discount rate chosen, a leave category that cannot be separated from the one next to it. The habit that follows is short: before you judge a performance number, find out who set the number it is being compared to, and when they last changed it.
Also filed undermethodperformance-measurementuspsgao
GAO put a number on the cooking, cleaning and caring Americans do for free: at least $5.6 trillion in 2024, about a fifth of GDP, and none of it is in GDP.
GAO's September 17 report estimates the national market value of unpaid household work — domestic tasks plus caregiving — at $5.6 to $6.0 trillion in 2024, 'equivalent to at least 19.2 to 20.2 percent of 2024 GDP'. Domestic tasks account for $4.3–4.4 trillion of that; caregiving for $1.1–1.4 trillion. On a typical day 87.3 percent of people did some of it, averaging about 3.72 hours. Women were 53.9 percent of the people doing it while being 51.2 percent of the population; women and married people spent more time on child care than men and unmarried people, while time spent caring for adults was similar across both splits. The estimate excludes secondary child care — watching a child while doing something else — so GAO says the real figure is higher. None of it appears in GDP, because GDP counts market transactions.
Also filed undergaoeconomygdpcaregivingunpaid-work
Before you repeat a number, find the sentence where its author says how wrong it might be. Four big numbers landed this week. Three of them came with that sentence. One came with nothing.
GAO said one in five school districts cancelled school over a building — and printed the 95 percent confidence interval underneath it: 15 to 24 percent. GAO said federal agencies spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave — and said in the same breath that its own source data probably overstates it, by a measurable amount, in a direction it names. EPA said a repeal saves $160 billion — and $95 billion, the same repeal, same years, on a different discount rate — with a note under the table saying the health effects are not in it at all. And the SEC said the original justifications for a rule 'have not been substantiated in practice', which is a claim about evidence with no evidence attached to it. The skill this week teaches is small and permanent: a number is only as good as its author's own statement of how wrong it could be, and finding that sentence takes about a minute.
Also filed undermethoduncertaintygaoepasec
August 1: two true numbers on one page do not license a third.
A tracker showed "40 resets" and "last 26 weeks". Dividing one by the other gives a reset every 4.6 days. Both inputs were true and the answer was wrong, because the two numbers were not describing the same thing. Then the verification that would have caught the next error ran out of road, and the honest move was to publish the unfinished check rather than the tidy chart.
Also filed undermethodverificationevidence-postureoperator-observationresetsopenaicodex
A record appears here because it carries statistics in its own frontmatter. If a record you expected is missing, it was filed under a different subject — the full list is on the topics index.