Longer life expectancies, ever-improving medical technology, and instant access to information are just some of the treasures of the 21st century. But it’s not all sunshine and roses. There are plenty of signs that the world is getting collectively dumber, meaner, and weirder. Get ready to question everything you thought you knew with these bizarre facts.
You’re More Likely to Get Bitten By Another American Than a Rat
Picture a zombie movie: hordes of human-like creatures shuffle down the streets, rabidly biting anyone who crosses their path. According to statistics, that’s modern America, but without the shuffling.
Every year, adult humans bite each other, a lot. In 2012, over 40,000 ER visits in the US were for human bite wounds. That’s more than 10 times the number of Americans bitten each year by rats or nonvenomous reptiles.
Dog bites still top the list, with nearly 340,000 reported each year. But when you have to worry more about your roommate gnawing on your face than the giant hell rats, it’s clear that something’s amiss.
American Toddlers Are Shooting One Person a Week
In 2015, a two-year-old kid in South Carolina picked up a gun and shot his grandmother. It made a few headlines but didn’t attract real attention until The Washington Post crunched the numbers and revealed that American toddlers had been shooting one person a week on average.
Their analysis defined a toddler as a kid aged three or under and included incidents where the toddler shot themselves. Toddlers had shot and killed two people by October 14, 2015, shot and injured 10 others, and shot themselves 18 times. An additional 13 toddlers had killed themselves.
Missouri was the toddler-shooting capital of the US, with five incidents reported from January 2015 to mid-October 2015. Florida came in second with four.
Sex Toy Injuries Soared After Fifty Shades Was Published
Fifty Shades of Grey brought S and M into the mainstream and triggered roughly a trillion awkward conversations. It also revealed how quick we are to jump on the latest bandwagon. Following the book’s publication in 2011, sex toy–related injuries almost doubled.
Sex toy injuries have been rising since 2003, with nearly 1,500 recorded in 2005. In 2011, these injuries peaked at over 1,500. When Fifty Shades became a global phenomenon in 2012, sex toy injuries soared past 2,500.
Eighty-three percent of the injuries required “foreign body removal.” Nearly 60 percent of those involved were men, most in their forties or fifties. The greatest number of women were in their twenties, the exact age group that Fifty Shades might have influenced to experiment.
If You’re Poor, You’re More Likely to Die in a Car Crash
Death is the great leveler. But whoever coined it evidently didn’t have access to federal statistics on car accidents. While traffic accidents have generally declined for years, there’s one sector of society where they’ve gotten worse: the least educated and poorest are now more likely to die in a car crash than anyone else.
If you don’t have a high school diploma, your chances of dying in an automotive accident are 4.3 times greater than someone with a college degree. This doesn’t necessarily mean the less educated are worse drivers. Instead, they’re frequently forced to live in environments where their safety is less assured.
Their cars are older and have lower crash test ratings. Their lower incomes mean they can’t afford all the extra airbags or rear cameras in newer models. Their towns or cities are likely to be less safe, too. Poor, rural areas have far fewer trauma centers, and roads in poor districts have fewer stop signs, crossings, and speed bumps.
If You’re Female and Educated, You’re Less Likely to Find a Date
Since 1981, America’s colleges have gone from all-male bastions of sexism to predominantly female environments. The average campus has a ratio of 57 women to 43 men. While this is progress, there is one area where it’s affecting the fairer sex negatively: College-educated women are finding it increasingly difficult to get dates.
The trouble is that most people tend to marry into their own class. For college-educated people in their thirties, the dating pool currently has five women for every four men. Switch your focus to those in their twenties, and it drops to four women for every three men. In Manhattan, there are 38 percent more college-educated women under 25 than there are men. In Miami, that rises to a staggering 86 percent.
The unintended effect is a dating market where educated women are suddenly struggling to find prospective partners.
In Some States, Your Health Is Worth a Lot Less Than You Think It Is
What do Texas, Oklahoma, and soon Tennessee and South Carolina have in common? If you’re a worker in these states, your health is worth significantly less than it is anywhere else in America.
This is because of a new system of opt-outs that companies can apply to workers’ compensation. The idea is to provide flexibility so that companies don’t have to deal with the government in court every time an employee is injured. Although it sounds good, it can also give a company the right to cheat their workers.
In most states, the loss of a hand while working will entitle you to an average of $145,000 in compensation. In Texas’s opt-out system, some employers will pay a maximum of $1 million if you lose your hand in a work-related injury. But many other companies will pay a maximum benefit of only $50,000 for the same injury.
Your Name Can Have a Truly Ridiculous Impact on Your Life
Names can have a weird impact on our lives. Job applicants with black names are 33 percent less likely to receive a callback than applicants with white names. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It turns out that names can affect us in more ridiculous ways than we ever imagined.
In 2002, a Gallup analyst found that we tend to enter a profession that resembles our first names. So there are a statistically unlikely number of dentists called “Dennis” and lawyers called “Laura.” Seashell shops are more likely to be owned by a “Sheryl” than a “Cheryl,” and women with the name “Georgia” are more likely to move to Georgia.
Having a surname that’s higher in the alphabet has been shown to correlate with success, especially among older generations. Boys who have asexual names like Hillary are more likely to misbehave in school, while girls with feminine names are less likely to study STEM subjects. Teenage boys with rare names are more likely to become involved in crime, while teachers use traditionally lower-class names to predict which kids will misbehave.
Some Campuses Are More Likely to Ban Toy Guns Than Real Ones
Texans love their guns. The state enacted a law allowing concealed carry on college campuses. This new law created some utterly ridiculous contradictions. Some Texas campuses now consider it more troubling for students to own toy guns than real ones.
At Texas A&M University, dorm rules specifically ban toasters, candles, and NERF guns. However, as of 2016, they allow students to keep real guns. Some Colorado campuses have enacted similarly absurd bans while allowing concealed carry.
When the campus concealed carry law became effective in 2016, it was considered a greater offense to publicly display a vibrator than a weapon. In fact, the vibrator would set you back a $500 fine.
Your Love Life Is Related to Your Credit Score
According to a recent report by the US Federal Reserve Board, one of the most important factors in a relationship’s success is compatible credit scores.
As a metric for gauging how trustworthy you are, your credit score is like your school’s “permanent record” updated for the adult world. A good score means you can take out personal loans, get a mortgage, and so on. A bad one means your bank manager will laugh if you ask for a new credit card.
Economists discovered that people tend to enter “committed relationships” with someone who has a similar credit score. They also found that couples with good credit scores were less likely to separate.
Your credit score may reflect what you’re like in life. Those who pay their debts on time and manage their money well are more likely to remember birthdays, clean the house, and so on.
The Richer You Are, the Longer You’ll Live
Life expectancy is rising overall, but this masks a worrisome trend: Life expectancy for the richest now far outstrips life expectancy for the poorest.
For US men born in 1930, being in the bottom 20 percent of income meant having a life expectancy of 76.6 years when they hit age 50 in 1980. For men born in 1960, it was essentially the same. By the time they hit their 50th birthdays in 2010, they could expect to live a total of 76.1 years. Those in the top 20 percent of income saw their life expectancy leap from 81.7 to 88.8 years.
America’s richest can now expect 12 more years of life than their poorest counterparts, up from the extra five years that they would have enjoyed 35 years ago.
It seems death might just be a sucker for inequality.
What do you think about these facts? Let us know in the comments below!
