Fun Facts for March

Income inequality in San Francisco matches Rwanda’s
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/08/silicon-valley-forgotten-poor-unlikely-hero-greg-gopman

The Wall Street bonus pool for last year is roughly double the total earnings of all Americans who work full time at the federal minimum wage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/upshot/wall-street-bonuses-vs-total-earnings-of-full-time-minimum-wage-workers.html?abt=0002&abg=0

Since the start of the global financial crisis at the end of 2007, the total debt worldwide has risen by $57 trillion, rising to 286 percent of global economic output from 269 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/upshot/global-debt-has-risen-by-57-trillion-since-the-financial-crisis-heres-why-that-is-scary.html?smid=tw-share&abt=0002&abg=0

Between 2008 and September 2012, there were 66 No. 1 songs, almost half of which were performed by only six artists (Katy Perry, Rihanna, Flo Rida, The Black Eyed Peas, Adele, and Lady Gaga); in 2011, Adele’s debut album sold more than 70 percent of all classical albums combined, and more than 60 percent of all jazz albums. Between 1982 and 2002, the number of Americans reading fiction withered by nearly 30 percent. In a 1966 UCLA study, 86 percent of students across the country declared that they intended to have a “meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2013, that percentage was amputated by half, “meaningful” no doubt replaced by “moneyful.” Over the past two decades, the number of English majors graduating from Yale University has plummeted by 60 percent; at Stanford University in 2013, only 15 percent of students majored in the humanities. In American universities, more than 50 percent of faculty is adjuncts, pittance-paid laborers with no medical insurance and barely a prayer to bolster them. In the publishing and journalism trades, 260,000 jobs were nixed between 2007 and 2009. Since the turn of the century, around 80 percent of cultural critics writing for newspapers have lost their jobs. There are only two remaining full-time dance critics in the entire United States of America. A not untypical yearly salary in 2008 for a professional dancer was $15,000.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120932/scott-timberg-culture-clash-review-americas-creative-destruction

Fois-gras was invented in Ancient Egypt.
http://socialevolutionforum.com/2014/12/25/the-ultimate-health-food-revealed/

Trained elephants were once used to execute people
http://io9.com/elephants-were-once-used-as-executioners-1685751446

Americans have collectively lost forty-one million IQ points as a result of exposure to lead, mercury, and organophosphate pesticides.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/the-toxins-that-threaten-our-brains/284466/

In 2003, 150,000 jobs went overseas, and only 2,000 came back.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-31447904

The U.S. has more jails than colleges.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/06/the-u-s-has-more-jails-than-colleges-heres-a-map-of-where-those-prisoners-live/?utm_source=SAS+Master+List&utm_campaign=3cf5892806-SR_Daily_Digest9_23_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0eb25d4404-3cf5892806-221394897

If states were still spending on corrections what they spent in the mid-1980s, adjusted for inflation, they would have about $28 billion more each year to spend on more productive investments or a mix of investments and tax reductions.
http://www.offthechartsblog.org/growing-incarceration-contributed-little-to-drop-in-crime-study-finds/

The percentage of young people languishing in low-skill, low-paying jobs is 44%, a 20-year high. Only 36% of college grads have jobs that pay at least $45,000, a sharp decline from the 1990s, after adjusting for inflation....the percentage of young people making below $25,000 has topped 20%, worse than in 1990.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/18/opinions/wheeler-silicon-valley-jobs/

Every year cows kill more people than do sharks.
http://io9.com/cows-are-deadlier-than-you-ever-knew-1690950434