Popular Statistics is where 100X Research goes on its sidequests. Every so often a question gets stuck in my head, who actually produces the pop songs everyone knows, how much of the US map was literally bought and paid for, whether China really does love fireworks more than everyone else, and the only way to get it out is to go count something.
It is an attempt to understand the world through numbers without pretending the numbers are the whole story. Some pieces are serious. Some are an excuse to settle a bar argument with a chart. The only bar for a sidequest is that it is interesting and it is countable.
The name is a joke against itself. The famous line is a warning: you can make numbers say almost anything. Fair enough. So the deal here is simple. The charts are honest about what they are, the sources get named, and when a number is made up to illustrate a point, the caption says so out loud.
Right now most of the numbers here are illustrative, plausible stand-ins while the real datasets get built out. Anything fabricated is labeled as such. As each piece gets its real data, the label comes off.
Popular Statistics is the culture-and-curiosities side of the project. The heavier research lives at 100xresearch.org. The sidequests live here at popularstatistics.100xresearch.org.