STOCKS AND FLOWS. The American Mind is less than impressed with the inference that "half of all marriages end in divorce." He correctly notes that if you talk about the incidence of marriages or divorces per 1000 people, "All that tells us is that in sheer numbers there were about twice as many marriages in 2001 than divorces.." (The figures are relatively low, 8.4 per thousand or 4.0 per thousand, because in a random sample of 1,000 people you will likely find a lot of people who were married last year and remained so this year, a lot of people who were not married last year and did not get married this year, and some people who got divorced last year and presumably did not have to repeat the exercise this year.) The most instructive statistic, provided one could calculate it, would be actuarial in nature, looking at the end cause of a marriage (death or divorce) which would give a better picture of the incidence of divorce within the stock of marriages than the flow of additions to and subtractions from a stock that is also changing as deaths occur.

SECOND SECTION. The American Mind finds Thomas Sowell's statement about stocks and flows, which is an early and spot-on smackdown of the "half of" miscalculation.