Female Labor Force Participation: A Cross-Sectional Analysis. Case: Venezuela in the 1990's

Determining internal inconsistencies such as these is one of the minor pleasures of numeracy. The point, however, is not that one should be perpetually analyzing numbers for their consistency and plausibility, but that, when necessary, information can be gleaned from the barest numerical facts, and claims can often be refuted on the basis of these raw numbers alone. If people were more capable of estimation and simple calculation, many obvious inferences would be drawn (or not), and fewer ridiculous notions would be entertained. Before returning to Rabelais, let's consider two hanging wires of equal cross section. (This latter sentence, I'm sure, has never before appeared in print.) The forces on the wires are proportional to their masses, which are proportional to their lengths. Since the areas of the cross sections of the supporting wires are equal, the stresses in the wire, force divided by cross-sectional area, vary as the lengths of the wires. A wire ten times as long as another will have ten times the stress of the shorter one ...»