Talk to Les Krantz, and he’ll tell you that 70 percent of men making $60,000 or more a year admit to extramarital affairs, beer is involved in 80 percent of all fatal alcohol-related auto accidents every year in America, and one in every 31 women in the U.S. has had a nose job.
Trivial chitchat? Not necessarily, maintains Krantz, who has spent much of the last decade ferreting out factual data on everything from job stress levels (the presidency ranks at the top, followed by firefighter and Indy car driver) to class rings (only 3 of 10 college grads now spring for a ring) to your odds of surviving a shark attack (a discouraging 30 percent, but the good news is that you’re far more likely to be struck by lightning than to become a shark snack).
“Sure, there are lots of trivial facts around, but there also are a lot of facts that matter,” says the veteran fact finder and Chicago-based author of “The Jobs Rated Almanac,” “What the Odds Are,” “The Best and Worst of Everything” and the recently published “Facts! That Matter” and “America by the Numbers.”
Take, for example, one of what Krantz likes to call his favorite “gee-whiz megafacts” for the ’90s: One of every 1,000 random strangers you encounter has murdered someone.
“Just think about that the next time you’re at Wrigley Field,” Krantz says with a smile. “And, since only 7 in 10 murders are solved, that means that 3 in 10 aren’t and the murderer gets away scot-free.
“Even if the murder is solved, the average convicted murderer serves only about eight years. So there are a lot of people walking around who have killed someone.
“What that tells me is that if someone’s giving you a bad time over a parking place or whatever, you’d better be darn careful, because you don’t know who you’re talking to.”
Here’s something else to consider: “A Hershey’s chocolate bar gets 52 percent of its calories from fat, but Good & Plenty licorice candy has zero grams of fat,” Krantz states authoritatively. “That’s important, because I’m watching my weight and I love licorice.”
Krantz, 47, spent more than a decade in advertising before moving into publishing with a series of guides to art galleries in Chicago, New York and Washington. In 1985 he came up with the idea for a reference book that would rank hundreds of jobs by criteria such as salary, stress level, security and benefits.
Three years and countless hours spent poring over Bureau of Labor Statistics data, government information and private surveys later, “The Jobs Rated Almanac” hit the bookstores and went on to sell more than 50,000 copies in hardcover and paperback.
“I got so much publicity on that one, it boggled my mind,” recalls Krantz, whose growing reputation as an icon of information means he often gets requests from media types in search of juicy factoids to spice up a story or radio show. Unfortunately, the usually good-natured Krantz notes with annoyance, some reporters can be slow when it comes to giving credit where credit is due.
But Krantz got his statistics from some other sources, too, right? “Sure, there are people who keep track of almost everything, but you’ve got to go out and find the information, and that’s not always easy,” says the author, whose principal sources of information include almanacs and other reference books, government and census reports, newspaper and trade magazine articles, medical journals, scientific reports, academic treatises and private surveys. (Krantz, incidentally, cites sources whenever possible in his books.)
“It’s especially difficult to find statistics on odds,” he says. “I have to compute a lot of those myself. Fortunately, I’ve always been kind of good with numbers.”
He does the sifting
The facts may be out there, but Krantz is happy that most folks aren’t willing to wade through oceans of information to find the nuggets that might matter.
“People are suffering from information overload already,” he says. “They want to cut through the haze and the maze and have facts interpreted in a way that relates to them and their daily life, and that’s why I’ve been able to carve out a little niche with these books. Besides that, people with short attention spans can skip around in them.”
Krantz’s latest book, “America by the Numbers,” serves up bite-size blurbs of information on everything from actors (40 percent of American children cite actors and actresses as their heroes) to UFOs (about 25 million Americans say they have spotted at least one)-and paints a picture of a nation in the midst of change for better or worse.
Twenty years ago, for example, about 10 percent of adults lived with an unmarried mate before marriage; today nearly half do. Today’s Americans spend $5 billion annually going to movies and $300 billion on gambling; less than a generation ago, the proportion of money spent on films and gambling was just the opposite. Americans now are the largest per-capita consumers of popcorn in the world, putting away more than 10 billion quarts of the stuff every year. And nearly 96 percent of us eat pizza 30 times a year, with pepperoni, mushrooms and extra cheese cited as favorite toppings.
1,005 bagels a minute
What’s next on the info front? At the moment, the indefatigable Krantz has eight more book proposals in the works, including one that rates the 100 most influential ideas of the 20th Century from best (movies) to worst (Nazism) and another that details scores of things that happen in a single minute (every 60 seconds, for example, Americans will eat 1,005 bagels and guzzle 256,862 Cokes, by Krantz’s calculations).
Meanwhile, the author’s relentless quest for information has paid off for him in several ways. After learning that bright indoor lighting can help banish the winter blahs, he replaced the 100-watt bulbs in a lamp in his home office with 250-watt bulbs and says he now feels much perkier. And while writing (using the pen name Jay Kaye) “Light Your House With Potatoes,” a collection of off-the-wall household hints, Krantz discovered that it’s possible to poach fish and vegetables in your dishwasher.
“I tried the fish,” he says. “It wasn’t bad.”
TOP 10 MEGAFACTS FOR THE ’90S
Crowds: About 1 of every 1,000 random strangers you encounter has killed someone.
Fitness: People who eat only 20 to 25 percent of their caloric intake as fat significantly reduce risks of cancers and ailments associated with heart disease.
The future: Only 2 percent of future retirees will be able to match their current standard of living.
Handguns: A handgun is 40 times more likely to kill a family member or friend than a criminal.
Hope: Average state lottery odds are 1 in 4 million for winning the jackpot, but 1 in 33,000 American households have won at least $1 million.
Jobs: Between 80 and 90 percent of job openings are filled by word of mouth rather than ads.
Mind: New research has shown that brain cells, like muscle tissue, become more powerful with use.
Production: Mankind produced slightly more goods and services from 1950 to 1993 than from 8000 B.C. to 1949.
Safe sex: Between 1 in 8 and 1 in 100 condoms will rupture or not prevent pregnancy.
Women: The odds of women getting mid-level executive jobs have risen from 1 in 4 in 1976 to 2 in 5 today.
From “Facts! That Matter,” by Les Krantz (Price Stern Sloan).
