The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

by Nate Silver

I downloaded data from eighty-four countries for which estimates of both obesity rates and daily caloric consumption are publicly available.5 Looked at in this way, the relationship seems surprisingly tenuous. The daily consumption in South Korea, which has a fairly meat-heavy diet, is about 3,070 calories per person per day, slightly above the world average. However, the obesity rate there is only about 3 percent. The Pacific island nation of Nauru, by contrast, consumes about as many calories as South Korea per day,6 but the obesity rate there is 79 percent. If you plot the eighty-four countries on a graph (figure 12-1) there seems to be only limited evidence of a connection between obesity and calorie consumption; it would not qualify as “statistically significant” by standard tests.*