Percentage change since 1975 in the portion of Americans
who hold hunting licenses : –38
Number of states that allow roadkill to be salvaged for food : 31
Number of the twenty least prosperous US congressional districts that are
represented by Republicans : 16
Of the twenty most prosperous districts that are represented by Democrats : 20
Percentage of statewide elections in the Deep South won by Republicans since 2008 : 97
Number of new Confederate statues that have been constructed on
public grounds since 2015 : 1
Percentage of Southern white Americans who say the country must
“protect and preserve its white European heritage” : 30
Of Southern black Americans who do : 28
Rank of Arabic among France’s most spoken languages : 2
Percentage of French students who study Arabic in secondary school : 0.2
Net loss of foreign-language programs at US colleges and
universities from 2009 to 2013 : 1
From 2013 to 2016 : 651
Percentage increase from 2012 to 2017 in the number of US college graduates who major in computer science : 51
In the number of students who earn PhDs in computer science : 17
Portion of 2017 computer science PhDs who pursued work in industry
rather than academia : 2/3
Factor by which graduate students are more likely to experience depression or anxiety than the general population : 6
Percentage of Indians with graduate educations who are unemployed : 16
Of Indians who are illiterate : 2
Percentage change in the value of the US market in adult fiction books
from 2013 to 2017 : –16
In children’s and young-adult fiction books : +11
Factor by which Facebook users over 65 are more likely to share stories from
fake news sites than users between 18 and 29 : 7
Percentage of US adult Facebook users who are unaware the company
categorizes them according to their interests : 74
Of users who feel their assigned categories do not accurately describe them : 27
Percentage of Americans born before 1946 who know someone who identifies with gender-neutral pronouns : 7
Of Americans born after 1996 : 35
Number of minutes by which the average American man has more leisure time each day than the average woman : 33
Percentage of this extra time that men spend watching television : 65
Percentage of Americans who said global warming was personally important to them in the spring of 2018 : 63
In the fall of 2018 : 72
Percentage of US adults in 1978 who said that the country’s levels of
consumption were “immoral” : 65
Who say so today : 46
Chance that an American CEO expected global economic growth to
slow last year : 1 in 50
That a CEO expects global economic growth to slow this year : 3 in 10
Average age of an American with at least $25 million in 2014 : 58
In 2018 : 47
Percentage of US adults who say they would rather talk about their
own death than money : 57
Percentage of Americans aged 18 to 34 who say they’d like to live forever : 24
Of Americans over 55 : 13
Factor by which the rate of asteroids hitting Earth has increased
over the past 290 million years : 3
April Index Sources
1 National Shooting Sports Foundation (Newtown, Conn.)/US Census Bureau (Suitland, Md.)
2 PETA (Norfolk, Va.)
3, 4 Brookings Institution (Washington)
5 Smart Politics (Minneapolis)
6 Southern Poverty Law Center (Montgomery, Ala.)
7, 8 Scott Huffmon, Winthrop University (Rock Hill, S.C.)
9 Embassy of France in the United States (Washington)
10 French Ministry of National Education (Paris)
11, 12 Modern Language Association (NYC)
13, 14 US Department of Education
15 Computing Research Association (Washington)
16 Lindsay Bira, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
17, 18 Amit Basole, Azim Premji University (Bengaluru, India)
19, 20 Association of American Publishers (Washington)
21 Andrew Guess, Princeton University (N.J.)
22–25 Pew Research Center (Washington)
26, 27 US Bureau of Labor Statistics
28, 29 Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (New Haven, Conn.)
30 Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.)
31 YouGov (NYC)
32, 33 PricewaterhouseCoopers (NYC)
34, 35 Spectrem Group (Lake Forest, Ill.)
36 Age Wave (Emeryville, Calif.)
37, 38 YouGov
39 Sara Mazrouei, University of Toronto
