Abstract Paints America by the Numbers

The 116th annual compilation of America by the numbers is on sale, its shiny green covers hiding a mass of tables and statistics that tell the tales of birth and death, purchase and sale, love and hate that are daily life in America.

Almost 11,000 babies are born every day in this country, and 6,000 people die. About 7,000 marriages begin, and 3,000 end in divorce.

There are 27 million transactions at automated teller machines every 24 hours. The post office handles 495 million pieces of mail.

The 1996 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which reports all that and so much more, went on sale Thursday. It’s a 1,022-page volume jammed with 1,468 tables chronicling the incidental and the important.

“All that goes on in a single day in America is hard to imagine,” said Glenn King, chief of the abstract staff at the Census Bureau.

For example, births and deaths have been chronicled for centuries in church Bibles and government listings.

Last year, 3,961,000 Americans were born, an average of 10,852 a day. At the same time, 2,329,000 people died, an average of 6,381 a day.

But the statistical abstract doesn’t stop there.

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It takes some slightly older numbers and dissects them in more detail to find that of 4 million births in 1993, 12.8% were to mothers who were still teenagers, and 31% of the new moms were not married.

White women accounted for 3,150,000 of the babies, blacks for 659,000, Asians for 153,000 and American Indians for 39,000. Hispanics, who are included in other races, totaled 654,000.

There were 105 boys born for every 100 girls, a statistic that evens out in midlife. Males’ shorter life spans--72.3 years compared with 79.0 for females--mean elderly women outnumber old men, grumpy or otherwise.

How about marriage and divorce? Well, they’re just not what they used to be.

In 1994, 9.1 marriages and 4.6 divorces and annulments occurred among every 1,000 people. That’s down from 9.8 marriages and 4.7 divorces in 1990, and 10.6 marriages and 5.2 divorces in 1980.

The median age for a first marriage in 1990 was 24.0 for women and 25.9 for men, up from 21.8 for brides and 23.6 for bridegrooms a decade earlier.

While marriage may be slipping in interest, Americans are spending more time with their ATM machines, posting nearly 10 billion transactions last year. That’s nearly double 1990’s total. In 1980, the Census Bureau didn’t even bother to collect statistics on the machines.

The book reveals that 62.1 million personal injuries were recorded in 1993, 170,137 a day, including 14 million sprains and strains, 12 million open wounds and 8 million fractures.

The most likely victims were men aged 18 to 44. Women in that age group came in second.

The 180.7 billion pieces of mail handled annually by the post office include 96 million first-class pieces--cards, letters, bills, etc.--71 million third-class items such as advertising, and 10 million or so newspapers and magazines.

There were 12.3 million motor vehicles made in the United States in 1994, including 6.6 million cars and 5.6 million trucks and buses. The volume also shows 6.5 million motor vehicle accidents that year, which killed 40,700 Americans and injured 3.2 million.

By comparison, in 1994, 784 people were killed in recreational boating accidents, 706 in private plane crashes, 611 in railroad accidents, 239 on airlines and 76 in rapid-transit wrecks.