Emily, the biggest takeaway for me was getting reminded, over and over, that statistics are numbers created by people and thus are flawed. As I mentioned before, a lot of the key indicators are based on surveys, so they are only estimates. Sometimes agencies use old data. For instance, if the U.S. DOT lacks a state's vehicle registration data, it sometimes uses data from an earlier year. http://ire.org/resource-center/econocheck/vehicle-registrations/