I'd also be interested for you to confirm how 12% of the population accounts for 33% of fishing licenses.
Just to clarify, I never said "33%" in my post, I said "something like one third" by which I meant "around a third".
If my memory serves me right, the author of the book I read also said the same thing.
As I am sitting in my hotel room by myself with nothing better to do, I decided to do some digging to see if the author of the book I read was talking about near ball park numbers.
US Fish and Wildlife Services in the past has issued annual National Fishing License Report by state and the latest data in their web site was from 2003.
I guess this also got slashed after Bush came in.
http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov/Subpages/LicenseInfo/FishingLicCertHistory.pdfI used this data to see what the share for 8 great lakes states were (numbers are in thousand dollars) in 2003:
MN $26,340
WI $24,390
IL $8,954
IN $9,924
MI $22,318
OH $12,430
PA $19,039
NY $21,399
Total $144,794
50 state total $512,970
Great Lakes states share of license sales: 28% for 2003.
The author did not state what year his numbers were based on so depending on year, it could very well have been higher than this.
The back data goes back to 1958, but I don't have the intention to run all of them.
Anyway, I think it would not be misleading for someone to say "around one third" for 28%.
If I crunched all the numbers back to 1958, I think it is highly likely that a higher number will pop out.
But do I really need to do that?
Regarding the original source book, I will have that posted when I get home.
Sorry again for going off the thread.