Stylized fact

In social sciences, especially economics, a stylized fact is a simplified presentation of an empirical finding.^[1] Stylized facts are broad tendencies that aim to summarize the data, offering essential truths while ignoring individual details. Stylized facts offer strong generalizations that are generally true for entire populations, even when the generalization may not be true for individual observations.

A prominent example of a stylized fact is: "Education significantly raises lifetime income." Another stylized fact in economics is: "In advanced economies, real GDP growth fluctuates in a recurrent but irregular fashion".

However, scrutiny to detail will often produce counterexamples. In the case given above, holding a PhD may lower lifetime income, because of the years of lost earnings it implies and because many PhD holders enter academia instead of higher-paid fields. Nonetheless, broadly speaking, people with more education tend to earn more, so the above example is true in the sense of a stylized fact.