D'Israeli is miscredited with saying there are 3 kinds of lies -- lies, damned lies, and statistics. The latter of which, nefarious redditors like /u/THVAQLJZawkw8iCKEZAE, have made a career out of.

It's not that numbers are outright lies, but are often presented without context. In this case, the 97% is probably based on a survey, which is contingent on a sampling of scientific inventories.

Inventions, like public key cryptogrphy (to take one example) rests on a body of work going back to the difficulty of factoring numbers, codified in ancient Iran, by al-Khwarizmi.

Other discoveries build on top of factoring, like the twin prime problem. If Murray's definition of inventories counts discrete inventories without regard to citation, then he's technically correct, but this redditor believes citation is a better metric to track invention.

However, I'm not one to criticise Murray's methodology, but it would be nice if said methodology was in the book. A similar argument to mine was made on quora as well.