Per Capita Country Comparisons

Comments criticize comparing absolute statistics across countries without population adjustments, especially pitting the large US against smaller nations, and advocate for per capita rates or other normalizations for fair analysis.

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Keywords

US IMHO gapminder.org OECD GINI OTHER EU wikipedia.org population countries capita population density country density numbers comparing statistics comparison

Sample Comments

ninetyninenine • Dec 7, 2024 • View on HN

Going up doesn’t mean anything. Compare relative amounts per capita to OTHER countries.

rubidium • Aug 29, 2017 • View on HN

what if you adjust for size of country/state and population density before judging, does that help?

lmz • Jan 23, 2024 • View on HN

You're comparing absolute numbers. What about as a % of population?

bassman9000 • Nov 23, 2019 • View on HN

If it's geographically, then don't account per capita. Account absolute values per country.

homonculus1 • Dec 2, 2019 • View on HN

The framing of this comparison is fraught due to unequal bucketing. Most other countries are the size of US states or even cities, so they can boast individually low numbers while in the US everything gets bundled together. The US should instead be compared to something like all of Europe or all of Western Europe.

simonw • Mar 12, 2023 • View on HN

Those numbers would be more informative if they compared to country populations.

Jensson • Apr 20, 2024 • View on HN

Divide by population, absolute numbers doesn't give a fair picture.

2stop • Nov 25, 2020 • View on HN

Curious why population is even a factor here. If it legitimately should be... why not compare states of the US with states of the EU? (Seems a roughly equivalent thing to do)

VeejayRampay • Sep 13, 2017 • View on HN

You'd need to bring down those numbers to a per-capita basis for them to be relevant though, I don't think America is anything special.

munificent • Aug 20, 2014 • View on HN

That's a meaningless comparison unless you account for population differences. Per capita would be useful to show.