• MoonMoon@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      As the other guy mentioned, 0.23% per 100,000 doesn’t make sense. That’s like saying 0.23 murders per 100 (cent) per 100,000. One of those per Xs is redundant.

      The Wikipedia page linked says Japan has a murder rate of 0.233 per 100,000 residents. If this made sense as a percent, it would mean a percentage of 0.000233%. But this statistic wouldnt work as a since a “percentage” implies a fraction of a whole, for example 50% of a population is born male.

      The original statistic under discussion says that there are “X number of murder cases per 100,000 people living in country”, rather than “Y% of the country’s population is murder victims”, which wouldn’t make sense anyway since the dead aren’t part of the population; i.e. you wouldn’t see a statistic like “20% of the population is dead” but rather “20% of the population died”, and “90% of the deaths were by murder” rather than “18% of the population is murder victims”.

      Thank you for attending my TED talk.

      Edit: formatting