Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Statisticking



Think Progress links to a wingnut blog which talks about murder rates in Philadelphia and in Baghdad:

In a post this morning, Wizbang blogger Alexander K. McClure compared the homicide rate in Philadelphia to the situation in Iraq:

Without looking at the URL or the headline at the top, try to figure out which city this is. Each red dot represents a murder in the past year. Isn't that a quagmire? Isn't it time to consider pulling out?

The city McClure pointed to is Philadelphia. It had 337 homicides between Jan. 1 and Oct. 31, 2006.

If you click on the link I gave to Think Progress you can see a map of Philadelphia with red dots for murders all over it. Horrendous, yes, but not comparable to Baghdad at all. Think Progress points out that the equivalent time period in Baghdad had at least 53,200 murders.

But even comparing the two cities with the same time period is insufficient as we also need to know how many people each city has, to figure out what the relative rate of murders is.

I'm not sure why all this is so hard for right-wing bloggers to get.