If you report on economic research and government reports, you’ve almost certainly encountered the statistical term “per capita,” a Latin phrase that means “by heads” or, essentially, “per person.” ...
To help us explain the right and wrong ways to use the term in news coverage, we teamed up with two experts — economist Steve Landefeld, the former, longtime director of the U.S. Bureau for Economic Analysis, and statistician Jing Cao, a professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Southern Methodist University.
They suggest journalists keep these four things in mind:
