Re:‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together...
by hinkley on Friday August 09, 2019 @08:01PM
(#20659230)
Americans have a real problem with proportions.
If you put a million people in a city and 100 of them die of a flu, everyone screams epidemic. You spread those same people out over all the small towns in a state, and 200 of them die, it's just fine.
Because, I suspect, we often associate statistics with a location rather than a cross section of society. We think "someone in my town was murdered", not "the murder rate is 1/250,000".
If you put a million people in a city and 100 of them die of a flu, everyone screams epidemic. You spread those same people out over all the small towns in a state, and 200 of them die, it's just fine.
Because, I suspect, we often associate statistics with a location rather than a cross section of society. We think "someone in my town was murdered", not "the murder rate is 1/250,000".