Absolute vs. Relative Numbers -- which is the best and why?

AMERICA'S athletes may be jubilant about "winning" the 2000 Sydney Olympics, carrying off more gold medals, and indeed more medals in total, than any other nation (see the red column). But it is only what you would expect from the richest country in the world, and one of the third largest in population. Adjust the figures for population, or for Gross National Product (GNP, a crude measure of monetary wealth), and the story is very different. Proportionately, the Bahamas (green circle), whose 295,000 citizens carried home one gold medal (shared by their four female relay-runners), won 24 times as many golds as the Americans, who managed only one for every 7million of theirs. Slovenia and Cuba (red circle) took the next slots in the medals-per-person table. And Cuba will further annoy its powerful neighbor by having won far more golds, adjusted for GNP, than anyone else. On that calculus, America (yellow-brown bar) was nowhere. [Source: The Economist, 7 October 2000]

Which statistic would YOU use and why? Is the total number of gold metals the best (for which countries) and the fairest (for which countries)?

Foreign aid provides another example how absolute numbers (dollars) create a very different impression of generosity from relative numbers (net official foreign aid as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product). For example, Norway only gave $2.2 billion in foreign aid but this represented 0.9 percent of its GDP, or national wealth; whereas as the USA was the single largest absolute contributor of foreign aid in the world, but measured by its ability to pay, gave less than 0.2 percent. So, which country was really the most generous?!

Source: The Economist, 7 May 2004.