Applied Cost

finance a la shmoop. what does per-capita mean? well there's poor capita yeah this

guy, how would you like to be named capita and then there's per capita which [man sits under a tree]

just means well technically per head. yep comes from Latin like oh so many

things salsa dressing and dancing among others, the word decapitation comes to [dancing feet]

mind. like what happens when those flying human taxi drones get too far to the

left or when King Henry got tired of a wife. so if that happened often it had [helicopter prop]

throw off the per capita calculations. and same deal if we suddenly had a lot

of two-headed people being born like the aliens in men in black and whole bunch

other Hollywood movies. per capita is a useful metric in a bunch of financial

calculations. a common set is GDP or gross domestic product per capita .like

if you have a ton of GDP say ten trillion dollars from your country [100 dollar bill]

whateverstan, if you only have a million people that's a ton of production

productivity. but if you're say China with well over a billion people well

then it's a much lower GDP per capita. the calculations get quoted when talking

about things like cell phone monthly subscriptions, computer ownership or [people crowd around a cell phone]

particularly rollicking house parties. so yeah the notion of per capita is pretty

important but don't stress if you're not an expert yet. it's a nothing to lose

your head over. [man carries head]