Math error in news: divorce rates

I heard an egregious math error the other day on NPR (from the morning of Friday, August 26. The story was about divorce statistics in the United States, regional differences, and changes over time.

The statement in questions was worded something like this:

The South has one of the highest rates of divorce in the country. One reason is that it has more marriages than elsewhere.

Sounds plausible right? Only if you redifine the concepts of what you are hearing. This is an egregious type mismatch of a rate to a number. a rate is the ratio of the subset to the whole (whatever the whole is), and a number is..well... it's just the count with no division going on. The rate is presumably the number of divorces per capita (entire population of the region).

The statement, as is, is inferring a number (more marriages) from a rate (higher divorce rate).



So maybe you have a large number of divorces and that can be because here is a large number of marriages (which may or may not be because of a large number of people). That is a reasonable inference to make.  

Or you might have a large marriage rate leading to a large marriage number in the region and (assuming people tend to get married within a region) this could lead to a large number of divorces in the region, and so immediately a large divorce rate.

But note this is all relative. A region could have a large divorce rate but small number of marriages or divorces. (or contrapositively, a lower -number- of marriages and high divorce -rate-). Much too unspoken is the relevant contexts for ratios and number comparison.

I don't think this is shoddy math exactly just shoddy use of language (which arguably -is- shoddy mathematics).

First, disclaimers: this is a paraphrase from memory, and I cannot find a transcript to corroborate my hearing.