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How To Calculate Percentage Change Between Two Values

So I’m a total math n00b, but I wanted to know how much of a change there was between some benchmarking numbers, in percentages. I thought that this was really basic, but I was wrong. So I Googled and found an article describing how to calculate the percentage change between two values. I wrote this Perl script so that I’d just have it in my toolbox:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;

print "\nUsage: $0 from to\n" unless @ARGV == 2;

my ($from, $to) = @ARGV;
my $diff = (($to - $from) / $from) * 100;
my $label = $diff < 0 ? 'greater' : 'less';
printf "$from is %.2f%% $label than $to\n", abs $diff;

When I run this script, I get values that agree with Dr Math’s answers:

% percent_diff 7 5
7 is 28.57% larger than 5
% percent_diff 5 7
5 is 40.00% smaller than 7

So far so good. But then when I ran it on my benchmark numbers, I got different numbers than I would intuitively expect:

% percent_diff 13.67 40.73
13.67 is 197.95% smaller than 40.73
% percent_diff 40.73 13.67
40.73 is 66.44% greater than 13.67

Now, to me, it seems like you can fit roughly three 13.67s in 40.73. So then why isn’t it 300% smaller?

Pardon my total ignorance, but if anyone knows the answer to this question, I’d greatly appreciate a simple explanation. Thanks!

Update:Mark Jason Dominus was kind enough to respond very lucidly to an email linking to this blog entry. With his permission, I’ve pasted his comments below. All is now clear.

Your algorithm is incorrect. 5 is not 40% smaller than 7. It is 28.57% smaller than 7. And 7 is not 28.57% larger than 5; it is 40% larger than 5.

I will try to make sense of this. The first thing to notice is that the algorithm is not symmetric. When you’re calculating percent differences, the percentage is always reckoned relative to the FROM value, never the “to” value. 40 is one-THIRD larger than 30, not one-fourth larger. And 30 is one-FOURTH smaller than 40, not one-third smaller. (If someone gives you a 50% discount on a computer that has been marked up from the wholesale price by 50%, say from $1000 to $1500, you are not getting it at the wholesale price, right? That is the asymmetry at work.)

Now let’s go back to basics. What number is (say) 10% larger than 70? To find this, you take 70 and add 10% of it. To do the calculation, you need to know what “of” means. In mathematics, “of” always means multiplication. So when you say that 1/3 *of* 75 is 25, you just mean that 1/3 * 75 is 25. (Similarly, if rutubagas cost 50c a pound, then twelve pounds OF rutubagas cost 12 MULTIPLIED BY 50c = $6.)

So when we ask about 10% of 70, we mean 10% * 70. What kind of number is 10%? “%” is also simple; it means “multiply by 1/100”, so that 10% is just 10 * 1/100, or 1/10, and 37% is 37 * 1/100. Thus 10% of 70 is 10 * 1/100 * 70 = 7, as you would hope and expect. And 100% of 70 is 100 * 1/100 * 70 = 70.

Now, what’s 10% larger than 70? You take 70, and add 10% of 70:

70 + 10%        of 70 =
70 + 10%         * 70 = 
70 + 10  * 1/100 * 70 = 
70 + 700 * 1/100      =
70 + 7                =
77

What’s 10% larger than 70? 77 is. OK so far, I hope.

Now let’s use algebra to work it backwards. Suppose we want to know how much larger than 70 is 84. So we want to solve the equation

84 is X% larger than 70

and to work out “X% larger than 70” we do the same as we did just before: Take 70 and add X% of 70:

70  + X%   of 70 = 84
70  + X%    * 70 = 84
70  + X/100 * 70 = 84
70  + 7X/10      = 84
700 + 7X         = 840
      7X         = 140
       X         = 20

So X is 20, and 84 is thus 20% larger than 70.

Now let’s do it in general. Suppose we’re given F (“from”) and T (“to”), as this program is, and we want to know how much larger T is than F. We set it up the same way:

    F + X%   of F = T
    F + X%    * F = T
    F + X/100 * F = T
    T - F         = X/100 * F
   (T - F) / F    = X/100

100*(T - F) / F = X

So T is now X% larger than F, where X is as above.

For example, when T is 20 and F is 10, we get that X is 100 * (20-10) / 10 = 100% larger than F, which is just right.

When about when T is actually smaller than F? Say, T is 5 and F is 10? Then X is 100 * (5-10)/10 = -50, so T is -50% larger than F. And then we usually say that T is 50% smaller than F.

So when X, the percent difference, is positive, it’s because T is larger than F and when X is negative, it means that T is smaller than F. Which is what you would expect.

What’s wrong with your program? Two things. The formula itself is exactly correct. The problem is later.

You have the “greater” and “lesser” reversed—you say that one is “greater” when X is negative; it should be the other way around.

Why didn’t you notice this? Because your final print statement also has F and T backwards. It says that F is X% larger/smaller than T, but it should be saying that T is X% larger/smaller than F. So your program got the greater-lesser thing backwards, and then reverse the from and to values to match. For some kinds of calculations, this would not be a problem. But as we noticed way back at the beginning, the algorithm is not symmetric between from and to, so we can’t do that here.

So here is the corrected version:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;

print "\nUsage: $0 from to\n" unless @ARGV == 2;

my ($from, $to) = @ARGV;
my $diff = (($to - $from) / $from) * 100;
my $label = $diff > 0 ? 'greater' : 'less';
printf "$to is %.2f%% $label than $from\n", abs $diff;

And it now produces outputs:

% ./pd 7 5
5 is 28.57% less than 7
% ./pd 5 7
7 is 40.00% greater than 5

These are correct.

% ./pd 13.67 40.73
40.73 is 197.95% greater than 13.67
% ./pd 40.73 13.67
13.67 is 66.44% less than 40.73

And now your thing about fitting three 13.67’s into 40.73 comes out in the numbers. 40.73 is as big as three 13.67’s, so it is about 200% larger, and this is what the program says. (If it were as big as one 13.67, it would be 0% larger, and if it were as big as two 13.67’s, it would be 100% larger.)

And going the other way, 13.67 is about one-third as big as 40.73, so it is about 2/3 smaller; 2/3 is 66.67%, which is what the program says.

I hope this was helpful and not excessively verbose.

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