Good morning. I don’t really understand numbers. There, I’ve said it. I don’t! I mean, I understand some very rough numbers: I know that £1 is a pint of milk and change, and £100 is a tank of petrol, and £1,000 is a holiday, and £10,000 is a reliable car, and £1m is a big house in Leeds and a small one in London, and £10m is a mediocre Premier League footballer probably on Southampton’s radar.
These are all numbers I can put on a scale without thinking about it, because I have a lot of practice, especially with the last. But outside a few quite limited realms, confusion descends more quickly than I’m generally prepared to admit.
I’m making this confession because I know I’m not alone. Polls have long found that our estimates are wildly off for things like the number of asylum seekers, or benefit fraud, or average salaries, or the scale of crime and terrorism, or the severity of the climate crisis, or how many…
