My friend Rupert posted today on Mastodon:
‘It would really help if every time a news article mentioned an amount of money that a country was spending on something, they also gave the cost per person. We are very bad at the scale of large numbers, and a little “50p per person” or “£158 per person” would help us all to grasp the significance of things.
It’s common practice when reporting on taxes and borrowing, but rare for spending. But these are two sides of the same thing, surely?’
I thoroughly agree.
For me, by far the most interesting figure about, say, the NHS annual budget, is that it’s roughly £2600 per person. Or that each person in our house is paying something like £1000 for HS2.
And when we decide we want to double the NHS budget, or cut HS2, or whatever, multiplying those by the number of people in the house suggests the kind of influence it might have on our household taxation.
And of course, Boris’s big Brexit Bus lie:
would have rather lost its impact if it had made the equivalent claim: “We each send the EU about 70p a day”.
(Not forgetting, of course, that the real number was about half that.)
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