How to read the news like a mathematician – from the budget and HS2 to Covid and sport
T hese days, keeping up with the news can sometimes feel like a maths exam. We face a constant barrage of figures, whether through national budgets, coronavirus data, hospital waiting lists or football transfer fees. It can be very easy to switch off and ignore all this, but being able to put these numbers into context and understand what they really mean is vital to our role as informed citizens. Here are some mathematical tricks and ideas that can help you make better sense of the world.
Jeremy Hunt’s budget will feature bewilderingly large sums of money, comprehension of which is not helped by the fact that the words millions, billions and trillions all sound the same but have vastly different effects. One way to make remote figures more comprehensible is by thinking about national budgets on a per capita basis – even if everyone will not pay the same. Divided among the population of the UK, something costing a million pounds would cost us about 1.5p each. A billion-pound proposal works out at £15 per head. A trillion pounds, the unit by which we measure annual gross domestic product (GDP), or national debt, equates to £15,000 each.
These comparators let us think in a more informed way about the costs of various items. For example, the annual salary bill for 650 MPs (each paid just over £84,000) is about £55m, or approximately 80p per head. It’s not nothing, but it might suggest that cutting these salaries would provide little in the way of direct cost savings overall. By contrast, in January 2022, the most expensive month of the coronavirus test and trace system, just over £3bn was spent (largely on the tests themselves). This makes them about £45 each, which may calibrate your opinion about the costs and benefits of
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