Many people think numbers are “objective” and therefore represent some pure form of decision-making. Nothing could be further from the truth.
For now, I’ll skip over the question of whether objective decision-making should be regarded as the best kind of decision-making, as I have some questions about that. But even if it is, equating numbers with objectivity is just baloney.
There’s nothing less objective than a number – a number on its own means nothing without the full context.
Here’s a quick example.
Let’s imagine we did a survey of 30 people in a room and asked how many of them had heard of Einstein’s famous E=mc² formula.
And let’s imagine none of them had.
That’s a real indictment on the UK education system, isn’t it? Possibly the world’s most famous equation ever, and nobody out of 30 people had even heard of it, never mind knew what it meant!
Shocking, right?
Well it is. Until I give you the context that this imaginary experiment was done with a group of 30 under-5s at a nursery school.
A number without context means absolutely nothing.
Politicians are the best at this
Just before we get into the meat of this article, it’s worth saying that I’m not taking a political stance here. This is just about how to interpret numbers – I’m not supporting one interpretation or the other, just pointing out how people use numbers to mislead others.
If you know me at all, you’ll know my views that, irrespective of party, I regard all politicians as sitting on a scale that varies between disdain and outright contempt. So I’m not supporting any party’s political views here.
However, exactly the same tricks are deployed by people in business every day of the week -generally less expertly than the average politician, but the themes are broadly the same so, by the end of this article, hopefully you’ll have some pointers about what to look out for.
It’s no exaggeration to say that being able to spot flaws in the numbers that are presented to me has been at the core of the career success I’ve had. and it comes from something I learned at university, where I studied Law.
A professor in a second year law class told us that, in every legal dispute, there were always at least two sides – sometimes more – and, whichever party we represented, it was our job to uncover all the different sides to the argument, and examine whether they were persuasive or not, in light of the available evidence.
It was not our duty just to parrot our client’s case as they relayed it to us, he said – at least not unless we wanted to lose a lot of cases, because our clients would generally only have one view of the matter. Their own. They were blind to all the other ways of looking at the situation
Seeing the other side of the argument was drummed into us then and it’s a skill that has carried me through my career.
So, whenever someone sticks a set of numbers in front of me, they are essentially making a case like a lawyer would in court, wanting me to agree with their view of the situation. Which is why I always ask myself “what might the other side of the story be here?”
If you get nothing else from this article, whenever anyone presents you with a set of numbers, ask yourself that question. Don’t be railroaded into agreeing with whatever the person presenting those numbers wants to do.
Otherwise you might end up unintentionally raging about why a group of 4-year-olds doesn’t know all about E=mc².
Comparison is the thief of joy (and also thinking)
US President Theodore Roosevelt supposedly come up with the expression “comparison is the thief of joy”.
Whether he did or not, isn’t the point (online sources differ), because all you need to know here is that comparison is often the basis for someone using numbers to trick you.
What they are trying to do is short-circuit your thinking processes by presenting something outrageous, or controversial (or sometimes, seemingly uncontroversial, like a generally-accepted truth) to give some superficial rationale for you taking the action they want you to take.
Comparisons are a good way to do this.
Stimulating your emotional thought process with the aid of a set of “objective numbers”, then presenting a simple solution on a place, (ie the action the person presenting those numbers wanted you to take all along) is a surprisingly effective way for the unscrupulous to get what they want.
When I worked in higher education, league tables were a great way of doing this. (League tables, by the way, are just about the worst way to manage anything, which is why politicians like them – it gives a superficial illusion of oversight, while actually lets politicians abdicate their responsibilities to make the country better.)
The pitch usually went something like this (deliberately choosing a ridiculous example to protect the guilty): “Institution A is 10 places higher in the league table than us. They recently painted all the walls in their student canteens purple. So we should repaint our canteens purple and we’ll climb up the league tables”.
I won’t distress you with the number of times a group of otherwise intelligent people were moved to action on the back of a pitch like that.
So every time someone starts their pitch with a comparison, be very, very suspicious. The odds are high they are trying to trick you into agreeing with a position they have already decided beforehand.
Despite appearing to consult with you, the last thing they want is for you to ask any awkward questions.
Which is precisely why you should.
Three recent examples
As it happens, I’ve seen three great examples of this phenomenon recently, which attracted quite a degree of press coverage and online attention.
The key thing to remember here is that all the numbers presented are factually accurate, insofar as they go. They are the truth, they are just not the whole truth.
I find it’s rare, albeit not unheard of, for people to completely make up a set of numbers. Although it happens.
More often, they don’t understand the context for those numbers well enough, which is why so many proposals don’t stand up to detailed scrutiny.
Or alternatively, they understand the context perfectly, but it suits their case to ignore the wider context, so they just cherry-pick the numbers which best support the case they wanted to make all along.
I’m not sure whether incompetence or malevolence is a more attractive trait, but I have very little time for either of them. Which might explain my dim views of politicians…
Anyway, here are three stories which have consumed countless column inches over the past few weeks to illustrate how the process works, and what to look out for:
1-Pensions
If you live in the UK, you’ll be aware that we have something called the “triple lock” on old age pensions. Introduced by a Conservative-led government in 2011, the intention is to ensure dignity in retirement by increasing state pensions each year by the highest of the rate of CPI inflation, the rate of earnings growth, or 2.5%.
And lately, you can’t help but notice the number of commentators who say that the 4.8% increase pensioners will be getting in 2026 is unaffordable. It is, for example, “ruinously expensive” according to one Daily Telegraph commentator.
Yet the UK still has one of the least generous state pensions in the developed world – which should give us all pause for thought about how bad things must have been before 15 years or so of triple-lock.
A report for the House of Commons (linked below) highlights that 20-odd, developed nations have a lower percentage of pensions living in poverty than the UK. The same report also highlights that the UK spends a much smaller percentage of GDP on pensions than 27 other advanced nations.
I’m not a pensions expert, so I don’t know the right answer. But I do know that stoking outrage about increases in state pension is a great way to dodge the question about how badly-off the average UK pensioner actually is.
If the triple-lock was an attempt to do something about that, albeit is very slowly and over 15 years or more, then surely trying to alleviate the number of pensioners in poverty is the bit we should focus on, not the annual rate of pension increase announced for 2026.
(Full disclosure: I have major issues with how “poverty” is defined in this government statistic, but that’s not to detract from the point made above – it’s the comparison designed to stoke outrage I’m encouraging you to be alert for.)
2-Taxes paid by the rich
Some right-wing commentators are claiming that the top 0.1% of taxpayers pay more tax than the bottom 50% of taxpayers, generally as a justification for not taxing the highly-paid any more than they already are.
Now, I don’t have access to all the information I would ideally like to unpick this, but I’m prepared to believe that the numbers quoted above are mathematically correct. It’s the conclusion we need to challenge.
There are some listings around, such as The Times’ Tax List, which takes the methodologically questionable basis of adding things like the corporation tax paid by their companies into an estimate of how much total tax the super-rich pay.
I say “methodologically questionable” because if those super-rich left the country, but kept their companies operating, they would pay just as much corporation tax as they do now.
But looking at HMRC’s own stats on income tax specifically, we get a slightly different picture.
Firstly, their stats on taxpayers show that the income cut-off point for the bottom 1% of taxpayers is an annual salary of around £12,900.
Now, given that the annual personal allowance (the amount us Brits get tax-free before having to pay tax) is currently £12,570, the average person in the bottom 1% of taxpayers will be paying tiny amounts of tax over the course of the year.
The top 1%, on the other hand, which starts at a salary of £219,000 but clearly moves up into the stratosphere from there, will clearly pay vastly more tax. Assuming they don’t pay into a pension for the sake of simplicity, someone on a salary of £219,000 will pay £79,082 a year, according to MoneySavingExpert’s online calculator.
Someone in the bottom 1% would, on the same basis, pay about £64 a year, assuming they all earned £12,900.
Put another way, it takes about 1,235 people in the bottom 1% to pay the same amount of income tax as one person earning £219,000 a year.
When you understand that context, it’s much less of a surprise that a small group of very wealthy people at the top of the income scale pay so much tax that, collectively, they pay more tax than a large number of relatively poor people at the bottom end of the income scale.
Frankly I’d be more surprised if that wasn’t the case, given that the tax take starts at £64 a year in the bottom 1% and shoots up to almost £80k in the top 1%.
Now, that’s an entirely separate argument from the question about whether we are over- or under-taxing the super-rich (or, more accurately, the people paying income tax, which isn’t quite the same thing).
Someone on a gross salary of £219,000 a year is paying about 36% of their income in tax at MoneySavingExpert’s estimate of £79,082.
You might think that’s too low, too high, or about right. I’m not expressing a view here.
And you might think that someone earning £12,900 and paying £64 in tax (about 0.5% of their income) is being taxed too low, too high, or about right.
My problem with the argument as it’s usually stated is that the fact that wealthy taxpayers pay a lot more than poorer taxpayers is exactly what I’d expect to see.
It’s not necessarily an argument for or against increasing tax on high earners – although the people writing opinion pieces would like to you uncritically accept their view that “people at the top of the income spectrum are already doing more than their fair share”, based on the way they present the data.
That said, according to OECD comparisons, the UK is generally at the lower end of tax rates across major OECD economies for someone on average earnings.
My purpose here is not to suggest one solution or another. Just to say that the “right” rate of tax is a lot more complicated than tweets and soundbites from interested parties would have you believe.
3-AI adoption
There’s only one group of people I trust less than politicians, and that’s people selling AI solutions.
Recently this chart has been doing the rounds, showing the speed of AI adoption relative to the speed of internet adoption.
This is often used to promote the idea that AI is hugely successful and we should integrate it into our everyday lives at every opportunity.
Of course, this is precisely what AI folk would like you to do, as it’s in their direct financial interests. It’s no great surprise that OpenAI, a leading AI company, is quoted as a source for this chart. It’s hard to imagine a group of people with a greater interest in getting you to think AI adoption is inevitable.
But in this case, while it might not be the thief of joy, comparison is at least misleading.
Think back. In the first couple of years of the internet it was just three people scattered around the world. Internet adoption in the 1990s was slow because you couldn’t do anything with it – you needed to buy a computer, hook up a modem, find a telecoms provider who, if you were lucky, could install an ISDN line for you.
There were no games, no emails, and no social media. Of course adoption was slow.
By the time AI came along, you could download an app to your phone in 30 seconds, so of course more people “adopted” it.
And AI started being baked into all sorts of products (earning their makers my enduring hatred, as a rule), so of course more people “adopted it”. They didn’t have a choice.
Thanks, if that’s the right word, to AI, ordinary people, with no training, can do things more or less out-of-the-box with AI, like make videos of their dead cat from an old photograph, whereas in the early days of the internet you needed a degree in computer science to send an email.
The fact that most of the things you can do with AI are pretty pointless, and generally offer little-to-no real-world RoI for businesses is a separate issue.
But the speed of AI adoption is only possible because the internet was invented before AI was. If the internet hadn’t been invented first, AI would still be something three people did in a lab somewhere. It’s “rapid growth” is no more of a surprise than the fact that Angry Birds or Wordle went from being nowhere to being everywhere in a short period of time.
The speed of AI adoption is not collateral in the arguments from AI folk that their technology represents the future.
But that’s what the people running AI companies would like you to believe. So they are more than happy to try their best to mislead us by promoting charts and graphs like the one above.
I’m sure the numbers are true, as far as they go. But think about the context for longer than a second or two and you’ll realise AI companies are trying to manipulate you by making an unfair comparison.
Check out the other side
It’s easy to get swept along by someone with a bit of enthusiasm, backed up by what appears to be “objective numbers”.
Every time someone turns up with a heady blend of enthusiasm and mathematics, your initial realisation should probably be that someone is trying to bounce you into making a decision you’ll probably come to regret, but which is very much in their own self-interest.
So, stop a moment, and take the advice of my old law professor.
For everyone presenting a case, there’s always at least one other side to it.
Take a few moments to think those options through before saying “yes”.
Every decision you make will be better for checking out the “other side” of a proposal, even if you end up taking the action proposed to you with that blend of enthusiasm and maths, because you’ll have weighed up the options.
And, every now and again, this process will either save you from disaster or open up a bigger opportunity that had been missed by the person making the proposal in the first place.
For those reasons and more, always check out the other side. You never know what’s there until you take a look.
There are always at least two sides to everything.