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In 2003, the UK government carried out a survey that measured levels of numeracy in the population, and they were shocked to find that for every 100 working-age adults in the country, 47 of them lacked level one numeracy skills. Level one numeracy skills are a low-end GCSE score; they are the ability to deal with fractions, percentages, and decimals. This figure prompted a lot of hand-wringing in Whitehall. Policies were changed, investments were made, and then they ran the survey again in 2011. Can you guess what happened to this number? It went up to 49. In fact, when I reported this figure in the FT, one of our readers joked and said this figure is only shocking to 51% of the population. I preferred the reaction of a schoolchild, who, when I presented this information to a school, raised their hand and said, "How do we know that the person who made that number isn't one of the 49% either?" So clearly there is a numeracy issue, because these are important skills for life, and a lot of the changes we want to introduce in this century involve us becoming more comfortable with numbers.
It's not just an English problem. The OECD this year released figures looking at numeracy in young people. Leading the way, the USA has nearly 40% of young people with low numeracy. England is there too, but there are seven OECD countries with figures above 20%, and that is a problem because it doesn't have to be that way. If you look at the far end of this graph, you can see the Netherlands and Korea, which are in single figures. So there is definitely a numeracy problem that we want to address.
As useful as studies like these are, I think they risk herding people inadvertently into one of two categories: that there are two kinds of people, those who are comfortable with numbers, who can do numbers, and those who can't. What I'm trying to say today is that I believe that is a false dichotomy. It's not an immutable pairing. You don't have to have tremendously high levels of numeracy to be inspired by numbers, and that should be the starting point for the journey ahead. One of the ways we can begin that journey, for me, is by looking at statistics.
I am the first to acknowledge that statistics has somewhat of an image problem. It's the part of mathematics that even mathematicians don't particularly like, because whereas the rest of maths is all about precision and certainty, statistics is almost the reverse. But I was a late convert to the world of statistics myself. If you had asked my undergraduate professors which two subjects I would be least likely to excel in at university, they would have told you statistics and computer programming, and yet here I am about to show you some statistical graphics that I programmed. So what inspired that change in me, what made me think that statistics was actually an interesting thing? It's really because statistics are about us. If you look at the etymology of the word statistics, it's the science of dealing with data about the state or the community that we live in. Statistics are about us as a group, not us as individuals. As social animals, we share a fascination with how we as individuals relate to our groups and to our peers. Statistics are at their most powerful when they surprise us.
There have been some really wonderful surveys carried out recently by Ipsos MORI over the last few years. They did a survey of over a thousand adults in the UK and asked: for every 100 people in England and Wales, how many of them are Muslim? The average answer from this survey, which was supposed to be representative of the British population, was 24. That's what people thought: British people think 24 out of every 100 people in the country are Muslim. Official figures reveal that figure to be about five. So there is this big variation between our perception and the reality as given by statistics, and I think that's interesting. What could possibly be causing that misperception? I was so thrilled with this study that I started to take it into questions and presentations. I did a presentation at St Paul's School for Girls in Hammersmith, with an audience rather like this, except it was made up entirely of sixth-form girls. I said, "Girls, how many teenage girls do you think the British public think get pregnant every year?" The girls were apoplectic when I said the British public think that 15 out of every 100 teenage girls get pregnant in the year, and they had every right to be angry, because in fact I would have to have closer to 200 dots before I could colour one in, in terms of what the official figures tell us.
Rather like numeracy, this is not just an English problem. Ipsos MORI expanded this survey in recent years to go across the world. They asked Saudi Arabians: for every 100 adults in your country, how many of them are overweight or obese? The average answer from the Saudis was just over a quarter. That's what they thought: just over a quarter of adults are overweight or obese. The official figures show it's nearer to 34. Again, a big variation. I love this one: they asked the Japanese, for every 100 Japanese people, how many of them live in rural areas? The average answer was about a 50/50 split, just over halfway: they said 56 out of every 100 Japanese people lived in rural areas. The official figure is seven. Extraordinary variations, and surprising to some, but not surprising to people who have read the work of Daniel Kahneman, for example, the Nobel-winning economist, and his colleague Amos Tversky, who spent years researching this disjunction between what people perceive and the reality: the fact that people are actually pretty poor intuitive statisticians. There are many reasons for this. Individual experiences can certainly influence our perceptions, but so too can things like the media reporting things by exception rather than what's normal. Kahneman had a nice way of referring to that. He said we can be blind to the obvious, so we've got the numbers wrong, but we can also be blind to our blindness about it. That has enormous repercussions for decision-making.
At the Statistics Office, while all this was going on, I thought this was really interesting. I said, this is clearly a global problem, but maybe geography is the issue here. These were questions about how well you know your country. In this case, how well do you know 64 million people? Not very well, it turns out. I can't do that either. So I had an idea: to think about this same approach in a very local sense. If we reframe the questions and ask how well you know your local area, would your answers be any more accurate? So I devised a quiz: "How well do you know your area?" It's a simple web app. You put in a postcode, and it asks you questions based on census data for your local area. I was very conscious, in designing this, that I wanted to make it open to the widest possible range of people, not just the 49% who can get the numbers. I wanted everyone to engage with it. For the design of the quiz, I was inspired by the Isotypes of Otto Neurath from the 1920s and 30s. These are methods for representing numbers using repeating icons, and if you like, the numbers are there but they sit in the background. It's a great way of representing quantity without resorting to terms like percentages, fractions, and ratios.
Here is the quiz. The layout is that you have your repeating icons on the left-hand side, and a map showing the area we're asking about on the right-hand side. There are seven questions. Each question has a possible answer between zero and 100, and at the end of the quiz you get an overall score between zero and 100. Because this is TEDxExeter, I thought we would have a quick look at the quiz for the first few questions for Exeter. The first question is: for every 100 people, how many are aged under 16? I don't know Exeter very well at all, so I had a guess, but it gives you an idea of how the quiz works. You drag the slider to highlight your icons, then click submit to answer, and we animate away the difference between your answer and reality. It turns out I was a pretty terrible guess: five. How about the next question? This asks about the average age, the age at which half the population are younger and half are older. I thought 35 sounded middle-aged to me. Actually, in Exeter it's incredibly young, and I had underestimated the impact of the university in this area. The questions get harder as you go through. This one asks about home ownership: for every 100 households, how many are owned with a mortgage or loan? I hedged my bets here, because I didn't want to be more than 50 out on the answer. These questions get harder because when you're in an area, in a community, things like age are fairly easy to judge. There are clues to whether a population is old or young just by looking around. Something like home ownership is much more difficult to see, so we revert to our own biases about how many people we think own their own homes.
The truth is that when we published this quiz, the census data it's based on was already a few years old. We've had online applications that let you put in a postcode and get statistics back for years, so in some senses this was all a little old and not necessarily new. But I was interested to see what reaction we might get by gamifying the data in the way we have, using animation and playing on the fact that people have their own preconceptions. The reaction was more than I could have hoped for. It was a long-held ambition of mine to bring down a statistics website due to public demand. This URL contains the words "statistics," "gov," and "UK," which are three of people's least favourite words in a URL, and the amazing thing was that the website came down at quarter to ten at night, because people were actually engaging with this data of their own free will, in their own personal time. I was very interested to see that we got something like a quarter of a million people playing the quiz within 48 hours of launching it. It sparked an enormous discussion online on social media, largely dominated by people having fun with their misconceptions, which is something I couldn't have hoped for any better. I also liked the fact that people started sending it to politicians: how well do you know the area you claim to represent?
To finish, going back to the two kinds of people: I thought it would be really interesting to see how people who are good with numbers would do on this quiz. The National Statistician of England and Wales, John Pullinger, you would expect to be pretty good, and he got 44 for his own area. Jeremy Paxman, admittedly after a glass of wine, got 36, which is even worse. This shows that numbers can inspire us all, and they can surprise us all. We very often talk about statistics as the science of uncertainty. My parting thought for today is that statistics is actually the science of us, and that's why we should be fascinated by numbers. Thank you very much.