People are numb to big numbers

I HAVE a confession to make: I hate big numbers. Or rather, I hate it when big numbers are used to impress or bamboozle rather than to make sense of the world. The annual Budget Speech by the UK’s chancellor, for instance, always involves a dizzying parade of large price tags. This year’s included an extra £63 million to be spent on leisure centres, £5 billion over two years for defence, £200 million for potholes and £10 million over two years for suicide prevention, to name just a few.

It’s important in any democracy for people to know how public money is spent. But I suspect the only thing most people hear on such occasions is: “Big number, big number, big number, big number.”

I’m not the first to worry about this. In a 1980s piece titled On Number Numbness, the scholar Douglas Hofstadter asked (in a sentence I wish I’d thought of): “Are we growing ever number to ever-growing numbers?” He took a stern approach, saying there was “no excuse for not being able to understand – or even relate to – numbers whose purpose is to summarise in a few symbols some salient aspects of... huge realities”.