A levels, from the perspective of a ‘choice architect’, are a disaster. While pupils are free to pick and mix freely among the humanities, science is implicitly presented as an all-or-nothing package deal. Any aspiring scientist must study at least three of the big four: mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. People who want to keep their options open, or who are reluctant to drop, say, history, are forced at around the age of 15 to make a highly asymmetric choice: either bet the farm on science or abandon it entirely. Faced with this skewed option, too many do the latter.
This means many otherwise intelligent people leave university with a rather poor understanding of science — not only of its strengths but its limitations. Having been fed only a diet of artificially neat geometry problems with a single right answer, someone whose mathematical education ended at 15 might easily conclude that anything expressed in numerical form is a hard fact — leaving no room for nuance or interpretation.
The result is not only that too many people are innumerate. It is also that the innumerate are too easily bamboozled by the semi-numerate.
Take a statistical finding now almost universally believed to be true. This is the notion that the poorest 10 per cent in the US have gained very little in wealth over the last 30 years, while the richest 1 per cent are minted. This has become the basis of almost every policy discussion from Davos to the Dog and Duck. It paints a grim picture of failed capitalism.
Except this picture is highly misleading. Here’s the economist Russ Roberts: ‘the biggest problem with the pessimistic studies is that they rarely follow the same people to see how they do over time.
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