7 JANUARY 1949, Page 21

THE IMPLICATIONS OF FIGURES

SIR,—As an admirer of A Spectator's Notebook I regret that Janus should quote a misleading sentence from The Recovery of the West. This sentence is a striking example of the percentage racket and of elegant variation. Not all of us read carefully and some are not arithmetically minded, so that there is the risk that the two increases will be compared as though they were in the proportion of 3 to 2,400. Careful consideration shows that while the number educationally employed has been multiplied by 3, the number of persons employed in entertainment has been multiplied by 25. This is quite sufficiently startling to have its due effect on us without the meretricious (using the word in its figurative sense) dodge of multiplying the larger increase by 100 (after deducting 1). How much more exact, simple and considerate to write: "The number of people employed in British education was trebled, while the number of those employed in sport and entertainment was multiplied by 25."-