The numbers of the year 2012

I was listening to Radio 4 and caught the tail end of the numbers programme ‘More or Less’; it’s not something I usually listen to, but it’s not a programme I would turn off. I was intrigued by a little item about important numbers for 2012, so for example there was 17, the least number of clues you need to solve Sudoku, other numbers connected to banking and finance,  the Higgs Bosun particle, the number of fatalities on Britain’s roads and then this intriguing number, $18 as posited by Gillian Tett of the Financial Times. It was later reported on the BBC web-site and I leave you to make your own judgement on it!

Gillian Tett, Financial Times

In my opinion, the most eye-popping statistic in 2012 was the amount of money that the Americans spent on their election.

They spent $2.5bn (£1.54bn) on the direct presidential campaign but when you throw in all the money for the Senate races and the House of Representatives you end up with about $6bn dollars of total spending on the campaigns.

If you work it out per person in the US, it’s about $18 (£11). The last general election in the UK was $0.80 (50p) per person and the last Canadian election was about $8 per person. However there’s a rather interesting catch. If you look at the sheer size of the US economy and the amount invested in elections, then the American number may not be so large after all.

My other eye-popping statistic of the year was that Americans spent $7bn on potato chips this year and about $8bn on the Halloween celebrations. There are some people then who say that spending around $6bn on an election is not that bad, especially when you compare it to the other things that Americans could spend money on in a consumer culture.