The chancellor's consistent misunderstanding of percentages does not bode well for the economy
There are some things that you want to hear from a chancellor. Things like "Relax, I've fixed the recession" and "Free puppies for everyone". A consistent misunderstanding of percentages is not one of those things. That's why, whenever George Osborne uses the term "110%", your heart sinks a little.
Giving 110% is something that should be reserved for The Apprentice (where 110% is given in such tasks as making candles or dressing like an estate agent) or The X Factor. But when George Osborne does it - when he promised ITV News last month that he would work "110% harder", or when he said the government should "focus 110% on the economy" yesterday - it's probably a sign that you should start stuffing your mattress with money.
It's not so much the latter example's catastrophic misunderstanding of how numbers work that irks; more Osborne's easy reliance on reality TV catchphrases. It's a slippery slope – first, you promise to "give the economy 110%", next you're "making the economy your own", or "owning the budget", or reciting a sob story about our shrinking GDP backed by a Coldplay instrumental, or losing the plot completely and referring to yourself as "a little Alan Greenspan". During the last series of Britain's Got Talent, David Walliams gave something a billion per cent. Hopefully George Osborne didn't watch that episode, or that's us really screwed.
Of course, you could claim that it is actually mathematically possible to give something 110%. A few years ago, for example, banks were offering 110% mortgages – and nothing bad ever came from that, did it? What's more, a paper published in The Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports last year merely defines 100% as the amount of effort that an individual can consistently sustain. It argues that you can give something 110%, but only inconsistently over short bursts when compared with the mean amount of longer-term effort you have given.
So maybe Osborne really can give the economy 110% – but only if he's been seriously half-arsing it up until now.