Numbers have become the all-powerful language of public argument. Too often, that power is abused and the numbers bamboozle. This discourse will show how to see straight through them – and how to seize the power for yourself. Public spending, health risks, environmental disasters, who is rich, who is poor, Aids or war deaths, pensions, teenage offenders, the best and worst schools and hospitals and immigration – life comes in numbers. The trick to seeing through them is strikingly simple. It is to apply something everyone has – the lessons of their own experience. Insight and understanding really can be close at hand, and we can all use what is familiar to make sense of what is baffling. All of us are capable of understanding and interrogating the numbers we hear, and so are the media and policymakers. They just don’t seem to bother.

Andrew Dilnot, economist and broadcaster, is Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford and Pro Vice Chancellor of Oxford University. He is the author, with Michael Blastland, of the best-selling book about numbers The tiger that isn’t, of which Rory Bremner has said ‘ it makes statistics far, far too interesting’. He was the founding presenter of BBC Radio 4’s series on the beauty of numbers, More or less and was Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies from 1991 to 2002.