Are you smarter than a politician?

This is so pathetic it's not even funny. 97 British politicians were asked a basic, sub-GCSE question about probability.

If you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?

There are, of course, only four possibilities: heads then tails, tails then heads, heads twice or tails twice. Ergo, the probability of two heads is 25 per cent. Even if you don't know this off the top of your head, you can work it out in a matter of seconds.

So how did the leaders of the nation—the men and women charged with spending our money—fare?

As you can see from the chart above (taken from Mark Easton's blog), most of them got it wrong, with only two out of five getting it right. Seven per cent of them couldn't even muster a guess. Labour MPs were more than twice as useless as the Tories.

Good grief.

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