Chinese puzzle
According to the World Bank, the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty (which is, perhaps questionably, defined as under $1 a day) has fallen from 1.451bn in 1981 to 1.101bn in 2001. This is a drop of 350m, or an encouraging 24 per cent. The Bank also tells us that over a similar period the proportion of the Chinese population living in poverty fell from 61 to 17 per cent. But with over 1.3bn people living in China this means that well over 550m of them have escaped from poverty. If the Bank's figures are right, it seems to follow that there must have been an increase of well over 200m in the very poor in other countries.
A pretty clean sheet
The post office is under attack for losing 14.5m letters in the last year and having 70,000 items stolen by its own staff. But this means that of every 5,000 letters posted, 4,997 arrive in the right place-and of the other three, two are wrongly addressed to start with. The loss of 70,000 items is actually just one in every 400,000. So, 99.94 per cent for accuracy and 99.975 per cent for honesty. You can't expect much better than that-but punctuality may be a different matter.
A Wright loss
It is now nearly 90 years since the first regular air passenger services started. Taken over the whole of that period the cumulative net operating results of all the airlines flying to all destinations show a net loss. Warren Buffett has said that if he came across the Wright brothers he would be inclined to shoot them.
