WHAT IS THE most difficult two-year experience in the life of a public official?
Answer: Primary One arithmetic class.
Or at least you get plenty of reason to think so.
For instance, take Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa saying the other day that an expected decline in civil service staffing from 190,000 to 181,000 represents about a 10 per cent reduction. Ahem . . . have you tried about 4.7 per cent, Mr Tung?
Then you get former deputy secretary for economic services, and former executive director of the Airport Authority, Elizabeth Bosher, writing in this newspaper last week (David and Goliath deal can open doors for us all) that the value added to the Hong Kong economy by the air transport industry in 1999 was nearly HK$195 billion or 2.2 per cent of Hong Kong's gross domestic product.
Let us try that one on. Haul out your calculator and enter the numerals 195, now hit the '/' key and enter 1227.65 (our nominal GDP in 1999), enter the '*' key, press 100 and now tap the '=3D' key. Well, well, what a surprise, must be something wrong with the calculator. Doesn't the read-out say 15.88?
Ms Bosher does you one better, however. She is a proponent of that school of illusion known as economic benefit (pick up a number, any number, make it bigger, bigger yet, wowee, look at what we get). She takes 33,000 people employed in air transport and makes it ('may actually translate into') 600,000 jobs through that wonderful tool of economic benefit analysis called 'the multiplier effect'.