As we've been saying for some time

Lionel Shriver reports on what people believe against what is true:

In part I, I speculated that most Britons would overestimate the size of the UK’s black population (according to the Office for National Statistics, about 3 per cent). I was right. Respondents hazarded that 20 per cent of the UK was black — a proportion seven times greater than reality. (One in nine respondents thought 30 per cent of the UK was black; they were wrong by an order of magnitude.) As for Muslims, Brits’ median guess was 15 per cent of the adult population (true: 4 per cent). For Asian adults, Brits went for 17 per cent (true: 7 per cent). Add these figures up (52 per cent), and Britons hazily perceive that more than half the adult population comprises ethnic or racial minorities. The correct proportion is 13 per cent.

As we’ve pointed out several times mass immigration is a recent thing in these isles, meaning that the non-white population veers markedly younger than the indigenes. At the 2011 census, for example, the non-white share of the population among the over-80s was 4% or so, markedly different from that of the population as a whole and even more so of the youngest cohorts.

This is not to say that immigration either matters or does not. Rather, to point out that those shouting about the under-representation of certain groups at the top of society aren’t in fact comparing like population with like. The leaders in near all fields (perhaps pop music and sport apart) are drawn from those rich in maturity and years - at least we generally hope so. So the correct comparator is the population mix in the age cohort, not that of the society as a whole.

Similarly:

But Brits’ estimate of how many compatriots earn more than £100,000 a year — 20 per cent — is crazily high (true: 3 per cent). Britons also imagine that 5 per cent of their fellows make more than £1 million a year (true: 0.04 per cent, statistically zero), a misapprehension probably borne less from optimism than resentment. Alas, the number of rich folks who can be squeezed to finance free everything for the rest of us is disturbingly wee.

The reason we can’t just tax the rich to provide everything nice is that there aren’t that many rich people and in aggregate they’ve not got that much money to be taxed - certainly not enough to pay the bills that some would pile up.

That is, much about the world makes much more sense if you’ve a reasonable idea of what the world actually is. Reality, we hope knowledge of it inveigles itself into modern politics. Well, we can hope, can’t we?