The political world is seldom a source of high scholarship, but the current U.S. presidential campaign sets new lows. In addition to the worse-than-normal avoidance of substantive issues, and a very unpleasant level of mudslinging, numerical literacy has hit a new low. Here are some telling examples:

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, during a July 2012 trip to the Middle East, compared the per-capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Israel, which he says is “about $21,000,” to that of Palestinian areas, which is “more like $10,000.” But as the U.K. Guardian notes, Israel’s per-capita GDP was $31,000 in 2011, while

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