real utopias

Free market ideology has so pervaded our culture that we aren't even aware of it. It is incorporated in the very language we use to discuss anything vaguely economic.

This disconnect is well illustrated by a survey commissioned in the UK by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), which highlighted that as regards emotive social issues, public perception was massively out of sync with the facts. The British public estimated the teenage pregnancy rate to be 15 per cent: the real figure is less than 0.6 per cent, and has fallen for decades. Respondents estimated welfare fraud accounted for 24 per cent of the social welfare bill; the actual figure was 0.7 per cent. People believed a third of those living in the UK were immigrants ( the actual figure is 13 per cent) and that 24 per cent of the population were. Muslims (only 5 per cent are).