Less than half vs fewer than one third

Question

From a CNBC article today (Amid inflation and market volatility, just 12% of adults — and 29% of millionaires — feel ‘wealthy’):

Less than one-quarter, or 23%, of more than 2,000 adults polled earlier this fall said they felt “very comfortable” about their finances. Fewer — just 12% — consider themselves wealthy, the report said.

Even with their high net worth, less than half of all millionaires, or 44%, felt “very comfortable” about their finances and fewer than one-third, or 29%, felt wealthy, the report also found.

It feels like the reporter is just mixing words up for impact, using "fewer" to imply an even smaller amount, is there a grammatical rule that allows this, or should it always be "fewer than half" when talking about countables like people?

Answer 1

You are missing a small but important distinction between the things these two words are referring to.

Less than one-quarter, or 23%, of more than 2,000 adults polled earlier this fall said they felt “very comfortable” about their finances.

In this sentence, "Less than one-quarter" is referring to a numerical fraction, a statistic derived from the adults being talked about.

Fewer — just 12% — consider themselves wealthy, the report said.

In this sentence, "Fewer" is referring directly to the adults in question. The percentage given is in an incidental clause separate from the main grammatical structure of the sentence.

In the first sentence, "less" is valid for talking about the fraction or percentage, but "fewer" would also be valid as referring to the countable quantity of adults that the fraction or percentage is calculated from.

In the second sentence, considering the grammar without the dash-separated incidental clause, I think "less" might be technically valid, but would be awkward due to the length of the implied reference target. Inserting the reference to make it no longer implied would produce a sentence like this:

Less than 23% of adults consider themselves wealthy, the report said.

"Fewer" is more clearly valid and feels more natural to me. Only a single word would have to be inserted to remove the implied reference while maintaining grammatical validity:

Fewer adults consider themselves wealthy, the report said.

In the second paragraph quoted in the question, both references are in context similar to the first sentence. As noted for that, "less" is valid as a reference to the numerical fraction, and "fewer" is also valid as a reference to the countable quantity the fraction is calculated from. Which word to use in each place is just a stylistic choice.

Answer 2

So many native English speakers ignore the difference between 'fewer' and 'less' that it is not considered to be an error in everyday speech. However, even those who insist on 'fewer' for countable items and 'less' for non-countable things usually agree that you use 'less' for percentages and fractions irrespective of what they represent because they are not counts. It is most likely that the percentages in your example were rounded from decimals. If the cohort polled were not precisely 2000 persons, the percentages quoted may produce decimals (eg 1.5 people) so you can see why percentages are not people.

The other important thing to note about both words is that they are comparative, so every time you use either word it has to be in comparison to something else. In your example, the writer first says "less than a quarter". They go on to specify that this is 23%; Clearly, the only reason to make this comparison was for emphasis; to help the reader see that 23% is a relatively small proportion. But when they go on to make their next statement with 'fewer', the only possible comparison is to what went before - the 23%.

This really is a very inconsistent use of language. Numbers and percentages should always be compared like-for-like, and speaking about them in two different terms when making a comparison is something a good editor would correct a writer on. Newspapers, universities etc may have style guides that insist on the distinction, but usually, consistency throughout your writing is what is most important, and your example shows an inconsistency by using both in the same paragraph.

I agree it is likely the writer of your example mistakenly thought it would help indicate that the second percentage is lower than the first, but all they have done is be inconsistent with their language. They should perhaps have instead said "less", and then "even less".

Answer 3

This is just sloppy writing/editing. Both sentences are a very similar context, and would be fine with either less or fewer. Using less for one and fewer for the other isn’t linguistically wrong, but it’s not very good style (at least to my ear).

The general rule is:

• Continuous quantities can only be compared with less: “I drink less coffee than Alice.” Fewer would be unquestionably wrong in such contexts.

• Discrete quantities can be compared with either less or fewer: both “I ate less sandwiches than Bob” and “I ate fewer sandwiches than Bob” are OK. Fewer is more traditional for such contexts, and some people feel that makes less wrong, so fewer is usually preferred in formal writing — but less is without question well-established in in spoken and informally-written English today, and isn’t rare in formal writing.

• Contexts like yours, describing a continuous fraction of a large discrete population, can use either less or fewer. Some people will argue that either one is the only correct option — “It’s a continuous fraction/percentage, so it has to be less” vs “They’re individual people, so it has to be fewer” — but the fact that both these readings are clearly reasonable is exactly what makes both less and fewer seem natural and idiomatic for most native speakers in this context (even for people who maintain the less/fewer distinction in unambiguously discrete examples).

Answer 4

In my opinion, "fewer," as written, is the better choice here, at least in the first paragraph.

I read "Fewer - just 12% - consider themselves wealthy" as a shortened form of "Fewer [adults] - just 12% - consider themselves wealthy."

If the author had, instead, used the word "less," it would call to mind "Less [adults] - just 12% - consider themselves wealthy." Many (including me) find the practice of placing "less" before a plural countable noun to be grammatically unsettling, despite its growing and dyspepsia-inducing popularity.

However, this doesn't at all justify the author's choice in the second paragraph. I'd prefer "Less than one-third" to "Fewer than one-third" in any event, given the direct comparison with the fractional quantity.