2010 in numbers

Summary

More or Less – "2010 in Numbers" (BBC Radio 4)

Host: Tim Harford
Guests: Hans Rosling, Daniel Franklin, Kathy Newman, Bill Edgar, David Spiegelhalter, Jill Matheson, Michael Blasland, Robert Peston, Ben Goldacre, Mark Easton, Ben Page
Date: December 31, 2010

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Episode Overview

In this special year-end edition, Tim Harford and a curated group of statisticians, journalists, and number enthusiasts review the figures that defined the UK and the world in 2010. The episode critically examines the ways numbers shape political debate, public perception, and policy — from crime rates and defence budgets to global health, economics, and climate change.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The State of Britain in Numbers

Falling Crime Rates Challenge "Broken Britain" Narrative

• Daniel Franklin (The Economist) highlights a significant drop in Britain's murder rate, noting it's the lowest in 19 years, even as politicians, notably David Cameron, spoke of "broken Britain."
• Key Stats:
  • Overall crime down by 45% since its 1995 peak
  • Downward trends also seen in teen pregnancies and smoking rates
• Quote:
  • "Britain was not really as broken as the Conservatives were suggesting... there was this big gap between... perception... and the numbers." [01:47]

The Defence Budget - Real vs. Cash Terms

• Kathy Newman (Channel 4 News) questions former PM Gordon Brown’s claim that the defence budget had risen every year, revealing that in "real terms" (accounting for inflation), the budget had actually fallen on four occasions since 1997.
• Prime Minister’s admission:
  • "In one or two years, defence expenditure did not rise in real terms." [03:44]
• Under Labour, defence up by 10% (1997–2010), but coalition government plans an 8% real terms cut over four years.
• Quote:
  • "The coalition government... is going to find itself also in the firing line for cutting the defence budget." [04:18]

Misleading Immigration Claims

• Nick Clegg’s claim that 80% of immigrants come from the EU is debunked; the real figure is closer to a third (or 40% excluding returning British citizens).
• Quote:
  • "The true proportion of arriving immigrants who are from the EU is not 80% but a third or 40% if you discount British citizens." [04:53]

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2. Statistically Unlikely Sports Mishaps

The ITV Goal Blunder

• Bill Edgar (The Times) recounts ITV's infamous technical mishap during England's World Cup match, missing the country’s only goal in a live game due to an unscheduled advert break.
• Probability: Estimated at 200 million to 1 for both such incidents happening at the most inopportune moments.
• Quote:
  • "The odds of both goals being lost to stray adverts are still four, four and a half million to one." [06:30]
  • Harford quips: "Idiots." [05:56]

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3. The Risks of Serving in Afghanistan

Understanding Risk through Micromorts

• David Spiegelhalter introduces the "micromort" — one-in-a-million chance of death — and calculates that British military personnel in Afghanistan faced 33 micromorts a day (comparable to the risk of a 200-mile motorbike ride).
• Quote:
  • "Every man and woman serving in Afghanistan on average, was facing 33 micromorts a day." [08:03]

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4. Health and Social Progress

Statistical Milestones in the UK

• Jill Matheson (UK National Statistician) shares:
  • Only 6% of the population now has full false teeth, down from 25% thirty years ago.
  • Lone teenage mothers accounted for 1% of births in 2009, down from 2% a decade earlier.
• Quote:
  • "Last year there were fewer than 9,000 births outside marriage to teenagers registering on their own." [09:52]

Insomnia and Well-being

• Michael Blasland notes that 30% of people report insomnia, illustrating the complex challenge of measuring "national well-being."
• Quote:
  • "30% is a big number, very big number... And it's a very big number, which is a new number to me." [19:58]

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5. Global Social and Economic Trends

Sub-Saharan African Progress

• Hans Rosling (Gapminder Foundation) celebrates rapid declines in child mortality and improving economic growth in countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya, though warns of continued struggles in Congo and Chad.
• Quote:
  • "Child mortality is falling in Ethiopia, at a rate that is faster than it ever did in Sweden and Britain." [10:49]
  • "Sub-Saharan Africa starts to behave like Southeast Asia did 30 years ago." [11:44]

Data Quality and Indicators

• Rosling addresses skepticism over African data:
  • Child mortality estimated from periodic representative surveys – reliable within reasonable margins
  • Warns against lumping all "developing" countries together; advocates for more nuanced categories (high income, emerging, low income, collapsed)
• Quote:
  • "Developing countries... means 6 billion people in the world and that doesn't make sense." [15:05]

The Power of Possibilism

• On his optimistic (or "possibilist") worldview:
  • "I'm not an optimist, I'm a possibilist. I can see that progress in the world is possible." [17:35]
  • Uses humor and engaging presentations to make statistics accessible.

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6. Banking and Financial Risk

Lessons from the Banking Crisis

• Robert Peston (BBC Business Editor) highlights that, at the end of 2008, RBS had cash reserves of only 0.5% compared to borrowings, versus 20% in the 1930s. This lack of liquidity (not just capital) contributed to the banking crisis.
• Quote:
  • "It was this absence of what bankers call liquidity, which was the first wave of disaster that hit the banks." [22:33]

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7. Medical Evidence Suppression

Hidden Data on Antidepressants

• Dr. Ben Goldacre reports that 74% of clinical trials on the antidepressant reboxetine were not published, obscuring evidence that the drug was ineffective.
• Quote:
  • "This, to me, is the greatest scandal of modern medicine... the fact that companies are allowed to withhold trial data from doctors and patients who need it the most." [23:30]

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8. Immigration: A Turning Point

Net Migration Goes Negative

• Mark Easton (BBC Home Editor) describes a crucial moment: in 2010, net migration of A8 nationals (mainly from Eastern Europe) turned negative — more leaving than arriving for the first time since enlargement.
• Social impact:
  • The influx transformed communities, sparked debate, and led to new cultural markers like Polish shops and rising consumption of Polish goods.
• Quote:
  • "It's an extraordinary social change which obviously made many people feel slightly troubled, even anxious, about immigration." [25:49]

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9. Climate Change Concerns Wane

Public Concern Falls with Cold Winters

• Ben Page (Ipsos MORI) says concern about climate change has fallen sharply in Britain, from 44% "very worried" in 2005, down to 28% in 2010, coinciding with cold winters and economic troubles.
• Quote:
  • "People have also just got other things to worry about now." [26:43]

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Notable Quotes and Moments

• On misperceptions and the power of numbers:
  • Franklin: "There was this big gap between the popular perception, something that politically the Conservatives latched onto, and the numbers..." [01:47]
• On political accountability:
  • Newman: "Gordon Brown was quite clear that spending on defence had risen year on year in real terms. A week later... he fessed up." [03:32]
• On Africa’s social progress:
  • Rosling: "There are more and more countries that are reducing child mortality and are having stable economic growth." [10:49]
• Statistics and optimism:
  • Rosling: "I'm not an optimist, I'm a possibilist. I can see that progress in the world is possible..." [17:35]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Intro and Overview: [00:05]
• Crime and 'Broken Britain': [01:04–02:37]
• Defence Spending Debate: [02:31–04:23]
• Immigration Claims: [04:23–05:13]
• ITV Football Fiasco: [05:37–07:22]
• Risks in Afghanistan: [07:22–08:17]
• UK Social Stats: [08:27–10:22]
• Global Numbers with Hans Rosling: [10:22–18:07]
• Measuring Well-being & Insomnia: [18:35–20:23]
• Banking Liquidity Crisis: [20:26–22:48]
• Suppressed Drug Trial Data: [22:54–24:04]
• Net Migration Turns Negative: [24:22–26:03]
• Decline in Climate Change Concern: [26:03–27:08]

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Summary

This episode provides an insightful, myth-busting statistical tour of 2010, with a strong critical eye toward politically charged figures and a global perspective. The contributors challenge unfounded narratives with carefully sourced numbers, illuminate global health and economic success stories, and point to gaps and biases in statistical reporting and perception. The tone is informed, lively, and sometimes wry — reflecting the program’s signature blend of analytical rigor and accessibility.

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For more, visit: BBC More or Less

Transcript

[Tim Harford]

Thank you for downloading this week's More or Less podcast.

[Hans Rosling]

Here's Tim Harford.

[Tim Harford]

Hello and welcome to More or Less, your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. This week, it's more of a guide to the numbers that defined the UK in 2010. We've asked our favourite number watchers to tell us the figures from minus 12,000 to 200 million that really caught their attention and why. And we've also asked Swedish statistical guru Hans Rosling to give us his favorite numbers from.

[Hans Rosling]

From around the world, the young couples in Iran, in Vietnam, in Brazil, are grabbing the condom or the pill in the midst of the night when they make love.

[Tim Harford]

Since 2010 saw a general election, our numbers of the year begin. In the world of politics, the meat and drink of More or Less are the errors and connivances embedded in the statistics which fill each news bulletin. That means the program probably couldn't exist without politicians. And it's here we start our journey into the numbers of 2010 with Daniel Franklin of the Economist, editor of the world in 2010 and the world in 2011.

[Daniel Franklin]

My number for 2010 was the revelation that the murder rate was the lowest that it had been in 19 years. And that came out just at the time when David Cameron was launching his remarks about broken Britain.

[Kathy Newman]

We have had cases like Jamie Bulger, like Baby Peter, like Damilola Taylor, like Gary Newlove, like Ben Kinsella on each occasion. Are we going to say that this is just an individual case, that there aren't any connections to what's going wrong in our wider society? Do we have a problem in Britain with violent crime? Do we have a problem with some aspects of what's going wrong in childhood? Do we have a problem with our care system? Yes, we do.

[Daniel Franklin]

We looked at the whole slew of statistics which suggested that when you looked closely at the numbers, Britain was not really as broken as the Conservatives were suggesting. If you look at overall crime, numbers from the British crime survey suggested that overall crime was down by 45% since the peak in 1995. And if you look at the on crime, I mean, teen pregnancies, for example, smoking rates, things like that, they were all actually pointing in the right direction rather than the wrong direction. So there was this big gap between, between the popular perception, something that politically the Conservatives latched onto, and the numbers which were suggesting that actually things were on the whole getting rather better.

[Kathy Newman]

I'm Kathy Newman. I'm political correspondent for Channel 4 News and I run the Fact Check blog. I haven't just focused on one figure, but a whole range of figures from the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown that I think sound a little bit dodgy. On 10th March, at Prime Minister's questions this year, he, he made quite a startling claim.

[Tim Harford]

The defence budget has been rising every year.

He might have a complaint if we

were cutting the defence budget every year, but it is rising every year.

[Kathy Newman]

So his figures didn't sound quite right to me. So I phoned the MOD and prized some figures out of them and they showed that in real terms. So that's including inflation. The defence budget actually fell year on year on four occasions since 1997. Now, the MoD then said, well, Gordon Brown wasn't talking about real terms, he was talking about near cash, which means not taking into account inflation. But that wasn't what Gordon Brown said in PMQs. He was quite clear that spending on defence had risen year on year in real terms. A week later, Prime Minister's questions again. He fessed up.

[Tim Harford]

Expenditure has risen in cash terms every year. In real terms it is 12% higher. But I do accept, I do accept, I. That in one or two years defence expenditure did not rise in real terms.

[Kathy Newman]

What's interesting, under labour, so from 1997 until 2010, the defence budget had risen overall during that period by nearly 10%. Now, some would say, well, there's been five wars to fight. But I think what's interesting is that under the coalition government, even though we're still at war in Afghanistan, over the next four years the defence budget will fall by nearly 8%. That's a real terms reduction, again, taking into account inflation. So if you think that Gordon Brown came under fire from the top military brass for not increasing the defence budget every year, year on year, the coalition government, I think, is going to find itself also in the firing line for cutting the defence budget.

[Tim Harford]

The Liberal Democrats aren't entirely innocent either. Take this claim made by Nick Clegg during the live TV debates. In the run up to the election,

[Kathy Newman]

David Cameron says that you can put a cap on immigration. It is complete nonsense since he knows that 80% who come into this country come from the European Union. You can't cap those numbers. So you shouldn't pretend to people, give them false hope that you can bring numbers down when you can't control them in that way. I think it's wrong to raise false hopes on such a sensitive topic.

[Tim Harford]

Mr. Clegg's figure seemed high to us and the Liberal Democrats weren't able to back it up. They pointed us to an article from the Economist magazine which actually makes a different claim, and one about students and non students. The true proportion of arriving immigrants who are from the EU is not 80% but a third or 40% if you discount British citizens coming in. That figure is from 2008. In earlier years the proportion was lower still. Now the spirit of More or Less is one of community and sharing. Having brought Kathy Newman of Channel 4 Into the Fold, we wanted to give some airtime to itv. Alas, the number isn't from itv, but about them here's Bill Edgar, sports statistician at the Times newspaper.

[Bill Edgar]

My stat for 2010 is the 200 million to one misfortune for ITV at this summer's World Cup. ITV's HD channel missed England's goal against the United States because the program mistakenly cut to an advert for about 30 seconds.

[Tim Harford]

Idiots.

[Bill Edgar]

It was the only England goal in a World cup game covered by itv.

[Tim Harford]

Apologies, I should say to those watching in hd.

[Daniel Franklin]

I understand there was some interruption yet

[Bill Edgar]

the same thing happened a year earlier when ITV missed Everton's late winning goal against big rivals Liverpool because of another unintended advert break of about 30 seconds.

[Robert Peston]

Really, really.

[Tim Harford]

Sorry, sorry to the public, sorry to

[Robert Peston]

the fa, I've rung the chairman of the FAA and apologise this morning.

[Tim Harford]

And to the Secretary of State who is a well known Everton supporter.

[Bill Edgar]

ITV has shown 114 major live football games over the past two years. Yet the only two unscheduled advert interruptions that occurred in that period, each lasting about 30 seconds, did so during arguably the two moments of football action that ITV would least have wanted to miss. How likely is that? While the 114 games comprise about 20,000 chunks of 30 seconds each now, the chances of the advert interruptions occurring in ITV's two best chunks of 30 seconds are about 200 million to one. Even if we are conservative and say that the two missed goals were only among ITV's 10 most dramatic moments, then the odds of both goals being lost to stray adverts are still 4, 4 and a half million to 1. Yet no one mentioned this amid the fierce criticism of ITV after it happened.

[Tim Harford]

Our next number is from David Spiegelhalter Winton, professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University.

[David Spiegelhalter]

I'm afraid my statistic for 2010 is rather sad. It's trying to look at the risks faced by people serving in Afghanistan at the moment. If we looked at over the summer, over a 10 week period, 23 deaths and that's out of about 10,000 people who are serving there every day. And we can convert that to a unit that we've heard about in more or less the micromort, which is a one in a million chance of death. And that means that every man and woman serving in Afghanistan on average, was facing 33 micromorts a day. And to get that in some sort of context, that's the equivalent of the risk that one would face for a 200 mile ride on a motorbike, on average. So that's getting some idea of the scale of risk being faced on average by people serving in Afghanistan.

[Tim Harford]

We asked our contributors to give us a single number of 2010. As you can imagine, when we spoke to a professional statistician, the choice was simply too agonising.

[Jill Matheson]

I'm Gill Matheson, national statistician. It's been a very busy and exciting year for statistics. It's very hard to pick out just one number, so I'm going to choose two or three. You can't look back at 2010 for statistics without thinking about the economy. GDP figures have been under incredible scrutiny and interest. I remember back to the beginning of the year with the huge interest in us coming out of recession. I don't think I've ever known a figure of 0.1% generating such interest. And then in the second quarter, with GDP figures of 1.2%, huge amount of press interest and public interest. Just demonstrating what statistics can do. My second number for the year is 6% of the population. Every 10 years we look at the state of the nation's teeth and it showed huge changes. I remember when I was young that lots of people had full sets of false teeth. It's now gone down to about 6% of the population, a fall from over a quarter 30 years ago. The other statistic that I always look out for with great interest is one of those that busts a myth, and that's about the number of births that are to lone teenage mums. In 2009, that was 1%. That's gone down from 2% 10 years before. So last year there were fewer than 9,000 births outside marriage to teenagers registering on their own.

[Tim Harford]

That was our national statistician, Jill Matheson and a bawling infant. And I'm sure all loyal more or less listeners are well able to tell the difference. Perhaps the world's most famous number evangelists is Hans Rosling, co founder of the Gapminder foundation, celebrated for his spectacular talks and presentations of data about the world's economic and social development. Taking a break from the UK numbers of 2010, I asked Hans to give us more of a world tour.

[Hans Rosling]

The big new change that really had become obvious this year is sub Saharan Africa. There are more and more countries that are reducing child mortality and are having stable economic growth. I'm looking at Ethiopia for instance, and then people would miss that because they have concerns with human rights. And I don't argue with that. But steadily child mortality is falling in Ethiopia and it's falling at a rate that is faster than it ever did in Sweden and Britain. And also economic growth is very fast in Ethiopia today and it's not just one or two years, it's now six or seven years. And Kenya turned around this year when we got the last survey on child mortality. We had an estimate of child mortality in Kenya that fell from 124 to 84 in September this year. I mean, this is great news. On the other hand, has the tragedies of Africa, which is Congo and Chad, where there's no improvement whatsoever, rather deteriorating. So what we are seeing now is a sub Saharan Africa that starts to behave like southeast Asia did 30 years ago. Thailand, Malaysia is going forward, whereas we see also in Africa like Afghanistan, which are not progressing. So this is one of the big new things we are seeing this year.

[Tim Harford]

Can we believe the data that are coming out of Africa? I mean, clearly the government statistical offices in sub Saharan Africa are surely not the best funded, not the most reliable organizations.

[Hans Rosling]

You can believe anything because religion is free. But it's a question of uncertainty. And child mortality is not measured with registration data. It's measured with surveys that are done with three to four years interval and they are based on a representative sample of the population from the last census. So then you get an estimate for child mortality in the whole of Ethiopia, the whole of Kenya or the whole of Tanzania, but you can't tell it per province that has a relatively narrow uncertainty range. We also know fertility rate from the censuses. GDP per capita is sort of weak, but the change is so dramatic, so it's clearly an improvement. Whereas on the other side, maternal mortality, though tragic, we have very bad data for because it's difficult to measure. Unemployment rate is very difficult to define, so we can't even use it. So it's not countries that have weak data, it's certain indicators that are weak for methodological reasons.

[Tim Harford]

You gather data and present data from all aspects of a country's society and economy. Are there particular indicators that you like to use, you think are particularly informative?

[Hans Rosling]

Well, I found that what happens in the bedroom people have missed that is fertility rate, that the young couples in Iran, in Vietnam, in Brazil are grabbing the condom or the pill in the midst of the night when they make love and they have two children per woman. This is a big news which people have missed. And it's also conceptual idea that Muslims have so many children compared to Christians, that's just wrong. The other which I like to see is the speed of change. It's not the data point itself, but how fast child mortality is falling, how fast the economy is growing. And it seems that the interest of money is bigger. So people have started to grasp what the growth in China means. But the accumulation of foreign exchange reserve in China is difficult to know. The magnitude of China has accumulated $1 billion a day at present. And I used to compare it with the generous gift of Bill and Melinda gates, which is 3 billion US dollar a year to the poorest people's health. And that's just Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in China. So the magnitudes of change in the emerging economy we have missed.

[Tim Harford]

Now, you used the term emerging economies. Does that make sense as a category? Should we talk about emerging economies or developing countries?

[Hans Rosling]

Well, you can talk of anything as long as you know what you mean. But developing countries, you don't know what you mean. That's the problem because it means 6 billion people in the world and that doesn't make sense. You take Afghanistan and Somalia and put it in the same basket as Chile, Argentina and Thailand. It's just a very low intellectual level. We need to have several categories. I used to have high income countries, many call them west, but 25% are not Westerners. And then middle income countries or emerging economy, then low income countries and finally collapsed countries, Somalia, Afghanistan and Congo.

[Tim Harford]

You've described this tremendous range of progress. Some countries doing very well, some countries doing very badly. Do we understand why yet? And is there anything in your data which can give us a clue?

[Hans Rosling]

Yes, it is. That steadiness over years is what makes a difference. One precedent can't change a country, but steadiness over decades. Look at Brazil for instance. It's a fantastic change in Brazil that over the last decades, you know, the social investments has been enormous in Brazil at the same time as the environment for business had been improved. And now you see child mortality falling with 6% per year, twice the speed of Sweden in the last century. And you see the income inequities shrinking. Brazil is coming together. So stability over time, though we don't see such a strong link between democracy and economic growth and health improvement. And you can see Iran, you can see China. They are progressing in health or in economy, but they are not very democratic. And there, I think there's a lot of ideological attribution to change that. People like democracy and human rights, so they say that these values will give economic growth and health. Me personally, I think that democracy and human rights are the goals of development, not the means. Mostly it is good governance and steadiness which makes countries progress.

[Tim Harford]

I can think of lots of reasons why your presentations have become such a success. The animations are very compelling, the data is fascinating, but I think one of the reasons is you present these numbers with such enthusiasm and almost, I would say, with such optimism. A lot of people think about economic development and they think about poverty and they think about a story of failure. But you're really presenting quite a lot of good news. Are there any particular?

[Hans Rosling]

No, I'm just presenting facts. I accept that I'm enthusiastic, but I'm not an optimist, I'm a possibilist. I can see that progress in the world is possible, you know, and even further and better, the problem is that people's ideology and advocacy reason make them see the world in ways which doesn't correspond to facts. And another thing I do is that I joke quite a lot, I make it humorous and statistic is sort of boring and if you are entertaining, you make people relax and that helps them to understand.

[Tim Harford]

Hans Rosling of Gapminder. And if you want to see one of his presentations from the BBC television programme the Joy of Stats, there's a link on our website, BBC.co.uk more or less. You're listening to More or less, in association with the Open University and I'm Tim Harford. If Hans Rosling makes people feel happy about statistics, the Prime Minister wants statistics about how happy people feel.

[Michael Blasland]

My name is Michael Blasland, I write about statistics, among other things, and once of the More or less parish, my number of 2010 is 30% and that's the proportion of people who, by one definition at least, say they have insomnia.

[Hans Rosling]

I can't get no sleep, sleep.

[Michael Blasland]

Why is that the number of the year? Well, because David Cameron said he wanted to measure national well being as well as gross national product. And I thought, well, a lot of the suggestions about what we should measure to measure national well being are things that we find easy to measure, like unemployment and so on. And that's a little unfair. Some people have been talking about measuring loneliness and so on, but I thought, let's ask the question in as open way as I can. And I did my own completely unrepresentative sample of friends and neighbors and said, what would make most difference to the way you feel today? And then the interesting answer that kept coming back was a good night's sleep. And I thought, hang on, you know, maybe lots of reasons why, you know, maybe it's the unemployment that's causing them to be awake all night. But actually it turns out this, if I start investigating this stuff, this is how ludicrous it gets. You find out that one of the reasons why a lot of people can't sleep is because they're worried about not being able to sleep. So insomnia is, in a funny way, its own cause. And about 10% of the adult population apparently are insomniac to the extent that it really affects their daytime capacity, it makes them more irritable, less able to function intellectually and so on. Good heavens. Actually, this is a social problem and medical problems go, this is news to me. So it's entirely personal. 30% is a big number, very big number. And it's a very big number, which is a new number to me. And I just think, well, being, this is a good illustration of how slippery a concept that is and all the things that might need to go into it.

[Hans Rosling]

I can't get no sleep.

[Robert Peston]

My name is Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, and my number is 0.5. Now, that is the amount of cash that the Royal bank of Scotland had in its safes and coffers and on deposit at the bank of England at the end of 2008 as a percentage of all the money it had borrowed. One of the things that I've been fascinated by is why in the Great depression of the 1930s, 30s, where the economy contracted massively more than the economy has contracted during this latest Great Recession and when unemployment was massively higher then as a percentage of the working population than it is today. Nonetheless, back then, no big British bank went bust, whereas a terrifying number of big British banks went to the brink of collapse and had to be rescued to the tune. Actually, if you add it all together, about £1.2 trillion this time round, a lot of people have focused on how much capital they have to absorb losses. And it is certainly true that in the 1930s, banks did have a bit more capital relative to their assets to absorb losses. But the thing which is really striking is that they had massively more cash. If you look at all the banks that were operating then, and actually they're very similar to the banks we have today, Barclays was operating then, Lloyds was operating then. They all had cash equivalent to a fifth of all the money they had borrowed. What does that mean? It means that when those who have lent to banks, depositors wanted their money back. Of course, there was more than enough there. What really did for our banks on this occasion was two things. One is they didn't have enough capital to absorb losses. But the other thing is that they did not have enough cash, so that when those who had lent to them wanted their money back, they could provide it. And it was this absence of what bankers call liquidity, which was the first wave of disaster that hit the banks, that ultimately precipitated their near insolvency.

[Tim Harford]

From one scandal to another, here's the columnist and author of bad science, Dr. Ben Goldacre.

[Ben Goldacre]

My number for 2010 is 74%. That is the proportion of trials on the antidepressant drug ruboxetine that were withheld from doctors and patients by the drug company. It's actually very common that drug companies do trials and then if the results aren't very good, they are still allowed to not publish them in academic journals. So doctors and patients generally don't find out about them and we make decisions in the dark. Ruboxetine is a drug that I prescribed myself and I'm a pretty nerdy doctor. I go out of my way to try and make sure that I know all of the evidence on any treatment that I prescribe. When I looked at the published evidence, ruboxetine looks like a safe and effective drug. When you look at all of the evidence, including the trial data that wasn't published in academic journals, it turns out that it's actually ineffective and worse than useless. This, to me, is the greatest scandal of modern medicine. Not just ruboxetine, not just the 74%, but the fact that companies are allowed to withhold trial data from doctors and patients who need it the most.

[Tim Harford]

I sometimes wonder if 20% of the subjects don't give rise to 80% of the dodgy statistical claims. Health and nutrition is one of the usual suspects. So is finance. And of course, there's immigration. Here's the BBC's home editor, Mark Easton, with a number you can believe.

My number for 2010 is minus 12,000. That was the figure published in May this year. At that point, the most recent annual estimate for A8 nationals coming to the UK. Those are people from Poland and the other accession countries. A massive wave of people came to Britain. But in that month, for the first time they discovered that the figure was actually negative. And I think it's a really important moment in our history. We had seen this extraordinary peaceful invasion from Eastern Europe, an invasion of people which has affected every postcode in the land. A million of those people still live in Britain, although the numbers coming and going now has kind of stabilized. But certainly the big numbers of 200 people coming every day, that has completely turned around.

My brothers are doing extremely well in Poland. So every time I go back, I

[Bill Edgar]

think, maybe I should go back.

[Tim Harford]

It is a phenomenon that I think is worth reflecting upon. This was something that I think changed both public and political attitudes to immigration. For the first time, many communities were kind of aware that there were immigrants coming and living in their community. There were Polish delicatessens, Catholic churches, which had never seen people coming hardly at all, suddenly found themselves overflowing with Polish migrants. Polish shops of all kinds opened up. Indeed, I think now 40 million pints of Polish beer are being drunk every year. So it's an extraordinary social change which obviously made many people feel slightly troubled, even anxious, about immigration. And politically, I think it changed the debate on immigration, too.

[Ben Page]

My name is Ben Page. I'm chief executive of Ipsos Mori, the survey research company. And one of the numbers that I found Most interesting in 2010 was the fact that the proportion of people in Britain who are worried about climate change has fallen sharply over just the last five years, down from 44% of us who say we're very worried, down to 28%. And in fact, the number of people who say they're not worried at all has more than doubled.

[Robert Peston]

This is shaping up to be the hottest year on record, possibly the second hottest.

[Tim Harford]

More heavy snow and plummeting temperatures, vast amounts of snow, severe weather warnings, freezing temperatures.

[Kathy Newman]

There's more heavy snow falling.

[Tim Harford]

Big freeze has much of the country in its icy grip.

[Ben Page]

The reasons for that, very simply, I think, have been the cold winter of last year and indeed this year, and of course, press coverage of the minority of scientists who say that man made climate change is a myth. I think the other thing, of course, behind it is that for every 1% globally that we've seen concern about the economy rise in the last few years, we've seen a similar falling in concern about climate change. People have also just got other things to worry about now.

[Tim Harford]

That's the last of our numbers of 2010. We'll be back in the next decade. And if that strikes you as a controversial claim, I'm sure you'll want to Visit our website, BBC.co.ukmorealls to hear the fin de la decine controversy thrashed out between two mighty authorities, the Royal Observatory of Greenwich and Paul Lewis of Moneybox. Our website is also, of course, the place to go to. Read more, subscribe to our podcast, listen to past programmes or simply get in touch. For now, rather than saying we'll be back next decade, perhaps I should simply say we'll be back next Friday at 1:30pm until then, goodbye.

More or Less was presented by Tim Harford, the FT's undercover economist. It was made in association with the Open University.