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- [00:00]
A
Thank you for downloading More or Less from the BBC. This is the version of the programme first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Harford.
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B
Hello and welcome to a brand new series of More or Less the programme which puts the statistics into Christmas. This week, I'll be running my slide rule over festive football fixtures, wine and magic.
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C
But first, this Christmas morning, 80,000 children will wake up homeless in Great Britain.
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D
This.
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B
This is an advertisement, a Christmas appeal from Shelter, a housing charity. It certainly pulls at the heartstrings. Shelter has put a lot of effort into its campaign. There are posters everywhere. But 80,000 children seems to be an incredibly large number, something one of our listeners, Simon from Lancashire, was unsure about.
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E
When I heard this number, I was extremely surprised as I don't see children sleeping rough on the streets very often. Is there an explanation for this? Is this something to do with the definition of homelessness?
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B
I think that when we think about homeless people, most of us, like Simon, first think of people who are sleeping rough. But this figure refers to something different.
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F
This is the government's definition of homeless.
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B
That's Toby Lloyd off shelter.
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F
To be included in those figures, you have to be accepted by a local authority as being homeless. That's what's known as being statutorily homeless.
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B
Being statutorially homeless means that your local authority has a responsibility to house you. The good news then is that those officially homeless people should in theory, and usually do have somewhere to sleep, but it may well be a hostel or low quality bed and breakfast accommodation. So this figure of 80,000 homeless children describes children who are being housed by their local council. I asked Toby to put the number into context. Is it rising or falling?
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F
What we saw by about 2010 is after a prolonged push from very, very high figures, in the early noughties, councils had had quite a degree of success of getting people out of temporary accommodation and intersettled homes. But then in the last three years, the pressures in the housing market, the pressure on rents and the cutback in particularly welfare support and council budgets has meant that once again, those numbers are rising.
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B
Are you worried that people will see the posters and will misinterpret what you're saying and will think that you're making a claim about rough sleeping?
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F
No, because we're always absolutely clear that we are talking about people in temporary accommodation here. I think people understand that you don't see whole families with small children on the streets. It's not. Something tends to happen because there is that basic safety net that protects people.
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B
But what about people who literally are sleeping on the street. The statistics here are very patchy. For the last three years, the government has asked English local authorities to do a snapshot, tell them how many people they think are sleeping rough on one night in November.
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G
On a particular night, the estimate is that there are 2,300 people sleeping roughly across England, of which around 450 are in London.
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B
This is Howard Sinclair, who runs a homeless charity called Broadway in London. To make this estimate, council can either go out and count people on the street or they can make an estimate and send it to the government. Which reminds me of a famous saying about statistics from Josiah Stamp, a baron and economist of the early 20th century. Never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman who just puts down what he damn pleases. I'm just saying, ideally we'd have a thorough rolling database where numbers of rough sleepers are constantly being spotted and recorded. Now that does exist in London, it's called Chain, and Howard Sinclair's charity runs it. Even this system, though, won't cover everyone.
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G
What we know about the numbers are that it is an underestimate that there are people in alleyways, in doorways, in cars who aren't counted on a particular night, who aren't known about.
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B
Do we have any idea how many children are sleeping rough?
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G
There are a tiny number of children who in London are seen on the streets. Only six children under the age of 18 were seen. It's actually one of the great successes of homelessness in this country that you do not see kids on the streets and those six children were brought off the streets immediately. If you go back 25 years to Piccadilly and Soho, you would have seen scores of young people at night sleeping on the streets. We just don't see that anymore.
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B
Who are rough sleepers? How old are they? Where have they come from? Why are they sleeping rough?
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G
The demographic is most people sleeping rough are in the 26 to 45 age group. 90% are male. 41% say that they are dependent on alcohol and 28% dependent on drugs. 44% have a diagnosable mental health need as well. About a third are people who've been in prison. The vast majority of people who are seen sleeping rough in London only sleep rough once and either agencies and services will get to them and help them off the streets or they make their own way off the streets. Only 3,3% of our figures, 197 people last year, seem to be habitually rough sleeping. And for Whom that is a lifestyle.
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B
Howard Sinclair of Broadway. You're listening to More or Less. If you like, our loyal listener Simon. Want us to investigate a statistical claim you've heard? Please drop us an email to more or lessbc.co.uk. now, I'm sorry to break the news to you at Christmas of all times, but I'm afraid there's no wine left.
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H
Could it be time for wine lovers
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A
to rethink their drink of choice?
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H
The US financial services firm Morgan Stanley has warned of a global wine shortage.
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B
Frankly, a disaster. Awful, awful news. I sent our reporter Charlotte MacDonald out to try to snap up the last few bottles for the More Or Less Christmas bash. A festival of bibulousness. So bacchanalian. I sometimes wonder whether we're responsible for the wine shortage all by ourselves.
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H
I'm just at a wine shop down here in Mayfair. And do you work here?
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E
Yes, I do.
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D
My name is Daniel.
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E
I'm the manager of the branch.
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H
I was expecting the shelves to be completely empty, but they don't seem to be.
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B
Oh, no.
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E
Completely fully stocked. We've got an entire cellar full of champagne.
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H
So do you think there's a global wine shortage?
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E
I think there's plenty of wine to be had.
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H
I'm a little bit perplexed, if I'm honest with you. I've been to a few different places now and this is quite a lot of wine. Just gonna ask a few people coming out some of these shops if they've had any problems. Have you bought any wine recently?
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G
I have.
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H
And have you had any problems getting hold of it?
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I
No, I haven't had any issues at all.
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H
It's actually more than ever, I thought.
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E
I walked into the local shops, saw
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J
the wine I wanted and purchased it.
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H
Strange. But there's a global wine shortage.
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E
Not in my local shop.
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B
Hmm. News media organisations across the world reported this, so surely it must be true. But loyal listener Benoit Hubert from Australia is suspicious and so am I. Something about this story doesn't smell right. I'm getting floral hints of PR driven hyperbole and not too subtle undertones of lazy journalism. I looked around for the best qualified person to help answer this question.
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J
I love wine. It's a wonderful, delicious, pleasurable drink. I drink it as often as I can.
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B
This is Felix Salmon, finance blogger for Reuters, based in New York. He too was skeptical about the global wine shortage. He did some digging around and realised that this news story was based on one single source. A research report from the investment bank Morgan Stanley's research division, plugging the stock of an Australian wine company. The news machine gobbled it up greedily.
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J
I think the first article I saw was full of these charts showing that the amount of wine we were drinking was going up even as the amount of wine that was being produced was going down, and that the inevitable consequence was that there just wouldn't be enough wine to go round. I think that most of the news stories didn't even read the report. They just read the headline which said global wine shortage. And then they said global wine shortage. And they just copy and pasted the numbers from the report into their little scary ready, set, panic articles. And that was the end of all of the reporting they did.
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B
Should we believe it?
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J
I can put you all at ease. You can stand down. You don't need to stock up on wine for the next five years because there's no global wine shortage.
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B
I'm looking at the basic Morgan Stanley graph and it seems fairly unambiguous. Production seems to be fairly steeply falling and consumption is now higher than production. What's wrong with that picture that the graph is painting?
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J
The interesting thing is that there actually was a little bit of a shortage between the years of 2007 and 2012. One thing they did was they stopped the graph in 2012.
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B
This refers to the main graph on the first page of the report. It fails to give an estimate for 2013. If it did, it would have revealed that the decline in production over the past six years seems to have ended according to official figures on wine production and consumption. Consumption, better harvests and a bumper crop in the Southern Hemisphere seem to have ensured a surge in the amount of wine. These figures come from the Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et Duvain, which surprisingly, is based in France. It represents wine producers in 45 countries and publishes wine production figures every six months. I spoke to its Director General, Federico Castellucci, in 2012. Was it true to say that there was a global wine shortage?
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D
There was a global wine shortage, yes. The fact that there was not enough wine for the drinkers? No.
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B
And why is that? Because there's wine in reserve.
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D
I mean, in my calculation, we had almost a bit more than 8 million hectolitres. And then there are all reserves around. All the big countries have some reserve wine anyway.
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B
And in 2013, is there a global wine shortage?
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D
No, there is not a global wine shortage unless everybody cheers up again and start drinking in a better way. There is enough wine to satisfy everybody.
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B
That calls for a celebratory drink. But how did this story happen?
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J
If you Just did a little bit of a check on this. You would find that no one believed this report. Everyone who went out into the wine industry and said, is there a wine shortage? Kind of shrugged and said, what are you talking about? And if you went down to Spain or France, you would find a lot of vineyards which were for sale for less than the cost of planting the vines. So you could buy the land plus all of the vines for less than it would cost to just plant the vines, which is a pretty good, on the face of it, evidence that there's no shortage of wine at all. The price of wine producing land is actually incredibly low.
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B
As Felix Salmon says, it's pretty clear that the global wine industry is voting with its wallet. If wine producers really did anticipate a lasting shortage of wine, it vineyards wouldn't be going for a song. In fact, the acreage of land used for growing wine would be rising to take advantage of the profit opportunity. It's not. It's falling. Still, those Morgan Stanley graphs do look scary. So what's going on? It turns out that wine production does fluctuate. It's an agricultural crop, after all. But there's a lot of wine in storage. Fans of the European Union may recall the wine Lake wine is also diverted to other uses, such as making vinegar. It's still possible for temporary shortages to raise the price of wine bought in bulk by wholesalers. And this did in fact happen in 2012. But if you bought your wine in a bottle rather than in a jerry can, you probably notice much difference. Great news. Now, on Wednesday, you might have heard me pop up on PM with a deck of cards that had been sent to me by BBC presenter cum magician Jolyon Jenkins. He joined me and Carolyn quinn from the BBC's Bristol studio. I had heard claims he could use maths to read minds, but could he read minds as addled as ours?
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E
Tim, could you take the deck of cards and just run through it to make sure they're not in any particular order?
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B
I'm just going to show Carolyn.
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E
And they're not all the same. Anything sneaky like that.
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B
They seem to be.
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H
They look genuine to me.
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B
Okay.
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E
Okay, so take some from the top and put them on the bottom. Effectively cuts the deck of cards.
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B
Okay, done that.
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H
Yeah, he's doing that. He's doing that.
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E
Very good. In fact, you can do it one more time. Okay, now take the deck and split it into two roughly equal halves and riffle. Shuffle the two halves together.
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F
This is.
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B
I'm dreading this. My riffle is not great, but I'm going to try.
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E
Well, that sounds pretty good. Now, take the. Take the deck and split in two again and put. So it's in two piles, left and right.
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F
Yep.
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E
Yep. Now, take a card from the middle of, let's say, the left hand pile.
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B
Yeah.
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H
And I'm following this at home.
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E
Now, remember that card. If you don't remember it, the trick goes wrong. Well, actually, it's a lot easier for me, but you do need to remember that card. So that card came from the left hand pile, and I put it back somewhere in the middle of the right hand pile.
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B
Okay.
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E
Now take either of the two piles. It doesn't matter which. Don't tell me which. And give it a really good shuffle.
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B
Okay. Another riffle shuffle.
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E
Any old shuffle. You can throw them up into the air and let the producer pick them up.
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B
For all having tried to master the riffle shuffle.
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C
There we go.
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B
I just did another one.
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E
Okay, very good. Now, so while you've got a deck, you've got half the pack of cards. I don't know which you've got, whether it contains the card or whether it doesn't, but I need you to send that stack back to me.
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B
We will. We have a courier revving his engine outside the studio right now.
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E
Now, even though I don't know which half I'm going to get or what the chosen card was, this time tomorrow, I shall endeavour to surprise you.
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B
Unbeknownst to Jolyon, I decided I would keep the half of the deck with my chosen card in and sent the other half off by courier to Bristol. And Jolynn had promised that he would surprise us, and the next day surprise us he did.
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E
I detected that it was a low card, and I think it was a black card. And I think by the power of the mind alone, I'm putting myself on the line here. I think it was the three of clubs. Well, that's the card you're holding up.
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B
He has, in fact, got it right. Straight after that, I dashed across new broadcasting house to a different studio to ask Jolyon how on earth he'd done it. Jolyan, I. I'm. I am. I'm quite impressed. I mean, I suppose I knew you were probably going to do it, because that's what magicians do, but I. I have no idea how you did it. You did give us the deck of cards in advance, but it looked random to me, so. So how did you do it?
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E
Well, as you say, the cards weren't in any particular order, but I did know the order which they were in. So that was the first thing. So you cut the deck to start with, but that doesn't change the order. And then you did a riffle shuffle. And in a way, this is the point of the trick, the way it works is the riffle shuffle is interesting because it. It destroys one aspect of the cards order, but it preserves another aspect. So to try and explain this, if you imagine that you have half a deck of cards, say all the clubs which are black, and you have them in order, ace through to king, and. And then on top of that you have all the hearts which are red, and you have them also ace through to king. So you've got all black followed by all red. Now, if you do a riffle shuffle, the red and the black cards will all be mixed up, but the black cards will still be in their order. They'll still be ace through to king.
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C
Yeah.
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E
And the red cards will still be ace through to king. So you have what you can think of as sort of two interlocking chains of cards. I mean, there's a small but not completely zero chance of it going wrong, but it is actually possible to reconstitute the chains. Now, what you did, when you took a card out of one half of the deck and put it in the other half, it meant that one of the chains was broken up and then you shuffled the deck again. But that didn't matter because the card was still in the wrong half of the deck. You could have shuffled that as much as you wanted. So when I got the cards back, I had to sort of reconstruct the chain and see which card was either missing or from a chain or in the wrong place.
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B
Now, this trick was originally a mail order trick. We did it at a mail order. Am I right? It was originally performed by mail?
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E
Well, yes, it's a funny story. It was invented by a reclusive chicken farmer in California called Charles Jordan 100 years ago. And he sold it by mail order for $2.50, which was a lot of money in those days. And you paid 50 cents up front for him to do the trick. And then if he wants to know how it was done, you paid him the extra $2. And it was actually, it was quite popular at the time.
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B
And this presumably, was a money spinner. Did he invent other tricks?
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E
Yes, and, well, he played around with this principle and he came up with a version which involved three riffle shuffles. Now, if you do that, then it works about 85% of the time, which isn't really enough, Certainly I wasn't going to take that chance. But what was clever was that he found out how to maximize the chances of it working. And it's only very recently that someone has shown through simulating it on a computer, that the method he came up with is actually the way which maximizes the chance of it getting right. So then the question then sort of arises, so how many shuffles, how many riffle shuffles do you actually need to do to make a deck completely random?
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B
So this is where the maths comes in, right?
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E
Yes. And so, well, you've had this guest on your program before, Percy Diaconis, professor of maths and a colleague. They looked at it and they found that if you do six riffle shuffles, you've still got a certain amount of order in the deck, but seven completely destroys the order. So if you're a casino, you need to know about this, because people used to assume that three or four riffle shuffles was enough, but it clearly isn't. But what's interesting in a way is that it's not a linear process. So there's still quite a lot of order in 5 and then still some in 6, but really none in 7. So it just vanishes the order at 7. It's like a kind of cliff edge. And if you think of other areas of life that could actually be important, I mean, if you're a paint manufacturer, you need to know how much to mix your paint to be sure that it's absolutely mixed. And it may be that you need to do it a fairly precise amount and the same, if you're making drugs, you don't want kind of clumps of the agent in with the filler. So this actually has real world applications.
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B
And is this chicken farmer who originally did all this early maths, is he a hero amongst magicians or indeed amongst mathematicians?
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E
Well, no, really, not at all, actually. And this wasn't the only maths principle he worked on. He did some, I think, fascinating stuff on binary sequences, which are still used in some magic tricks today. But we don't actually know very much about his life and he's really almost forgotten except by a very few mathematicians and some die hard card maths enthusiasts.
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B
Just remind me, how many different ways are there to arrange a deck of cards?
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E
Well, that's a fairly simple question. It's actually 8 times 10 to the power of 67, which is. I know. You know, when you get to powers of numbers, it's hard to know. It's a very big number. It's Far, far, far more than the number of stars in the universe Jolyan Jenkins.
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B
And you can catch his BBC Radio 4 programme, Maths and Magic on the BBC iPlayer. While many people eat and drink to excess over Christmas and the New Year, there's one group of people who need to be more disciplined than ever. Footballers in the Premier league will play four matches in 10 days. It must be a tough life for the poor things. Pundits are always keen to tell us that the Christmas fixtures have a big impact on who will be crowned champions in May and which teams will fall through the trapdoor out of the lucrative Premiership. But is that right? Ben Carter is here. Ben, is there any truth to the seasonal claims that these Christmas fixtures are pivotal?
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C
Not really, tim. Of course, four games are four games and that's a reasonable chunk of a 38 match season. But there's no reason to think that the Christmas games are especially important. I looked at the last 10 Premier League seasons.
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B
You're a statistical hero, Ben.
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C
Well, somebody's got to do it, Tim. I looked at the last 10 Premier League seasons and compared each end of season table with a table in which I'd stripped out the results of the four matches over Christmas and the new year. The outcome of the title was affected just once in the 20112012 season.
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B
I remember that that was the one when Manchester City took the title with a dramatic pair of goals in injury time. And they pit Manchester United only on goal difference. I think they did.
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C
And as a Manchester United fan, I will never forget it.
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B
Sadly, in fairness, Ben, that was a drawn season, effectively. So it's not a surprise that the result would have been different if you took out the four Christmas games.
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C
Quite. And without those fixtures, United would have won the title just by a solitary point. And there's another season when the Christmas fixtures were important. That was the 2004, 2005 season.
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B
Now I remember that controversial Everton finished fourth, Liverpool had won the Champions League and then they needed to be granted special dispensation to defend their title because they hadn't finished in the top four places of the Premiership.
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C
Tim, you are a true football historian. You are of course correct. But if we took out the Christmas fixtures that year, then Bolton and not Everton would have finished fourth.
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B
Wow. So Bolton, in some alternate pagan universe, were in the Champions League.
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C
Yes, but that's the only time. And in this alternate reality, they would have been relegated in 2007, 2008, instead of reading.
- [22:47]
B
So hang on, you're saying the Christmas fixtures can make a Difference.
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C
They can, but they usually don't. In the last 10 seasons, 30 teams have been relegated from the Premier League. Only four of them would have been different if we took out the seasonal fixtures. And the results are even more robust at the top. Apart from the two cases we've considered Manchester City in 2011, 2012 and Bolton in 2004, 2005, the Premier League champion would have been the same in each case. And the four coveted Champions League places would have gone to the same four teams.
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B
So the Christmas fixtures are basically about as pivotal as well any four games you might pick at random. And Ben, what about the points that teams have racked up over the Christmas fixtures in the past decade?
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C
Well, there are no great surprises there. Manchester United have the highest number of points per game with Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea behind them. The Big four over the last decade were also the big four at Christmas. But if we look at how teams perform over Christmas compared to their Premier League performance as a whole, things get more interesting. There is one team that seems to excel at Christmas relative to its usual record.
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B
So come on then, who are the kings of Christmas?
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C
A team that have had a very difficult last month, Tottenham Hotspur. They average nearly half a point more per game over Christmas than during the season overall.
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B
So that's not a statistic their recently sacked manager, Andre Villas Boas will enjoy hearing.
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C
Absolutely not. Interestingly, the big teams do tend to slightly outperform the excellent baseline at Christmas.
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B
Maybe Christmas is important after all then, if the big four teams have historically done especially well.
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C
I don't think so, Tim. We're typically talking about a quarter of a point per game. So this is a single extra point picked up by the big teams over the Christmas period. Perhaps their deeper squads help deal with the fixture congestion, but it's not a big effect and it could easily be coincidence.
- [24:36]
B
So we've looked at the teams that are successful at Christmas. Which fans should be entering grounds with a degree of trepidation?
- [24:42]
C
Well, I'm afraid Norwich and Newcastle fans, both clubs average more than two thirds of a point less per game than their season average.
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B
Oh dear. Well, Ben Carter, thank you very much. That's almost all we have time for this week. If you want to listen to this programme on a loop throughout the Christmas period, that's understandable. And so we've made it available for download at our website, BBC.co.uk more or less. Next week we'll be bringing you a special edition of the program outlining our numbers of the year. In the meantime, do please keep your Questions and ideas coming, you can email us at more or lessbc.co.uk. but before we go, we must pay tribute to Stephanie Flanders, the BBC's economics editor throughout the financial crisis and beyond, and a good friend to More or Less in her passing.
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A
She's not dead, Tim.
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B
She's dead to us. Ruth, in her passing to JP Morgan last month, Stephanie left a Stephanie shaped hole at the BBC. We'll miss her. But what better way to remember her time at the BBC than to hear once more what's perhaps her finest broadcast moment, recorded right here on More or Less pnc.
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I
Have really put a cat amongst the turtledoves with this one. And I'm going to be talking to them personally because I think it's an inappropriate stripping out. I mean, if you take out swans just because they are volatile, well, yes, you get a smoother index, but what about your true love? If your true love needs those swans every year for you to demonstrate your love for her, then I don't think you can just take it out. I think if you have a basket of goods that should be in the index.
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B
That was Stephanie back in 2009 discussing the Christmas Price Index, an annual endeavour from wealth managers PNC. The Christmas price index that year had jumped 1.8%, but Stephanie was questioning how the index was constructed.
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A
And I've got this year's update, Tim. Based on the selection of goods in the classic song the Twelve Days of Christmas, the Christmas Price Index is up a massive 7.7%.
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B
Well, thank you, Ruth. But although admirable in its incisive analysis, that wasn't actually Stephanie's finest moment. Oh, no. This was on the 12th day of Christmas my true love sent to me
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I
12 drummers drumming, 11 pipers piping 10 lords a leaping nine ladies dancing eight maids a milking seven swans a swimming six. You got to do better with that.
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B
That's got to be enough.
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I
No, you got to do it again. That's okay.
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E
Okay.
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I
Six geese are laying Five golden rings
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B
Four calling birds Three French hens Two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree. Tell me you can cut back because I'm not seeing it again. Stephanie Flanders. Apparently she comes from a musical family.
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A
And thanks to Stephen Nash, Tam Pollard and Alex, perhaps our most loyal listeners, they responded to our appeal for the missing Flanders tapes after we discovered we'd deleted them from our system. What a loss to the nation that would have been.
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B
Now that really is all we have time for from all the More Or Less Team. Merry Christmas.
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A
More or Less was presented by Tim Harford, the Financial Times undercover Economist. It was produced by Ruth Alexander and made in association with the Open University City. You can Download many more Radio 4 programs for free. Find these at BBC CO UK Radio 4.