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Immigration
00:27:44
What does a detailed look at immigration statistics tell us about the benefits, or of...
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- [00:00]
Tim Harford
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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Hello and welcome to More or Less the programme which explores and explains the numbers in the news and in life this week. Wine, women and tennis. But we begin the program with a question posed by loyal listener Andy Howarth. I was listening to the fascinating debate on Radio 4 recently called immigration Good for whom? One expert confidently asserted that immigrants made a net economic contribution of some huge amount.
- [00:38]
Charlotte McDonald
The oecd, which is a very reputable international organisation which has looked at this in some detail, is saying that on average, migrants in this country are contributing 70 billion a year.
- [00:51]
Tim Harford
But then another expert equally confidently asserted that the net economic effect is either neutral or slightly negative. It is simply not true to say that there is this huge fiscal benefit from immigration. If you look at the overall picture, fiscal contribution has probably been neutral or slightly negative. I don't feel I can form a valid opinion unless I know which statement is true. Can you investigate? Andy was listening to David Goodhart of the cross party think tank Demos, and author of the British Successes and Failures of Post War Immigration. And to Susie Symes, an economist and chair of 19 Princelet Street, Europe's oldest museum of immigration and diversity. So whose numbers were right? Well, Ruth Alexander's been looking at this and Ruth Suzie says immigrants contribute £70 billion to the UK economy. That's a big number. That's over £1,000 for everyone who lives here.
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Yes, rather too big. Susie actually misspoke and accidentally multiplied the number she was referring to by 10.
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Well, we've all done it.
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Yes, although not many of us on national radio like you, Tim. But anyway, Suzie meant to say £7 billion. Now, this is an extrapolation of a calculation done by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the oecd. And they weren't actually looking at how much immigrants contribute to the economy as a whole. They were looking at a related but narrower question. Do immigrants contribute more to the public purse than than they take out? And to answer it, they compared how much immigrants pay in tax and Social Security contributions to how much they receive by way of benefits and services like education and health. Now, it concluded that in the period 2007 to 2009, immigrants provided a positive fiscal impact in the UK, equivalent to just under half a percent of gross domestic product, or GDP, which works out as roughly 7 billion pounds. Now, Susie Symes's argument was that this meant immigrants were making a large contribution, but the OECD says half a percent of GDP is actually quite a small amount.
- [03:02]
But what about David Goodhart's opposite claim? He said it's not true that there's a huge fiscal benefit. The benefit rather is neutral or slightly negative. He said.
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Yes, David was quoting numbers from a different report done by a team at University College London. They're looking at a different time period, the 16 years from 1995 to 2011. The other report, if you remember, Tim, looked at just the three year period, 2007-9. I hope you're keeping up, by the way. Now, if you look at these UCL figures, immigration has been a drain on the public purse to the tune of about 95 billion pounds. But interestingly, the authors don't point that out. In fact, they say in the paper, overall, our analysis draws a positive picture of fiscal effects immigration has had on the uk. So what's going on? Well, their analysis emphasises another finding instead, which is that European immigrants have put in more to the public person. They've taken out especially recent European immigrants who've arrived in the UK since the year 2000. And those are the key people the authors want to study, given that European immigration has been such a hot topic for debate in those years. You know, people have been worrying that the thousands of Central European people who have come to the UK in the past decade have been attracted by the benefit system, not work opportunities. But the numbers show that as a group, they've actually put in more to the Treasury's coffers than they've taken out. But as I say, when you look at all immigrants, you see that the overall impact on the public purse is a negative one and it's non European immigrants who tip the overall figure into the red. So let's have a look at the numbers to make sense of it all. I've broken them down a little. So between 1995 and 2011, on average, each European immigrant put about 6,000 pounds more into the public purse than they took out. Non European immigrants, on the other hand, each took out about 21,000 pounds more than they put in. There's also also a lot more non European immigrants in this country, which means that when you look at both groups of immigrants as a whole, so European and non European together, they take out around £14,000 more than they put in. And before you ask me, Tim, I can read your mind. You know, we all know the government is in debt and is running a large deficit. That is it's spending more than it's got and it's spending a large proportion of that money it doesn't have on its own people. And we can see that very clearly when we look at how much native Brits are each putting in and taking out of the public purse. On average, each native Briton took out roughly £11,000 more than they put in between 1995 and 2011. So, on average, only the Europeans are putting in more to the UK public purse than they're taking out. At least that was the case between 1995 and 2011. But as I mentioned at the beginning, we've been talking about the impact immigrants have had on the public purse. So what about the impact they've had on the economy as a whole? Well, that's a question we'll be looking at next week, so I'll leave you with a cliffhanger.
- [06:09]
Ok, Ruth, thank you very much. You're listening to More or Less with me, Tim Harford. And now to your local doctor's surgery, or more specifically, loyal listener, Michael Greens. He got in touch with us via More or less@BBC.co.uk, after spotting a statistic in the waiting room of his gp. I came across this brightly coloured Department of Health leaflet and was going through the warnings about drinking too much and came across across what to me was quite a scary warning, which was that two large glasses of wine a day or more could make you three times more likely to get mouth cancer. I wondered, gosh, could it be that bad? And what evidence was there? Before we get to the question of evidence, let's think about what the NHS leaflet is actually saying and what it's not saying, because it doesn't actually tell us what the risk of mouth cancer is. 3 times 0 risk would still be zero risk. And unless we know how common mouth cancer is, it's hard to know how worried we should be about the risk of it tripling, which is why risk communication experts often advise against reporting risks in this way. So what are the chances of getting cancers of the mouth? This is David Conway, lecturer in Dental Public Health at the University of Glasgow.
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David Conway
They are relatively low volume cancers. So I think across the UK, we have around 3,000 cases per year of mouth cancer.
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Tim Harford
So 3,000 cases of mouth cancer means it's not by any means an extremely rare condition, but it is a lot rarer than breast cancer and prostate cancer. There are around 50,000 cases a year of each of them. So the second thing to think about is the amount of alcohol required to produce this higher risk. Here's David Conway again.
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David Conway
Two glasses of wine. And we're talking large glasses here, presume, which is what, 250ml high strength wine? I mean, 250ml times two is about 2/3 of a 750ml bottle of wine. That is quite a lot of alcohol.
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Tim Harford
Given the way the NHS leaflet defines a glass of wine, two glasses a day turns out to be twice the recommended limit for men and three times the recommended limit for women in the uk. Well, now we've put the claim into context. Now, is it true we asked the NHS to give us their evidence connecting alcohol with mouth cancer? The key claim, two glasses equals three times the risk, seems to come from a study published in 2004. It's what we call a meta analysis by Professor Giovanni Correio and colleagues from the University of Milan Bikotka. They reviewed all the studies they could find and brought them together to try to produce a clearer picture. So does the study by Correjo and his colleagues back up the NHS claim? Here's David Conway.
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David Conway
Technically, if you read the exact wording, it probably is technically true. It's caveated with a could statement that it could make you three times more likely.
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Tim Harford
Yes. The NHS leaflet says that alcohol could triple your risk of mouth cancer, which is a convenient choice of phrase because a lot of things could be true. The authors of the 2004 study sent us an updated version of their work, including a handy graph which does seem to show that with an amount of alcohol similar to two glasses of wine, your risk of getting mouth cancer increases threefold. But do we fully believe it? It's a robust, decent meta analysis, but even so, it's difficult to standardize the data. The French are drinking wine while the Russians are drinking vodka. How do we make these alcohol consumption studies comparable? However, this is not the main difficulty that David can spot in the study.
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David Conway
I think tobacco is often the elephant in the room when you are looking at the risks associated with alcohol. It's difficult to totally disentangle that risk to just focus on the alcohol consumpt consumption.
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Tim Harford
Which brings us to a new and important problem. When you see that drinkers tend to suffer from cancer, is that correlation caused by the drink or is the pattern in the data explained by something else? For instance, that drinkers are more likely to smoke? Of course, the Correo paper tries to make the necessary adjustments and the authors defend their methodology as robust. But David Conway isn't sure how effective that is.
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David Conway
We've looked at that in a European wide case control study called The Archeage study, we had two and a half thousand head and neck hand cases. From our data, we see that tobacco alone seems to contribute 22%. Interestingly, alcohol alone, when you just try and tease out the contribution of alcohol alone, it contributed 0%. But tobacco and alcohol in combination had a 61% risk or population attributable risk. So the combination of their effect is actually, I think, where the heart of a lot of the risk is.
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Tim Harford
In short, perhaps the risk factor for mouth cancer isn't alcohol or even tobacco, but alcohol and tobacco together. One final point. The leaflet talks about mouth cancer, but it turns out that it means cancers of both the mouth and the throat. And David Conway points out these are different cancers and they seem to have different risk factors behind them. So confusing the two isn't a good idea. Although the NHS has based its claim on some well established studies, it's hard to be as definitive as this leaflet sounds. The statement's predicated on assuming you can control for drinking without smoking, and it includes throat cancer too. It also hides the fact that out of a number of illnesses which can be caused by alcohol, the incidence of mouth cancer is lower than some other cancers. But one thing we must also consider, this fact shouldn't be seen in isolation. It was part of a bigger campaign run by the NHS trying to encourage people to have a healthier lifestyle, to avoid all sorts of cancers. And it's not focusing on mouth cancer. And the general claim that drinking less will reduce the risk of illness is indeed well supported by the evidence. If you have a statistical claim you'd like us to investigate, please get in touch via more or lessbc.co.uk. What is this? Charlotte, have you plugged your MP3 player into the studio sound system again?
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Charlotte McDonald
Tim, this is Beyonce. It's a very inspirational tune.
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Tim Harford
Is it? Why are we playing it?
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Charlotte McDonald
Well, it's going to get us into the mood for the next item. One of our listeners got in touch to say this.
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Wendy Sigle Rushton
I read an interesting article by Lynn Seagal in the Guardian Saturday Supplement and wanted to check out these statistics that come towards the end of the article. She says, today, by the age of 60, more than twice as many women as men are single. Older men are often living with younger women, which is why twice as many young men as young women live alone.
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Tim Harford
Twice as many women as men are single by the age of 60. Just two decades more and the odds will be firmly in my favour.
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Charlotte McDonald
Tim, if you could stop thinking about your love life as a sexagenarian, I Thought we might look into these numbers.
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Tim Harford
Fair enough, Charlotte, take it away.
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Charlotte McDonald
Okay, so this paragraph comes from an article written by academic Lyn Siegel. Most of the piece is her personal story of managing relationships over the decades, but at the very end, she adds these statistics. There are three points here, so let's take each in turn. Are there twice as many women as men who are single by age 60? Now, the obvious thing to do was to get in touch with Lynne Siegel herself, and she pointed me in the direction of research which explains that in the UK, twice as many women live alone compared to men. I checked, and this is backed up by official statistics. In 2013, there were about 2.4 million women living alone over the age of 65, compared to about 1.2 million men. So that's the first statement. Let's turn to the second point. Are older men often living with younger women? Now, there's some evidence that men are more likely than women to re partner after the end of a marriage. And there's also evidence that men remarry women younger than themselves. So yes, there's evidence to support that assertion too. Now to the third. Are twice as many young men as young women living alone? Again, looking at the evidence, lyn Siegel highlighted 16% of men aged 25 to 44 years old were living alone, a rate that is twice as high as that of 8% of women of the same age living by themselves. So again, that statement is backed up by the numbers.
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Tim Harford
Well, thanks, Charlotte.
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Charlotte McDonald
Now, wait a minute, Tim. It's more complicated than that. Although those three statements are strictly true, there's a lot more to consider. So, to start with, we have established that there are twice as many older women living alone than men. Also, if you look at marriage statistics, a higher percentage of men are married than are women. However, experts have been telling me that the one reason for this is that there are many more women over the age of 60 in the UK than
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Wendy Sigle Rushton
there are men in the age group 60 plus. There are 83 men for every hundred women.
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Charlotte McDonald
This is Wendy Sigle Rushton, an expert in gender and family studies from the London School of Economics.
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Wendy Sigle Rushton
Living alone amongst older people is due to the fact that women are more likely to live longer and more likely to live as widows. So imbalanced sex ratios is a huge part of the story.
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Charlotte McDonald
Another issue she pointed out is that although official statistics show a person is single, it doesn't necessarily mean that's how they describe themselves.
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Wendy Sigle Rushton
I think informally, most people see single as being unpartnered, not in a couple. And we have official statistics that can provide information on marital status and we've got other measures which try and get at people that are in co residential unions. But we don't really have official statistics that match up with what individuals see as being in a couple or not. Well, the living apart together relationship would be very hard to capture. You have people who perhaps have been in a previous relationship, they haven't formed a new marriage, and both people maintain separate households and separate addresses. So in all of the formal statistics they are seen to be independent, unmarried, living alone, and yet they spend one night or the other at each other's place and pretty much share a life together. Those people wouldn't be captured in statistics,
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Charlotte McDonald
but Wendy Sigle Rushton says that the statistics do indeed show that men will often choose a younger partner, but not at all stages of life.
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Wendy Sigle Rushton
When we look at first marriages, people are marrying at pretty young ages. And at younger ages, age preferences tend to be more narrow and people tend to marry people that are more similar to themselves. As people get older and form subsequent partnerships, their preferences in terms of age differences tend to be a bit wider. We have seen more people getting divorced and forming second partnerships in recent years. And in second partnerships age differences tend to be wider. And because men tend to be older in partnerships, we have seen older men living with much younger women. There is some truth in that.
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Charlotte McDonald
Why do you think it is that way round?
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Wendy Sigle Rushton
The why is harder to get at. A colleague of mine and I wrote a paper where my colleague Maurini Brocklein actually contacted a dating agency. And so we were able to look at what people preferred in terms of the age of their partners. What we did find, which was rather interesting and relates to the third point in this sentence, is that when you look at age preferences for people in their 20s, women are very much in high demand because men in their twenties are very interested in women in their twenties. But men in their thirties are also interested in women in their twenties. And men in their twenties are pretty hard done by because women who are slightly older than men in their 20s aren't interested in them. The flip side of that is that when women are older, they are in circumstances where they would quite like an older man. But older men have wider age preferences and quite like younger women. So women face the reverse of what men in their 20s faced.
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Charlotte McDonald
So basically a 35 year old man, their preference might be that they'd be quite happy with a 35 year old woman, but that 35 year old woman is in a way also in competition because that 35 year old man would be quite happy perhaps to have a 27 or 28 year old. And then the idea though, that there are twice as many young men as young women living alone, is that true?
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Wendy Sigle Rushton
There are many more young men living alone than there are young women living alone. But that's not necessarily because of young women have been snapped up by older men. There's a variety of reasons. Women do tend to form partnerships earlier, they tend to marry younger, but they're also more likely to be lone parents. Lone parents are not going to be recorded as living alone because these are household statistics, not relationship statistics. And if they are in a partnership that breaks down and that partnership included children, they're more likely to live with the children than the man is.
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Charlotte McDonald
So many women may not be in a romantic relationship, but because they're living with their children in official household statistics, which is where these numbers come from, they will not be classed as living alone. So there's a lot going on behind the numbers and indeed behind closed doors. It may be true that there are a lot more single women over the age of 60 compared to men in this country. Country. But that isn't a simple case of men pairing off with younger women. Women live longer on average, plus they seem less keen to go for younger men. Not to mention we really don't know how many officially single people are actually in a meaningful relationship.
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Tim Harford
Charlotte McDonald reporting there. Thank you, Charlotte. Back in 2010, one of the most memorable tennis matches in Wimbledon's history took place between John Isner from the United States and France's Nicolas Mahou. So close it went on and on and on and on.
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David Conway
Hux,
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Tim Harford
nicknamed the endless match, the score in the final set went so high it temporarily broke the scoreboard. But after three days, after 11 hours and five minutes of play, and after 138 games, the match was won. By John Isner. The match was the longest in history and broke many other records. But meanwhile, over in John Isner's homeland, the United States, a sports writer was firing up his spreadsheet because he'd noticed something else was remarkable about the match. Nicola Mahoud lost, but he actually won more points.
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Ryan Rodenberg
It jumped off the page to me that Isner won the match, but his opponent had won a full set's worth of points more than John Isner had. Something had to be going on there to have such an irregular result in terms of the number of points. Wonderful.
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Tim Harford
This is Ryan Rodenberg, sports writer and sports law specialist at Florida State University. Mahoud, by the way won 502 points, Isner a mere 478. And both players destroyed the previous record for the number of aces in a match. One of the things that makes a tennis match exciting is that it's made up of lots of smaller dramas. A match is made up of sets, and to win a men's Grand Slam match, you need to win three sets. Each set is made up of games with the advantage of serve alternating between those games. You win a set by winning at least six games and then either winning a tie break game or getting two games ahead of your opponent. Final sets don't have tie breaks, which is why the Mahuisnomach went on for three days. Neither player could get two games ahead because both players had very strong serves. Now, even the games themselves are made up of points. You need to win at least four points and to be two points ahead of your opponent to win a game. What all that means is that if you win some games and some sets by large margins, you can end up winning more points than your opponent, yet losing the match. Now, the Mahuisna match was unique, but these topsy turvy matches where the loser accumulates more points than the winner, aren't unique at all. As Ryan Rodenberg discovered systematically over the
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Ryan Rodenberg
course of 20 plus years. We saw several examples of this. And even more recently with the ongoing Australian Open tournament, we saw that American Venus Williams lost a match where this exact sequence happened against her first round opponent down in Australia.
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Tim Harford
Does this happen often?
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Ryan Rodenberg
Fairly often. I mean, it happens little less than 5% of all matches exhibit these type of unique characteristics. So when we looked at every men's match since 1990, a sample of over 61,000 matches, a little over 4.5% exhibited this characteristic. So it's rare, but certainly not unheard of. And a number of players, a number of noteworthy players have participated in these type of matches in the last 23 years.
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Tim Harford
And then Ryan stumbled across another surprise. There was one player in particular who stood out in this data. He's far and away the player most likely to be on the wrong end of these results. Winning the most points but losing the match. And you may just have heard of him, he's the winningest player in the history of men's tennis. A young chap called Roger Federer.
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Ryan Rodenberg
Roger Federer was a complete outlier. During the course of his long career, he's participated in 28 of these type of matches and he has a 4 in 24 lifetime record in them.
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Tim Harford
So what we're saying here is when Roger Federer is involved in a match where the person who wins most points loses the match. That guy's usually Roger Federer. He's usually the one who wins most points and yet loses the match.
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Ryan Rodenberg
Exactly.
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Tim Harford
So why is that?
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Ryan Rodenberg
We came up with two explanations. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. The first one primarily is on the other side of the net. It's not specific to Federer directly, but his opponents may have consciously decided, well, if I were just to play my normal tennis game, I'm going to lose 626 2. This guy's just too good. But if I adopt a very high risk but high reward strategy, perhaps my slim chances of winning go up.
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Tim Harford
So they're going for broke on the big points and they'll usually lose. That usually won't work. But every now and then that comes off. So this is a player who loses more points than Federer because, hey, they're playing Roger Federer, of course they're going to lose more points. And yet somehow they get a few lucky points just when it counts and they manage to win the game.
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Ryan Rodenberg
Exactly. So that would be going on. Plus they strategically, throughout the course of the match may take certain stretches of points off to rest, what people would call tanking.
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Tim Harford
And so that's just saying, look, the fourth set is just beyond me. I'm not going to win it. I'll lose heavily in the fourth set. I'm not even going to try. Hopefully then I will have my energy back and I'll be able to win the fifth set. And if I win the fifth set, I win the match.
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Ryan Rodenberg
Exactly. And your energy level will be a little higher.
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Tim Harford
So you said that you think that both of these things may be applying to Federer. So what you're saying is he doesn't tap.
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Ryan Rodenberg
Exactly. There is little to no evidence that on an interim match basis, Federer partakes in this strategy.
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Tim Harford
There is no point at which Roger Federer takes a rest. He's always trying to win the next point.
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Ryan Rodenberg
Exactly.
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Tim Harford
Ryan Rodenberg, and you can read more about his analysis online in the Atlantic Now. Ruth Alexander's here. Ruth, what have you got for us?
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Well, I was just going to say it was interesting to see that when Federer played his Australian Open semi final against the world number one, Rafael Nadal, there was no sign of the topsy turvy result. Unfortunately for Federer, he. He lost three sets to love, 19 games to 12 and 105 points to 86. The paradox did make an appearance in the biggest shock of the men's tournament though, when the three times defending champion Novak Djokovic went out to Stan Bavrinka in the quarter finals. He won 161 points, eight more than his opponent.
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Thank you, Ruth. That's all we've got time for this week. Please keep your comments and your questions coming To More or lessbc.co.uk you can download this program and many other editions at our website BBC.co.uk more or less until next week. Goodbye.
- [27:27]
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. You can Download many more Radio 4 programmes for free. Find these@BBC.co.uk Radio 4.