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Gun laws and gold medals
00:27:48
Last week's mass-shooting at a cinema in Colorado has - not suprisingly - intensified...
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A
Hello and welcome to more or less wrestling the truth from numbers, greco roman style. Later in the program, we'll be looking at the correlation between gun control laws and gun crime.
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B
And I think it's wonderful for a mother to hold a baby in her arms and think of the influences that she can have on that child.
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A
We'll be asking why the mothers of US Presidents such as Rose Kennedy live longer than the mums of British prime ministers. But first, as I speak, the nation is preparing to watch the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. If you're listening to the Repeat, wasn't it great? If it's a shambles, can we edit that bit out? Yeah, ok, cool. On More or less, we've been limbering up for the Olympics too. We've been wondering whether it's possible to level the playing field. I don't mean the actual playing fields, which we hope are level already, but the statistical playing field. Charlotte MacDonald, explain.
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C
Well, this is the thought experiment we set ourselves. If you adjust for the fact that some countries are richer than others and some have more people in them, can we work out what the final medal tally should look like based on only those factors? In other words, can we work out which countries punch above or below their weight? We asked Professor Megan Bussey from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in the US to help us with the sums.
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D
We think there are two primary economic indicators that are going to be the most important. The first of these is population. Extraordinary athletic talent of the sort you need to win Olympic medals doesn't occur very often. And so you need to have basically a lot of people born in your country to have a lot of people born who have that kind of raw athletic ability. The second thing that's going to help you is frankly, if you're a wealthy country, it matters both because you need the kind of sports infrastructure necessary to train athletes. The second reason that it matters is that you need to have people be wealthy enough that children or teenagers or young adults depending on the sport, can have enough leisure time to devote themselves to specializing in these very particular set of abilities. So a family that really needs all of its children in order to feed itself and support itself is not going to be able to have one of its 12 or 14 year old children devote 8 or 10 hours a day to being good at diving or archery or gymnastics or that kind of thing.
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C
Using just these indicators, Meghan found that the US should come top with 51 medals, followed by China, Japan and Germany. Britain should come 8th with 32 medals in total 62 countries would get at least one medal. 143 probably wouldn't get any. And that's what should happen based on population and wealth. But of course, this is just a thought experiment.
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E
It.
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C
It's probably not the best way to predict what will actually happen. If you look at who won what at the last Olympics, quite a number of countries got far fewer or far more medals than our model would have predicted.
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D
So the kind of countries that underperform are typically countries that have very large populations but low GDP per capita. And those would be countries where you would think, given the number of people, gee, there ought to be some really extraordinary Olympic talent there. But it could be the case that given income levels in that country, either the people who are lucky to be endowed with that athletic ability don't have the leisure to be able to develop those talents, or they don't happen to live in a place where there are sports programs and sports facilities that enable them to develop that talent. So a country like Brazil or a country like India or a country like Venezuela.
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C
Now that's why some countries underperform. But then there are others that overperform.
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D
Some of these countries are places like the US where sports are really popular and lots of people are involved in lots of kinds of sports. Other examples are countries that have political reasons to want to have good Olympic performance. So China is an example of this, which has a much more systematic way of training Olympic athletes, of taking kids out of families and out of villages and putting them in Olympic academies at young ages. The other kind of overperformance that we see sometimes are places like the republics that used to be part of the former Soviet Union. So countries that perhaps still have the infrastructure created by the Soviet Union when it had a strong political reason to want to have good Olympic performance and might not have such high population or might not have such high GDP per capita, but are still reaping the benefits of those institutional investments that were made some years ago.
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C
So Meghan says that population and GDP will only tell you part of the story. It's not just about which countries invest in sport and which don't. There are cultural factors at play, too. For instance, according to Meghan's original table, India should be ranked fifth in the world with 34 medals. But in 2008, it got just three. Meghan says this is partly explained by its low GDP per capita. But Professor Dan Johnson from Colorado College in the US Points out that some countries simply prefer non Olympic sports.
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F
If you think about the sports competitions that the Indian Population really enjoys cricket ranks really high. Well, there are zero medals to be won in cricket. In contrast to that. Take the example of South Korea. One of their national passions, athletically is taekwondo. Well, that happens to be a very fortuitous athletic passion for South Korea because there are loads of medals to be won in taekwondo, right? I mean, men's and women's categories, multiple weight classes, you can field a flotilla of athletes and walk home with a truckload of medals, whereas India's passion in cricket translates into zero medals.
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C
If what we want to do is predict the final medal tally as best we can, then we need to put some other things in our model. Dan has created such a table by adding two more factors. First of all, he measured the difference between what countries should get based on population and GDP and what they really got over the last 60 years. He then created an average of winningness, as he calls it, for each country and added that to the model. He calls this the cultural specific factor. And on top of that, Dan says host countries, perhaps not surprisingly, have an edge.
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F
In a nation that hosts the Games, that nation will be expected to win 18 more middles than they would were they not hosting. But that's not a one time spike. There are also smaller spikes in the Olympic year preceding. So for Britain's case in 2008 when China had a huge hosting spike, Britain actually also had a mini spike. And then there's a legacy effect on the tail end as well. So in the subsequent two Games we see a mini bump about five medals overall in the two subsequent Olympic venues. The idea being, or the intuition being, they generally ramp up their spending on Olympic activities. The athletes don't have to deal with changes in cuisine, changes in time zone, frankly, all of those advantages of playing in front of a home crowd. The legacy effect after that is, we suspect, due to the fact that Olympians frequently repeat their performance.
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C
So put all that together and dan predicts the USA will still come top this time with 99 medals. China will get 67, then Russia, then the UK in fourth place with 45.
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A
Charlotte MacDonald, the Fatima Whitbread of Radio Current Affairs. We're going to publish all the data Charlotte was talking about online, so you'll be able to see how accurate or otherwise Megan and Dan's predictions turn out to be. You're listening to More or Less with Me, Tim Harford. Last week's mass shooting at a cinema in Colorado has not surprisingly intensified America's bitter and long running argument with itself about gun control. The Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, has called on President Obama and Mitt Romney to make gun control an election issue. The argument is political and highly partisan, but it's also practical. Would tighter gun laws actually lead to fewer gun debts? You might think it's obvious that they would. But as Wesley Stevenson's been finding out, the evidence isn't quite that clear.
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G
Think about Britain and the US. There are between 90 and 100 guns for every hundred people in the US. There are just 6.6 in England and Wales. In the US there are nearly three murders with guns for every 100,000 people each year. That's 40 times more than in England and Wales. Ergo, fewer guns equal fewer incidents of gun crime, right? Well, maybe. But consider this stat from Professor Dan Polsby, dean of the law school at George Mason university in the USA, who wrote a famous article in the mid-90s called the False Promise of Gun Control.
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H
There are more guns in this country than there were 30 years ago by a lot. And most of the new inventory are handguns, which everybody says those are the evil guns. That's what crime can be traced back to. And yet our homicide rate today is half what it was in 1980 and in that general period of time. So having more guns out there is consistent with a falling homicide rate.
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G
But Professor Polsby isn't foolish and realises that there's a lot more at play here. Of course, correlation, as we know, doesn't mean causation. But he thinks there may be some link between the two. And this is his reasoning.
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H
Law abiding people by definition here are more likely to obey those laws. But if they're likely to obey those laws, they're probably also likely to obey the laws that forbid criminal behavior. More generally, people that are less likely to obey those laws may be less likely to obey other kinds of laws, including committing crimes with guns. So you could have a prohibitory law that actually decreases the amount of firearms holding in a given geographic jurisdiction, perversely, has the effect of creating more crime out of that, because the people that have turned in their guns are the ones that want to use it for legitimate self defense. And the people that have retained their guns by tautology are the mischief makers.
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G
Well, this has some logic to it. When he first wrote his influential article back in the 1990s, there was little empirical evidence on the issue of gun control. That was until a man called John Lott came along. What he wanted to do was look at what happened before and after states introduced gun control laws. So he compiled crime data for all the counties in the United States between 1977 and 1992 and looked at the difference various gun control laws made.
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I
Amazing thing. Prior to my research, none of the research on gun control had accounted for any law enforcement activity. So I tried to account for things like arrest rates, conviction rates, prison sentence lengths, the death penalty. And then you have demographics. Income, poverty, unemployment, literally hundreds of different factors that were included, as well as the different types of gun control laws. And what struck me was that there's only really one type of gun control law that seemed to produce any type of benefits, and that was the passage of these right to carry laws.
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G
Right to carry laws are laws that allow citizens to buy and carry guns, specifically handguns. When this research came out, it had a profound effect on the gun control debate, and unsurprisingly, it was jumped upon by the gun lobby. Now, while the downturn in violent crime was significant, it was still quite small, between 6 to 8%. Other researchers began to question the results, and one man who did so was Professor John Donahue, an economist and lawyer from Stanford University. He says that although lot controlled for a lot of factors, he didn't agree with all of them.
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E
John Lott was using the ratio of arrests to murders when he tried to explain the number of murders in a state. But if you look at that ratio of arrests to murders, that ratio is frequently greater than one, because frequently many people are arrested for a single murder. And Lott was just using the total number of arrests and dividing it by the total number of murders. Two other measures that are better are what's the rate of incarceration in a jurisdiction? And what's the rate of police hiring in a jurisdiction. And those are measures that have been found in many other criminological studies to correlate very well with explanations of changes in crime.
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G
Now, this may seem a little arcane, but if you change even just this controlling factor, it changes the results and makes them much less significant, and in some cases proves the opposite point, showing violent crime, particularly robbery with guns, rises when right to carry laws are introduced. Another factor is the time frame you use. Professor Donoghue also ran the figures over a longer time frame and saw the effects of the laws diminish. John Lott ran a longer but different timeframe, and he said it backed his original research. And herein lies the problem.
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E
It is incredibly difficult to tease out these causal relationships. Ideally, you'd like to have the law implemented in a random fashion. So let's say I think there is something like 38 states now that have adopted right to carry laws. If we had said to those 38 states, well, why don't half of you adopt it? And then we'll compare in five years, then we'd have a nice answer to this question. I suspect that if that had been done, we would have found out that the states that passed these laws probably did get a little bit more crime in terms of more assaults, maybe more murders. But that the impact was not huge would be my guess.
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G
When the National Academy of Sciences looked at the literature back in 2004, including John Lott's work and John Donahue's research, they concluded that it was not possible to determine that there was a causal link between the passage of right to carry laws and crime rates. The gun lobby in the US and John Lott himself criticised the panel for being too anti gun. And this is the further problem. Even if it was proved that more guns meant more crime, it probably wouldn't make a lot of difference to the levels of gun control. As Professor Polsby points out, people in
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H
this country, by overwhelming majorities, crossing party lines, crossing racial and cultural lines, crossing rural urban lines, believe in the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms.
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G
So into the void left by inconclusive figures, steps, politics and conjecture. And if Olympic medals were awarded for this, you can imagine the Americans would probably win.
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A
Wesley Stevenson, you're listening to More or Less in association with the Open University. The Treasury Minister, David Gauke, came in for some stick this week for arguing that people who pay plumbers and cleaners cash in hand while not breaking the law are immoral. He says the loss to the Exchequer is about £2 billion, an estimate which comes from a 2008 Public Accounts Committee report. In reply, several commentators have argued that this whole problem is small beer compared to the huge amounts sheltered from the taxman by large companies and rich individuals. And several listeners have asked us, are they right? Well, it's hard to say because the hidden economy is well hidden. But here's what we do know. Revenue and Customs say the tax gap is about 35 billion pounds a year. That's the difference between the tax they get and the tax they think they should get. £35 billion is a big number, substantially more than £500 per person in the country, more than £1,000 per income taxpayer and about 7% of total government revenue. HMRC say that about half that amount can be blamed on small to medium sized companies and about a quarter on large companies. That means the lion's share of the tax gap can be attributed not to sprawling multinationals, but to smaller companies which will include everyone from sole traders to corner shops to medium sized businesses with a couple of hundred employees. So in short, although we should be concerned about big businesses avoiding tax, we should be at least as concerned about small businesses doing so too. Now, moving on. Mike Shearing, a listener in Malaysia contacted us recently with an interesting observation.
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J
It's come to my attention that of 24 Republican or Democrat US presidential candidates since the war, three of them had mothers who lived to 100, six more who made it to 90, and five more who have made 80 plus mothers of British prime ministers seem to fare much worse. Are these figures statistically unusual or significant? How often should I get out?
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A
Well, Mike, the short answers to your questions are yes and more, but the longer answer is much more interesting. We collated the age of death for every mom of a post war US President or losing presidential candidate, except those who are still alive, of course. And for the mothers of every post war British prime minister and losing opposition leader. Then we sent the whole lot to Dr. George Leeson at Oxford University's Institute of Aging.
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K
Your list is absolutely spot on. So that if we look at the mothers of the US Presidents, we have an average age at death equal to 83.7 years. And if we look at the mothers of the UK prime ministers, we have an average age at death of 74.8.
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A
Might that be a single outlier?
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L
I mean, I noticed.
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A
Well, President Kennedy's mother, for instance, lived to 104. I mean, might be just one or two. That.
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K
No, that's the interesting thing because that would be one's immediate reaction to say, oh, we've just got Rose Kennedy who's living so long and we don't have anyone like that in the UK. Well, that's not quite clear. One of the UK mothers actually lives to 97. So we do have, if you like, an outlier there. But it's not that at all actually,
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A
because if we then Michael Howard's mother.
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K
I know it's Michael Howard. Right, okay. But if we look at something called the median, which is another way of looking at how data are distributed, the median actually divides data into two equal halves. So 50% of your observations are higher than the median and 50% are lower. And the median is therefore less sensitive to these outliers. The Median for the US mothers is 84.5, so very close to the average. For the UK mothers, the average was almost 75 and the median is 76. So there's very little difference. So it's not outliers. And in fact, if we think of what we would expect to find with ages at death is that we would have what we call a normal distribution. This is a nice bell shaped curve. So we would have most people congregated around the middle observations, and then we'd have some small numbers, usually out at the extremes. And we do have that for both of these groups of mothers. However, if you like, the US curve has moved further to the right, so that, as your listener pointed out, we've got more people in the distribution who are reaching 100 and in their 90s in the US simply because the curve has all moved to the right.
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A
So we're fairly sure that the difference in the average is real?
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K
Absolutely, yes. It's so significant.
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A
Now, might it still be a coincidence because we're still only Talking about about 40 people, I suppose about 20 in each?
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K
We are, yes. And it is a small number of observations. But we can begin to look at other things where we might want to get a more clear picture of what is actually happening. Because of course, there are a number of things that affect your age at death, what we call life expectancy. And one of them, of course, is the time in which you are born. So what we've done is we've looked at what we call cohort life expectancy. So we look at the cohort that is the birth generation that these women come from, and we've looked at their life expectancies for that cohort to determine really whether the US and the UK mothers respectively are outliving their peers.
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A
And are they?
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K
And they are, yes. But it's more interesting than that even. And that's when we begin to ask questions about why is this so? For every decade going back to the 1840s, when we have our first mother born, to the 1940s, when we have our last mother born, for every decade, the life expectancy of that cohort of women in the UK is higher than the life expectancy for that cohort in the United States. And we're only looking at white women in the United States because once we begin to take the whole population, then there is actually a huge effect because of the ethnic mix in the us so UK life expectancy for that cohort higher than the US life expectancy. The UK mothers of Prime Ministers are outliving their peers quite significantly, the US mothers are also outliving their peers. However, and this is what is interesting, given that the general population life expectancy for these cohorts is higher in the UK than in the US or what is fascinating is to see that the US mothers are living much longer than the comparable cohorts of UK Prime Minister's mothers.
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A
George Leeson from Oxford University. So there is an advantage to being a leader's mother, but the advantage is much greater in the US than in the UK. Dr. Leeson speculates that the reason may be to do with the quality of private health care available to wealthy Americans. He says he plans to look into all this in more detail and he may even write an academic paper about it. So listener Mike Shearing. Good work.
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L
The more or less travel budget doesn't often allow us to get out and about, but this week we've made an exception. And I am standing on the site of the finishing line of the 1908 Olympic Games, which sounds all very impressive until you realise it's about 10 seconds walk from our offices in White City in West London. Still, London's changed a great deal and Britain's changed a great deal since 1908, and so has the Olympic Games. And to mark that fact, the House
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A
of Commons Library has published a rather
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L
beautiful book called Olympic Social and Economic change since the 1908 and 1948 London Games. I think the reason the House of Commons Library is now doing such interesting stuff is because they poached one of our best people, Oliver Hawkins, formerly of More or Less now at the House of Commons Library and one of the authors of this book.
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A
Ollie, welcome back.
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M
First of all, thank you very much. It's nice to be back.
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L
One thing that's changed is that we won an awful lot more gold medals back in the day. We're standing in front of a list of the gold medal winners and Great Britain won 56, USA 23 and Sweden a poor third place with eight gold.
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M
The 1908 Olympic Games were exceptional in terms of Britain's performance. They won more gold medals per head in the 1908 Olympic Games than in any other Games. Per 10 million of population, they won 13 gold medals per head. And when the Games came back to London in 1948, they won less than one.
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L
But objectively speaking, the performances in 1908, they weren't really up to much by modern standards.
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M
No, I think one of the most interesting things about how the Games has changed over the last hundred years is the extent to which performances have improved. And you can see that in the record progression. One of the most interesting charts for me in the book is a chart that shows Olympic records at each Games during the century, measured by the speed at which athletes were running in order to set those records. And to give you a sense of just how much athletes have improved over the period, when Kenenisa bekele broke the 5,000 meter record in the 2008 Games in Beijing, he was running fast enough to have won the 1500 metres in 1908. Similarly, when Constantina Dita Tomescu won the marathon in the 2008 Games, she would have won the men's event in 1908 by a clear half hour.
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L
Maybe part of the reason that the 1908 times weren't that impressive was that actually a lot of countries didn't really take part fully.
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M
No, that's right. Participation in the Games has gone up enormously over the last hundred years. And in fact, when the Olympic flag, as we currently know it, was first presented to the International Olympic Committee in 1914, its designer said that the colours of the rings represented all of the nations of the world, and then went on to list just 14 countries. And even to this day, Africa is underrepresented in terms of the number of athletes it sends per head of population. And yet countries like Kenya, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe continue to outperform Western countries in terms of the number of gold medals they win per athlete that they send.
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L
Now, the book isn't just about how the Olympics have changed, it's also about how the country has changed. What were the real surprises to you as you and your colleagues were working on this?
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M
I think one of the most surprising and sort of almost optimistic statistics in the book concerns the decline in infant mortality that's happened over the last hundred years. When the Games came to London in 1908, infant mortality in England and Wales was 120 deaths per thousand live births for children under the age of one. And today the number is about four per thousand.
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L
And I guess we can't really talk about British achievements over the last century or so without talking about alcohol. What's the story there?
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M
The alcohol story is very interesting because alcohol consumption, when measured as litres of pure alcohol per head, essentially has a U shaped curve over the last hundred years.
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L
Do we actually drink litres of pure alcohol?
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M
No, we don't drink litres of pure alcohol. In fact, the kind of drinks that we drink has changed quite considerably. At the start of the 20th century, 98% of all alcohol consumed was in the form of beer and spirits. That's fallen to 60%. And wine now accounts for a third of the the alcohol that we consume.
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L
Ok, Ollie, well, on that final thought, we're standing with our toes on the finishing line. I've got the wine bar in my sights. I think it's about 50 yards. I reckon I could be there in six seconds. Ready, steady, go.
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A
Oliver Hawkins, who lost, incidentally, that's it for now. Do please send us your comments and questions, more or less@BBC.co.uk, and do please visit our much improved website, BBC.co.uk moreorless next week, among less trivial matters, we'll be looking for the most dangerous place in television crime drama. Is it midsummer? Cabot Cove? Tune in and find out. Until then, goodbye.
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N
More or Less was presented by Tim Harford, the Financial Times undercover economist. The producer was Richard Knight and the editor was Richard Varden. More or Less is made in association with the Open University.