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How big are the Conservatives' planned cuts?
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The Conservatives' plans to achieve a budget surplus by 2019-20 have led to near that...
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- [00:01]
Tim Harford
Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast from the BBC. Statistically proven to be the very best numbers program around. Hello and welcome to More or Less, the programme which uses numbers the way your gin and tonic uses a slice of lime. In today's program, spending cuts, victims of terrorism, and this. Do you concede Tokyo the best and worst board games in the world? The statistics decide. Although my children have their own ideas, too. But first, in the Chancellor's Autumn statement, which for some reason happened in December, Mr. Osborne announced that by 2019 20, Britain is now predicted to have a surplus of 23 billion pounds. There seemed to be near universal acknowledge. Could we stop the Christmas music, please? Thank you. There seemed to be near universal acknowledgement that this plan to achieve a surplus and to do so without raising taxes, would involve big reductions in government spending. Really big ones. Massive, dramatic, devastating. But then this week, David Cameron said something that made those warnings seem completely misplaced. It means reducing overall government spending by just 1% each year. Put another way, we have to spend one pound a year in every pound
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Oliver Rader
hundred that government spends.
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Tim Harford
I don't think there is a family
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Steve Buckland
or a business that couldn't do that,
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Tim Harford
and I don't think that government, seeing
- [01:34]
Steve Buckland
as it is your money, should be any different.
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Tim Harford
Just what's going on here? Would the proposed cuts to government spending be huge or just 1%, as the Prime Minister said there? I asked Gemma Tetlow from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent economic research institute, to explain.
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Gemma Tetlow
David Cameron is right to say that over the next Parliament, the coalition's plans imply that total spending will be cut by about 1% a year over the four years from 2015 to 2019?
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Tim Harford
Okay, so it's true. But then how does that square with what we hear about enormous cuts that
- [02:11]
Gemma Tetlow
are planned, even though total spending is only being cut by 1% a year? Within that, there are parts of spending that are actually growing much more quickly over the next Parliament, which means that there are some other areas that are going to have to be cut by much more in order to reach that total of only a 1% cut.
- [02:27]
Tim Harford
So we've got a cut of 1% a year, but that's to overall spending. So when you just look at the areas that are not protected, what do the planned cuts look like?
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Gemma Tetlow
Each year, total spending is going to be cut by 1% a year. But once you take account of the fact that debt interest will be growing, spending on the NHS isn't going to be cut. Spending on schools and overseas aid may well not be cut. Either pension spending is going up, as are other areas of Social Security spending. That means that the unprotected areas of public service spending, that includes things like policing, the home office courts, areas of local government spending, such as social care, would need to be cut by about 6% a year over the next Parliament.
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Tim Harford
And then when you add it up over the entire Parliament, what are the cuts by the end of that parliament?
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Gemma Tetlow
So 6% a year for four years means that by the end of the Parliament, those areas will be cut by 26% compared to their 2015 level.
- [03:20]
Tim Harford
Okay, so that is, I think it's fair to say that's not a small cut.
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Gemma Tetlow
That is not a small cut to spending, and it comes on top of significant cuts to those same areas of spending over this Parliament. So it will not be easy to deliver.
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Tim Harford
So taking into account cuts since 2010, then when David Cameron became Prime Minister, what are the total cuts scheduled over the life of both parliaments?
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Gemma Tetlow
So comparing what these budgets would be in 2019 with where they were in 2010, they'd be about 41% lower than they were.
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Tim Harford
Okay, so that's not 41% on all government spending. That's 41% of the departments that are unprotected.
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Gemma Tetlow
So comparing these unprotected departments, if the next government were to continue the sorts of protection that we've seen in this Parliament, that would mean those unprotected departments budgets being 41% lower by 2019 than they were in 2010.
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Tim Harford
Now, Mr. Cameron, I'm sure would say that if we don't cut public spending, then the money's got to come from somewhere. It's got to come from tax increases or it's got to come from increased borrowing and be paid by future generations. So what are the alternatives? What, for example, is the Labour Party offering?
- [04:25]
Gemma Tetlow
The coalition's current plans are that they actually want to get to an overall budget surplus of about 1% of national income by 2019. Now, that's a substantially tighter fiscal position than we had before the crisis hit. So there's actually quite a bit of difference between the major parties between how much they want to cut borrowing over the next Parliament. The coalition's position of a 1% surplus is actually somewhat tighter than the concern Conservatives stated target of achieving a small surplus. And then the Labour and Liberal Democrats have suggested that they would actually be willing to borrow a bit more. They'd be willing to borrow to cover investment spending, although not day to day spending. So they could borrow perhaps £50 billion more and still comply with their fiscal targets.
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Tim Harford
£50 billion. Is that £50 billion in total over the life of the parliament, or 50 billion a year?
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Gemma Tetlow
That's £50 billion a year by 2019, and that's in 2019 prices. So that would feel a bit like a smaller number in today's prices.
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Tim Harford
That's still. That's nearly £1,000 a person in the country. It's quite a lot.
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Gemma Tetlow
It's quite a significant difference between the fiscal position that the Conservatives and the Labour and Noble Democrats want to achieve. And that may well be one of the biggest distinctions between what the different parties are offering in the next election.
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Tim Harford
Gemma Tetlow from the Institute for Fiscal Studies explaining how the Conservatives budget cutting plans would feel tougher than David Cameron would like you to think. All those numbers, by the way, were adjusted to remove the effects of inflation. I'm reminded of the American humorist P.J. o' Rourke's explanation about how to eliminate the U.S. budget deficit in the early 1990s. He made it look so easy. And never forget O' Rourke's circumcision. You can take 10% off the top of anything. That said, Djamotetlo's talking about many government department budgets enduring total cuts of 41% across the decade. It sounds like there are certain areas where that kind of cut really would bring tears to your eyes. Now, before we move on, Eagle eared, loyal listeners may have heard. Eagle eared. Owl eared, surely. Anyway, owl eared loyal listeners may have heard me popping up on the Today programme this week talking about Ed Miliband's new cost of Living index. Everything was going well until, without warning, Sarah Montague hurled this zinger of a question.
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Ruth
Do you have a favourite statistic, Tim?
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Tim Harford
Oh, well, statistics are our friends.
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Ruth
You love all of them.
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Tim Harford
In general, I have to say I have a fondness for cpi. If you're going to ask me to name my favorite statistic cpi, the Consumer Prices Index. It's rather well done. It doesn't get as much attention as it should. Ordinary people never believe that it's telling the truth, but I think they do a pretty good job. That is such a pathetic answer. Although, well, you know, the cpi, my friends, it's honest, it's reliable. The RPI gets so much attention, but it's all talk and no trousers. If you want the job done right, you go to the cpi. I'm probably not helping the situation here, but it did make me wonder, what's your favourite statistic or statistical series? Send it to us at more or lessbc.co.uk with a brief explanation and we'll do a statistical analysis later in the series to determine our favorites. You're listening to More or Less with me, Tim Harford and loyal listener Mark has been in touch with a question.
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Steve Buckland
After the Charlie Hebdo shooting, I heard
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Tim Harford
an imam interviewed on the World Service and one of the things that struck
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Steve Buckland
me was that he said that 95% of victims of terrorism are Muslims, Unfortunately.
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Tim Harford
Is this the sort of statistic that
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Steve Buckland
you might be interested in investigating?
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Tim Harford
Well, it is, Mark, and thank you. We started to look to find out where this number comes from. Ruth. Ruth is our producer. Ruth, you found it in a US government document.
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Ruth
Yes, a report from the National Counterterrorism Centre published in 2011 and it said that in cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97% of terrorism related fatalities over the past five years.
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Tim Harford
So the imam in Paris wasn't far off then?
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Ruth
Well, the problem is that qualifier in cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, we don't know whether that's most cases or just a few. And we don't know whether they're representative of other attacks or not.
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Tim Harford
Ruth, of course, does not give up easily.
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Ruth
I don't. So I went to the Global Terrorism Database, which has been going for 40 years and is now the official source of data for the US government. It's run by a group at Maryland University. And let's just stop for a minute to think about what their job involves because it is a bit depressing.
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Erin Miller
It can be trying, right? I mean, essentially we spend all day reading articles about devastating violence and it can sort of do a number on your view of the world. But it's also fascinating and it's also something that we think is important.
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Ruth
That's Erin Miller, a criminologist and statistician at the Global Terrorism Database. Every day she and her colleagues sift through thousands of media reports to determine where attacks have been happening.
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Tim Harford
But wait, what counts as terrorism? I mean, saying that something is terrorism or isn't terrorism. I mean, this is something that politicians do all the time purely for their own convenience.
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Ruth
It is. So the Global Terrorism Database has a particular methodology. They label and attack terrorism and put it into this database if it's intentional, violent or threatening and the perpetrators aren't governments.
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Tim Harford
So the alleged hack by North Korea of Sony Pictures, if it was in
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Ruth
fact by North Korea, it wouldn't count because that would be a state act.
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Tim Harford
And anyway it's non violent okay, and what else? Because if someone pulls a knife on me and demands money, well, that's an intentional, violent, non governmental act. So there must be some other criteria that go into the definition.
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Ruth
That's right. There are other criteria, other considerations. Is there a political, economic or religious goal? Is one, is it an attempt to send a message to a wider audience, not just to the direct victims? Or is it outside the context of legitimate warfare activities?
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Tim Harford
So all this goes into making up the definition of terrorism. Let's go back to the claim that 95% of terrorism victims are Muslim.
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Erin Miller
It's a really interesting question. It's very difficult to know for sure and to put a specific number on it like that.
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Ruth
The tricky thing is Erin and her team rely on media reports, and she says they don't often contain information about the religion of victims.
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Erin Miller
But we do have some information that could be useful for considering this type of question. So take for example, the most recent 10 years of data that we have from 2004 to 2013. The top three countries, the three countries with the most attacks in the world, actually comprise about 50% of all attacks and 60% of all deaths from terrorist attacks, and they are Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. So they're majority Muslim countries. And we know that about 80 to 90% of them are domestic terrorists. So the nationality of the target is the same as the nationality where the attack took place. So the perpetrators aren't attacking necessarily foreign entities in these countries.
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Tim Harford
So Does Erin think 95% is right?
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Ruth
Well, she thinks it's a bit high, actually, but that it's probably in the right ballpark. The story then is that most terrorist attacks affect domestic targets, and so casualties will to some extent reflect the makeup of the civilian population.
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Tim Harford
And since the hotspots for terrorist attacks are majority Muslim countries, it makes sense to say that Muslims are both the most likely attackers and the most likely victims.
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Ruth
And just to put the latest available numbers on this, over the 10 years from 2004, the UK suffered 400 terrorist attacks, mostly in Northern Ireland, and almost all of them non lethal. The U.S. suffered 131 attacks. Fewer than 20 of them were lethal. France suffered 47. But in Iraq, there were 12,000 attacks and 8,000 of them were lethal.
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Tim Harford
But that original claim that 95% of the victims of terrorism are Muslims, that claim is surprising to Westerners because when they think of terrorist attacks, they think of Charlie Hebdo of the 77 London tube and bus bombs, the Madrid train bombs, and of course, 9, 11. Those attacks were meant to grab attention and they succeeded. And while Muslims did die in them, most of the victims wouldn't have been Muslim.
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Ruth
Yes, although Erin Miller is a bit dismayed that we find the religious affiliation of victims so fascinating.
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Erin Miller
It is, I think, tempting for many people to try and turn it into almost a scorecard, trying to figure out which religious groups are more violent than the other religious groups and boil it down to this sort of grossly oversimplified keeping of score like it's a football game. And I a mistake to do that because these are conflicts that are sort of entrenched in deep geopolitical issues and religion is certainly a part of them, but it is not the only part. And sort of boiling it down to that identity, I think is somewhat mistaken.
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Tim Harford
Our thanks to Erin Miller from the Global Terrorism Database for taking us through the numbers. The work Erin Miller does isn't easy. The recent attack in Baga, Nigeria by Boko Haram shows you why. Although satellite images have now been taken showing widespread devastation across two towns where thousands of people lived, it's still not clear how many people have been killed. The BBC has reported that estimates vary from 150 to 2000 deaths. Julian Rademeyer from fact checking website AfricaCheck has been looking into this. We asked him what he thought the true number of casualties might be.
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Julian Rademeyer
The simple answer is that nobody knows. Something clearly quite catastrophic has happened there, given the eyewitness accounts. Survivors who've escaped the town have spoken about people being slaughtered like insects running for their lives. And the refugees themselves have come up with various estimates. One man saying that he believed as many as 500 people had been killed. He'd seen several groups of villagers that had been killed at least, and the smallest group was five people. Other accounts as high as 3,000. The numbers are all over the place. The initial reports of 2000 stemmed from a local government official who was interviewed by journalists shortly after these massacres were first reported and he listed the figure of 2,000. He wasn't in the town itself, he was much further away, but he based it on the reports of survivors. The Nigerian military initially agreed that certainly that this would have been one of the deadliest acts committed by Boko Haram. But more recently they've tried to downplay the figures, saying that the numbers of dead have not exceeded 150, including Boko Haram militants and soldiers and civilians. And the bottom line at this point is that there are no independent journalists, there are no independent monitors gaining access to that area. It's still under the control of Boko Haram Any numbers that are coming out of there are questionable. And you know the eyewitness accounts, again, these are people who are fleeing for their lives. They're not counting bodies, they're relating stories of what they've actually seen. So we certainly know that something truly horrific has happened there. But 2000 is a number that potentially at this point seems as if it may be too high. But again, we don't really know.
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Tim Harford
Julian Rademeyer of AfricaCheck speaking to us from Johannesburg. While on the subject of fact checking websites, I should apologise to fullfact.org I tried to give them credit last week for an excellent piece of analysis, misspoke and credited an American website instead. So sorry, full fact. You're listening to more or less. And it's time for a more cheerful question. Which are the world's best board games?
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Gemma Tetlow
Because it's, it's a freaking nice game. My favorite game is Mice and Mystics because it has lots of of different versions that you can play. You can make boards that will work so you can play with them. And it's cooperative game King of Tokyo
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Ruth
because I am not merciful and so
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Gemma Tetlow
I can deal lots of damage and kill all the other monsters and you
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Tim Harford
get to say do you can see Tokyo? In case you were wondering, Cube Quest is a flicking dice game. These are good choices in my view, but we didn't want to take my children's word for it because despite my best efforts as a board game geek, they've sampled only a fraction of the games that are in existence. Oliver Rader, a senior writer for the numbers website FiveThirtyEight, has done a statistical analysis to find out the very best and the very worst games known to humanity. I must say, things aren't looking good for Snakes and Ladders. Oliver, you roll first.
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Oliver Rader
Alright, here we go. I've gotten a seven.
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Tim Harford
Okay, let me, let me have a roll. I've got a four. Ah, a ladder. So I'm. Hey, I'm winning already. Well, that's the luck of it. So Oliver, you've been looking into the best and the worst games. How does Snakes Ladders actually fair?
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Oliver Rader
Well, I don't know if this surprises you, but Snakes and Ladders is actually one of the worst board games ever made. That's what I found.
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Tim Harford
What about something like Monopoly, which I think people take more seriously as a game? Is that a good game?
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Oliver Rader
Monopoly is actually a bete noir of board gamers. It's the game they love to hate.
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Tim Harford
Why would a great board game fan sneer at Monopoly then what's wrong with it?
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Oliver Rader
Well, Monopoly has a few characteristics that any board game designer worth his salt tries really, really hard to avoid. One is Monopoly often has a runaway winner, but the game takes another four hours. Another thing about Monopoly is players can be eliminated. So you can go bankrupt in sort of good games. It's good to keep players sort of engaged for the whole game.
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Tim Harford
Before I ask you about your methods, where these conclusions come from, I should ask you to roll again and remind you I'm on 14, you're on 7.
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Oliver Rader
Alright, here we go. I've gotten a 5.
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Tim Harford
Gets you nowhere in particular. Let me have a go. Okay, I've got a seven, so that takes me up to 21. Hey, hey. Another ladder. I'm up to 42, you're on 12. Yeah, great game. I think it's.
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Louise McCrae
This is.
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Oliver Rader
Yeah, this is requiring a lot of trust between us, I should mention.
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Tim Harford
Yeah, well, I'll have the producer come and independently verify my dice rolls. Don't worry. Don't worry. So, Oliver, the logic makes sense. Snakes and Adders is a game of pure luck. Monopoly is deeply flawed as a board game, but you have a numerical or statistical basis for making these assertions.
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Oliver Rader
So my data comes from a website called boardgamegeek.com and this is a very, very popular website among some of the serious, more serious board Gamers.
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Tim Harford
Sort of TripAdvisor for board games.
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Oliver Rader
Exactly. So users on the site will log on and they'll rate games and importantly they'll provide a numerical rating. So a rating of 10 is the highest. So I'm interested, when I'm looking at the worst games is first of all games that people actually play games.
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Tim Harford
So it's not just the worst games, but you know, the worst games that are actually reasonably popular. For example, Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders.
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Oliver Rader
Quite right. I have six games in a Hall of Shame. These are games with around 1,000 to 10,000 users have rated them on the site, but their average rating is somewhere between 2 and 4.
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Tim Harford
Before I ask you where Snakes and Adders falls there or Monopoly, let me ask you to roll again.
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Oliver Rader
Alright, here we go. I've gotten a seven.
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Tim Harford
Okay, that takes you to 19. And I've got an eight, that takes me to 50. Okay, so yeah, still winning. So Snakes and Ladders, is that in the hall of Shame or Monopoly?
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Oliver Rader
Snakes and Ladders is Snakes and Ladders, Tic tac toe, Candyland, the card game War and the Game of Life along with Monopoly. A lot of these games have something in Common, which is they're just utterly based on luck.
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Tim Harford
So look, let's be more positive, Oliver, what about the best games, according to the geeks on BoardGamegeek?
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Oliver Rader
So the best game is a game called Twilight Struggle. This is a two player game. One side takes the Americans, one side takes the Soviets and we basically play out the Cold War. In a lot of ways, these games that are rated very highly are anti monopolies. Right? They don't suffer from the problems with Monopoly that we discussed earlier. So for instance, you always think you're doing something, you always have a chance to win, and if you're losing, you always have a chance to catch up. These games usually have a very healthy dose of skill. So the balance between skill and luck turns out to be very, very important.
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Tim Harford
Speaking of which, Oliver, do you want to give me another roll on Snakes and Ladders?
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Oliver Rader
Yeah, here we go. I've got an eight, so that'll put me on. Oh, I just missed the big ladder. That'll put me on 27.
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Tim Harford
27. And I got a double two. That's a four. That puts me up to 54.
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Oliver Rader
I think that's a snake.
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Tim Harford
Yeah, that's a snake. That takes me down to 34. But you know, I'm still winning. So there obviously is some, some degree of talent required. I'm a little bit puzzled, Oliver. So people who hate board games presumably hate monopoly, and people who love board games hate Monopoly. They're the people rating games of board game geek. So tell me, why is it that everyone has a copy of Monopoly?
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Oliver Rader
Well, I think a little bit it's a quirk of history, a quirk of commerce. You know, we all have Monopoly in our closets at home. You know, even though these games aren't the greatest games, we start with these games and we can move on to better ones.
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Tim Harford
So, Oliver, I'm going to release you from this game of Snakes and Ladders, which I am winning partly because I may not be winning after much longer. But before I let you go, what's your favorite game?
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Oliver Rader
My favorite game is Scrabble and interestingly.
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Tim Harford
Oh, that's a terrible game. We stopped the tape there because nobody wants to hear me burst a blood vessel. That was Oliver Rader with his favourite pick, Scrabble, a word game. Now let's take a trip into the jungle. Because if the Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London are right, there are now fewer animals here than there were 40 years ago. In fact, across the world, the average amount by which the animal population has fallen is over 50% over the past four decades. Now, this finding prompted startling headlines and it also got the more or less inbox buzzing. So we had a look. The number came from the recently released Living Planet Index and the project manager is Louise McCrae from the Zoological Society of London.
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Louise McCrae
The exact figure is 52%, and this is a decline in the size of vertebrate populations over 40 years. We gathered over 10,000 different population trends from over 3,000 species. We've calculated an average of these trends to get this figure. It's the rate of decline. So it means that populations have roughly halved over this period. So it's not that we've lost half of all individual animals, because some of the populations are very large and hundreds of thousands of individuals and some are very small, so it's all relative, but it just means that the rate at which populations are declining is that they've halved on average over that time.
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Tim Harford
Let's imagine a scenario. You have two populations, one of frogs, one of birds. Let's say in 1970, there were 10 frogs and 100 birds, giving a total of 110 animals. By 2010, the frogs had declined by 80% and the birds by 20%. That leaves two frogs and 80 birds, a total of 82 animals, down from 110. Now, the average decline of these two populations is 50%. But the total number of animals hasn't halved, not even close, which is probably not what most people would have understood from the headlines. As one of our loyal listeners, Steve, pointed out to us, it is just an index of vertebrates. It doesn't include insects or plants. And it's not as if either the Worldwide Fund for Nature or the Zoological Society have been out to count the animals themselves. This is a figure modelled using available data. Now, some of that is patchy. There are more data from northern Europe than there are from tropical areas, for example, where most species are to get round that, they've re weighted the data that they do have. Steve Buckland is a professor of biostatistics at St Andrews University in Scotland. Now, his models are used in calculating the figure, so you'd think he'd be keen to endorse it, but he's concerned.
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Steve Buckland
Firstly, the index relies on those populations that are monitored, which are not necessarily representative of populations in total. There are all sorts of reasons for monitoring populations. One of them is that a species or population of a species is thought to be under threat. So when you increase the weight of those monitored populations in tropical areas, the rate of decline increases quite substantially from the old index.
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Tim Harford
So does this mean that the Living Planet Index methodology overplays the rate of decline?
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Steve Buckland
I think it probably does, simply on the basis that the populations being monitored are not representative. The difficulty is that populations that are not in trouble are less likely to be monitored. They've done some assessment of whether there's bias towards surveying threatened species, and they concluded that there wasn't evidence of bias from that source. But nevertheless there probably is bias towards species that show decline rather than species that are largely unaffected.
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Tim Harford
Professor Steve Buckland Remember, more or lessbc.co.uk is the address to email your favourite statistics to us for our education, amusement or possibly our horror. You can always send us numbers you'd like us to investigate and thank you for all of the ideas you give us. If you'd like to gorge on some of the statistics we've taken an interest in over the past few weeks, months and years, you can find them scrutinized in our articles and program archive at our website, BBC.commoreorless. you can also download our podcast there, absolutely free and worth every penny until next week. Goodbye. Sorry, I'm just fiddling with a towel. Don't broadcast that. This is the extended edition of More or Less, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and produced in association with the Open University.