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Scottish Independence
00:27:58
On this week's More or Less: Scottish independence, mobile phones and cancer, and is...
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A
Thanks for downloading the More or less podcast from BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Harford.
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B
Hello and welcome to More or Less, the programme that examines the numbers in the news and in life. Later, we'll examine claims that mobile phones cause cancer.
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C
They're not in cigarettes league. I mean, they just can't be all we'd know.
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B
That much might seem obvious, but it's not. Stopped some pretty scary headlines recently and we'll tell you why those headlines are wrong. We'll also ask whether this man is statistically the greatest sportsman around.
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D
Tendulkar, 35, not out. So the stage really is set for him to score this elusive hundred, which would be his 100th international century.
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B
But first, back in May, the Scottish National Party won a dramatic victory at the polls in the Scottish elections and promised to hold a referendum on independence in the next five years. Listeners have already been in touch with us for help in getting their facts straight. Are the English subsidising the Scots? Just how big a deal would North Sea oil be in any breakup of the Union? And would an independent Scotland have gone bust bailing out the Royal bank of Scotland and HBoss? Let's start with the question of whether Scotland is subsidised by the rest of the UK. Neil McClure dropped us a line. Hello, Neil. To say he suspects the per head statistic, usually trotted out to back up this claim is misleading because London skews the figures for the rest of the uk. He says that's because the capital city naturally generates more wealth, pays more taxes and hosts big events such as the Olympics enjoyed by the rest of the country. And he wonders whether leaving London out from this calculation might give a fairer picture. Well, Neil, I'm not entirely sure that's right. After all, if the Scots do decide to leave, I don't think they get to take London with them. But we can certainly try to answer the question. And there is a way of comparing spending across the UK and including London, which does compare like with like the Treasury's total identifiable expenditure on services. Figures give us an idea of where public money is spent, broken down by region. It's not the entire government budget, but it's most of it about 80%. And it does allow us to compare how much is spent per head in Scotland with the rest of the UK. Average identifiable spending was £8,770 per person in the UK in 2009-2010, Scotland received over £1,000 more than the UK average with £9,940 per person. England got £8,530 per head. That's about £250 less than the UK average. And without London, England's average would have been more like £500 less. London gets £10,200 per head, and that's because it does very well in terms of spending on transport, such as Crossrail and public order. One justification for higher spending per head in Scotland is that there are higher costs of providing public services in rural areas, and Scotland has quite a few of those. So that brings higher transport, health and education costs, amongst other things. Other people can argue about whether this is fair. The point is, if Scotland goes alone, it'll have to find the money to fund this spending or make cutbacks. And that brings us to the other side of the equation. Revenue. How much revenue is raised from the Scots rather than the rest of the UK? More or less's. Phil Kemp has been looking into this.
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E
Yes, 8.4% of the UK population lives in Scotland, so we can use that as our benchmark. The Scottish Government publishes data on revenue and calculates that last year the Scots underpaid on income tax, just 7.4% of the UK total, but overpaid on corporation tax, VAT and other revenue sources. Add it all up and you get 8.3% of UK revenue from 8.4% of the UK population. A subsidy to the Scots, but a small one.
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B
When you say add it all up, are you including the oil money?
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E
Well, I was going to come to that. No. Now, Scottish advocates claim that Scotland pays more than its fair share through oil and gas revenues from the North Sea.
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B
Is that true?
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E
Before we begin, all the figures you're about to hear are based on the official Scottish Government view of how much oil revenue Scotland is due. That's itself a controversial area, because where you draw the line between Scottish waters and English waters is something that could be disputed under any negotiation for independence. But let's accept the figures for the purpose of this discussion.
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B
Ok, let's. I guess they're as good as any. They're probably better than most.
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E
Yep. Well, last year, the SNP were keen to highlight figures showing that Scotland paid 1.3 billion pounds more to the Exchequer in Westminster than it spent in the year 2008, 2009. That's all revenue, other tax revenue, everything.
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B
Now, all our numbers so far have been in pounds per head, not in billion pounds. So how much is that per Scot?
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E
I had a feeling you'd ask me that. It's around 250 pounds per person. In Scotland. So alert listeners will note that the ore revenue Scotland handed to the UK treasury must have more than made up for the extra public spending.
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B
Ok, but that's just one year. Has the same been true in other years?
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E
I'm afraid it hasn't. Those figures were from 2008. 2009. In 2009, 2010, oil prices fell and even including Scotland's share of oil, Scotland as a whole was back in deficit to the tune of £9 billion. Now, neither of these figures take into account capital spending. If that was included, then Scotland would have been in deficit both years. In fact, according to a report by the Scotland Office published in 2009, there were only nine years in the 27 years since 1980 when Scotland paid out more than than it got back. And over that time, it had actually worked up a cumulative deficit of £20 billion.
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B
That's not such a huge number. I mean, it's about £4,000 per Scottish resident over almost 30 years. It's nice for the Scots, but it's not going to bankrupt Scotland if that money vanishes.
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E
No. And it's also worth saying that while Scotland would be in deficit, that's not unusual. In fact, the UK government deficit is currently 11.1% of GDP, while the equivalent figure for Scotland is actually lower at 10.6%.
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B
OK, so who's right? Do you think those who claim England subsidises Scotland or the nationalists who claim Scotland more than pays its way through oil revenues?
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E
Well, I put exactly that question to Professor John Kay, who was a member of the Scottish Government's Council of Economic Advisers, established by the First Minister, Alex Salmond.
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Both these things are true, and neither of them are a terribly big deal. Public expenditure in Scotland is kind of 10 to 15% above the UK level. And it's also true that Scotland would, if you allocated oil revenues on normal territorial principles, get a very disproportionate share of total UK oil revenues. But what these revenues are, of course, is very volatile and depends on the oil price. But adjusting to whatever arrangements were made on that would not be a very big issue in relation to an independent Scotland. And there would be other issues that would have to be negotiated. If you were having a complete separation to do with allocation of UK existing government debt, to do with how you arranged existing state pensions across the jurisdictions and so on, which would be every big as these issues of expenditure and revenues. But the truth is, all of this is not a very big deal. It's something on which matters could be negotiated very easily if There was reasonable goodwill on either side to create a settlement, and it would not lead either to Scotland being markedly worse off or markedly better off.
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E
Now, an independent Scotland would clearly be a much smaller state than the United Kingdom. And there are plenty of economists who argue that there are some big benefits to being small. These countries tend to have stronger economic governance and more homogenous societies. But quite a few small economies were caught out in the banking crisis when they were exposed to debts way beyond their capacity to guarantee.
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B
Oh, gosh, yes. And I remember before the crisis, Alex Salmond referring to Iceland and Ireland as being part of this arc of prosperity that he wanted Scotland to join.
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Yeah. So it's worth asking how an independent Scotland would have coped with bailing out the Royal bank of Scotland and HBoss, both headquartered in Edinburgh. The coalition government's Scotland Minister, Michael Moore, was in no doubt about what would have happened when questioned about this. In June this year, the scale of
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the financial disaster that befell both Royal bank of Scotland and Halifax bank of Scotland would have placed a crippling burden upon Scotland. By being part of the United Kingdom, we shared the risks, we're sharing the recovery, and that is the right way forward.
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The Minister's view was, however, strongly disputed by the Scottish economist Professor Andrew Hughes Hallett, appearing on the Newsweek programme on BBC Radio Scotland on a shaky phone line from Australia.
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By international convention, the bailout is shared in proportion to the area of activities of those banks, and therefore it's shared between several countries. In the case of the RBS, I'm not sure exact numbers, but roughly speaking, 90% of its operations are in England and 10% are in Scotland. The result being, by that convention, therefore, that the rest of the UK would have to carry 90% of the liabilities of the RBS and Scotland. 10%.
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One observer we spoke to said he suspected this argument was an example of the reverse Andy Murray effect. Before the bailout, these were Scottish banks and now they're British.
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This international convention, it's news to me. I mean, what did your interviewees have to say?
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E
Well, Professor Kaye, who we heard from earlier, told me that he wasn't aware of any convention of the sort Professor Hughes Hallett was describing either. And, by the way, Kay was a director of Halifax before it merged with bank of Scotland in 2001. But John Kay did accept that it was unlikely Scotland would have been left to shoulder the whole burden of bailing out the banks on its own. I also put Professor Hughes Hallett's argument to Dr. Stephen Davies from the Free Market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs.
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D
It's true that there is such a convention, but it doesn't have any formal legal status. It's really just a convention with a small C. And understanding, there are several things you can say. One is that given the size of the liabilities of the two banks you mentioned, even 10% of that would have been a really considerable hit. It's true that the British government or English government in this hypothetical situation would also have had to pay a very large amount out, even much more in Scotland in fact, because of course RBS is basically a Scottish bank that took over a much larger English bank, NatWest. But indeed there's also the problem of the significant liabilities that RBS in particular has incurred outside the uk. Now some of this would be covered by foreign governments for reasons of self interest, essentially as was the case in the United States. But it would be rather difficult to get many other governments to agree to do this. And so I think that the two British governments would actually pick up a rather larger proportion of the total tab than a strict application of the convention would indicate.
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E
Are there any situations that you could point to where this didn't happen?
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Well, the obvious example is Iceland where banks creditors were not bailed out and had to take a pretty severe haircut.
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The Scottish Minister has been saying, were Scotland responsible for bailing out RBS and HBOS on its own, that it would have gone the way of Greece.
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I think that's a serious overstatement and that's not comparing apples to apples because the problem with Greece is not so much to do with anything to do with banks. It's the fact that Greece is completely insolvent. It's had an utterly irresponsible fiscal policy for a long time. It has lied about its public finances and this has now of course come to light. And lots of people now believe with very good reason that it's an absolute certainty that they will default on their debt. I don't think any of those things apply in the Scottish case.
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So where does this all leave us on the question of how economically viable and independent Scotland would be? Well, Professor John Kay thinks that the economics are actually probably less important in the debate around independence than the politics of it.
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Scotland would plainly be economically viable as an independent country. There is no question about that. Indeed, when you look at the kind of profile of the Scottish economy, the similarities between the Scottish economy and the UK economy are actually more striking than the differences. Incomes per head in Scotland are really very close to the UK average in Fact. Scotland is probably the most prosperous region of the UK outside London and the Southeast. The real issue, economic issue, is whether an independent Scotland with a government that was completely or much more free than it is at the moment to set policies for Scotland, whether that would encourage economic growth in Scotland or hold it back, that would depend very much on how the Scottish government actually behaved.
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B
John Kay and our very own Phil Kemp. Thanks, Phil. You're listening to More or Less with me, Tim Harford, in association with the Open University. You can contact the programme by emailing us at more or lessbc.co.uk, as several listeners did last week, to tell us about more sloppy coverage of statistics in the media. Media. Charlotte MacDonald's here. So what's the inbox looking like this week, Charlotte?
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Well, Tim, I'm afraid we've had some complaints about an error in a programme called More or Less.
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Oh, tell me more.
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A
During our item on salt last week, you said.
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B
Next we move to the question of statistical significance. In this clip, you'll hear Rod Taylor talking about a P value. Just to explain that briefly and a little loosely, this is the probability that the results might have emerged purely by chance. Assuming, in fact, that salt has no effect on health at all. P of.05 means a probability of 5% by convention, and it is just a convention. A p value of 0.05 or lower is regarded as statistically significant. A higher P value is not statistically significant, but of course, that does make statistical significance a high bar to jump. In some cases, you can be 93% confident that the results didn't happen by chance and still not reach statistical significance. Hmm. You can tell there was something nagging at the back of my mind. By the way, I said loosely at the beginning of that. Doesn't that cover me?
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Not good enough, I'm afraid. Your error is actually so common that it even has a. The P value fallacy. Things were going well. You said that this Number P equals 0.05 or 5% is the chance that you'd see the results by coincidence, assuming there's no actual effect at all. That's pretty much correct. Strictly speaking, you have a 5% chance of seeing those results, or even more extreme results, assuming no actual effect.
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B
Right. So with these P values, we're playing this funny game of assuming nothing's going on. In this case, we're assuming salt doesn't give you heart attacks and strokes. And then we're looking at the results and we're trying to work out how likely the results are. Assuming Nothing is going on except chance.
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A
But then you're not allowed to do what you then did and say that P equals 0.07 means you can be 93% confident that the result is real rather than chance. Because when you calculated the P value, you already assumed the result wasn't real, it was chance.
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Ok, that's tricksy. So can we say anything about how likely the result was to be real?
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Not using this framework. You have to go Bayesian.
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Bayesian? Is that some kind of hat?
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That's a topic for another day. But you could think about it this way. Imagine rolling a pair of dice and getting double six. What are the chances that the dice are biased?
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Well, I don't know.
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No, you don't. At least not using the P value approach. You know that if the dice are not biased, then there's a 1 in 36 probability of getting that result purely by chance. You can't then say that there's a 1 in 36 probability that the dice are biased.
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Got it?
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Fine. Now say sorry for getting it wrong.
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B
Sorry, Tim.
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Say it like you mean it.
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Sorry.
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A
The trouble is, Tim, once our statistical armour has been breached, listeners won't stop trying to find further chinks in it. Several of them have been in touch to say that they thought they had a much simpler way of estimating a child's height as an adult, rather than the one offered by our expert Steve Becker.
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B
Surely the most accurate determinant of a child's height is the one in the old wives tale. Measure the height of your child on its second birthday and double the figure. I've done this with my children and it works. Were you half your current height aged two, Charlotte?
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A
Well, we'll never know because my mum says the doctors gave up recording my height after the age of one. But I did go back to medical statistician Professor Tim Cole, who spoke to us last week about this, and he gave our listeners theory short shrift, I'm afraid.
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The average height of children at age 2, it doesn't vary very much according to their sex. Boys are about 1cm taller than girls on average, so that's only about a third of an inch. It's obviously not sensible simply to double height because it means that boys and girls are going to be predicted to be the same height as adults, which we know they're not.
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B
Some other listeners complain that Tim Cole's calculations didn't take into account the fact that tall women are more likely to pair up with tall men and that would further reduce the chance of Having a short son.
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A
I'm not sure that's fair. Tim. Tim Cole came at the problem with two separate approaches, one of which was based on data about births in 1958. The two approaches matched up with each other pretty well.
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B
Well, fair enough. At least one of the Tims on this program has got his statistics straight. Thank you, Charlotte. Now, if any of your friends or family are regular readers of the Daily Express or the sun, we may be able to explain why they've not phoned you recently. Back in June, they would have read the headlines, mobile phones can give you cancer. That was the Daily Express, while the Sun's headline just read Cancer mobiles. They were reporting on a decision by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, the iarc, to classify radio frequency electromagnetic fields like those given out by mobiles as possibly carcinogenic to humans. The sun said that the IARC had performed a U turn with these findings. Well, I turned to Kevin McConaughey, professor of statistics with the Open University at, for some advice about what this development really means.
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C
They classified the radiation that comes from mobile phones as being possibly carcinogenic to humans and they hadn't previously pronounced on whether that sort of radiation was likely to cause cancer. So there was something new there. But what they were only saying was that they had looked at the existing evidence and they decided that there was a possibility that it caused cancer in humans.
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B
So basically, possibly means there's a risk greater than zero, but we don't know how big the risk is.
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C
Well, it possibly means they think there might be a risk greater than zero. It really is quite a long way removed from, oh, it's definitely going to finish you off.
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B
Is there a way to quantify this kind of risk in a way that people understand? Can we compare it to something else that causes cancer?
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C
Certainly there are a lot of things which appear on the list which are known to be harmful for other reasons.
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B
Petrol exhaust fumes.
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Petrol exhaust fumes is one. Exhaust fumes sound like terribly scary stuff, but they're not normally considered scary because they cause cancer.
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B
I was quite interested in the way different newspapers talked about this risk. So the cell on the Daily Express mentioned mobile phones are kind of like petrol exhaust fumes and they're kind of like ddt, this notorious insecticide. And DDT and petrol exhaust both sound pretty bad. The Times said, oh, it's kind of like coffee. That doesn't sound so bad. The Guardian says it's like talcum powder or it's like working in a dry Cleaner's. Now, I'm guessing all these things are roughly equivalent in their actual cancer risk. We don't know a great deal, but the sort of emotional resonance is very different.
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Actually, you're not quite right to say they're roughly equivalent in their cancer risk. What the IARC said is they're roughly equivalent in terms of how likely it is that there is some risk. What the IARC is talking about is our state of knowledge, not officially how risky things are. And that's something that got very confused in these stories.
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B
So in other words, there's so much coffee in the world and so many exhaust fumes and so on, they can't possibly be that bad for us.
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Absolutely. I mean, they're not in the cigarettes league. I mean, they just can't be all we'd know.
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B
There are also studies that don't seem to get reported at all. I mean, I know you and I are both fans of this extremely nerdy comic xkcd. They talked about a mobile phone cancer study. And this was your news source, an online comic rather than the newspapers.
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C
That's absolutely right. This was in the middle of July where the XKCD comic said another huge study found no evidence that cell phones cause cancer. And it referred back to this World Health Organization study. This was the first I'd heard of there being another huge study. It was actually a better study technically than most of the studies that have been done on this, in that rather than essentially relying on records that might be wrong and people's memories, it actually follow people up for a long period of time recording how much they use their phones and whether any of them got these tumors they're interested in. It was actually one particular kind of tumor. You have to follow these huge numbers. Most of them will be fine, but a few of them will get it. And then you look and see whether they use their phones more than other people did. And anyway, that's what they did. And they found there wasn't really any evidence that they had. There's practically no mention of it in the UK media. It's in this cartoon. That's how I found out about it.
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Okay, so if there's a risk, it will get reported. If there's an extremely elaborate, very careful, very large scale study finding no risk. No one in the UK media wants
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to know that's true.
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B
You're listening to More or Less with me, Tim Harford. Our email address is more or lessbc.co.uk. and thanks to those loyal listeners who alerted us to this from Countryphile and
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D
what we throw away in the UK is mind boggling. That 16 million tons of our listeners
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B
were skeptical about a figure the program used that said 25% of the food householders are buying in the UK is wasted. Several of you thought this figure had to be, well, rubbish. Charlotte MacDonald has donned her rubber gloves to get to the bottom of this one. What did you find, Charlotte?
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The figure comes from a report by rapp, which is a not for profit organisation funded by government which encourages people to cut down on waste.
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B
We've done this before. The number was something like one third of food is wasted.
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E
I remember.
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B
It's bobbins, isn't it?
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A
Well, the previous RAP report has disappeared from its website. The numbers have changed a bit. But the basic problem is the one we found when we looked at it a few years ago. The 25% figure mentioned in the piece is quite misleading. You might assume it's referring to food that you don't get round to eating and bin because it's no longer fit to eat or you've cooked much more than was needed. But in fact it includes waste from items you have consumed, such as tea bags or chicken bones. And it includes waste that the report refers to as possibly avoidable, such as potato peelings or bread crusts which could be consumed, but you know, they often aren't. The amount of food that is bought and not used at all accounts for only 16% of what people buy, according to the latest report.
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B
Okay, well that's still a lot, but not perhaps as much as people thought. Well, thank you, Charlotte. You can take off the Marigolds now.
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A
Thanks, Tim.
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B
Now, bit of cricket. One of the subplots of England's 40 whitewash of India has been the effort of the great Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar to score his 100th international century.
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D
And he's given out. He's been given out. Leg before wicket and he's walking off to a hero's reception. But there's no dream hundred here today for Sachin Tendulkar or for his fans. They must wait for another day.
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B
Sachin Tendulkar still becalmed on 99 international centuries. The little master may not yet have scored his hundredth hundred, but nobody else has ever come close. Ricky Ponting of Australia is in second place on 69. Few men have ever surpassed 50. Some have claimed that Sachin Tendulkar is for this reason a contender for the title of the greatest sportsman currently active. In Prospect magazine, for instance, Jay Elwes made exactly this claim, dismissing the likes of Roger Federer, as he did so with a few choice statistics. Statistics. This sounds like a job for more or less, and we've outsourced it to Rob Eastway, co author of the Hidden Mathematics of Sport, with his thoughts on this PubTalk favourite.
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H
The case for Sachin Tendulkar is certainly strong. His international career has spanned an astonishing 22 years, during which time he's never been dropped from the Indian test side. He's scored more runs and notched up more international hundreds than anyone else in the history of the game. And it's not just that he's scored more, it's the huge margin by which he tops the table. Longevity and the accumulation of trophies is certainly an important factor in making greatness, but it's surely not the only one. After all, if you're only looking at durability at the top, then Tendulkar is outstripped by Tom Watson, who's been a serious challenger in the British golf open since 1975. The trouble is, there are so many statistical ways to measure greatness. One is to pick out those sportsmen and women who, for a period of time, are in a different class from their peers. The goal scoring feats of Lionel Messi make him a candidate, but statistical measurements of footballers are always tricky, not least because it can be hard to disentangle one player's performance from the contributions of his teammates. Or you can take a look at a sport's world rankings. Every sport uses a different system for ranking its members, but all of them are based on some form of objective mathematical model to identify the world's greatest. Why not look at which sportsman has managed to spend the longest amount of time as world number one? Tiger woods managed to be top of the golf rankings for over 10 years before his recent fall from grace. By this measure, though, there's a British sportsman who pips Tiger for the title. Phil the Power Taylor has had an almost unbroken position as world number one in darts since 1998. And yes, darts is now officially a sport. We can, of course, let the market decide on this score. The world's greatest sportsman at the moment could be Alex Rodriguez. He's paid around $30 million a year, and that's before all the product endorsements. In case you're wondering, he plays baseball. But can he really be called the world's greatest when his name barely registers in public consciousness outside his own country? Of course, greatness also depends on many things that are hard to measure, such as charisma, style and an ability to hit the headlines with all this complex and sometimes conflicting data. Perhaps we should put our trust in the wisdom of crowds. Despite the diverse and often ill informed opinion of the public. Put enough people together and they often manage to come up with the right answer. And if we ask the crowd who is the greatest sportsman, I think I know who will come out top. Sachin Tendulkar. Why? He would win by sheer weight of population. There are over a billion people in India who have little sporting interest other than cricket. And a billion people can't be wrong, can they?
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B
That's all we have time for this week, I'm afraid. But do please keep your suggestions coming in via Twitter or more or less@BBC.co.uk.com our website is BBC co uk more or less and we'll be back next week. Until then, goodbye.
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A
More or Less was presented by Tim Harford, the Financial Times undercover economist. The producer was Phil Kemp. The program was made in association with the Open University.