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The economics of Scottish independence
00:24:13
Tim Harford inspects the claims the UK Treasury and the Scottish government make about...
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Thank you for downloading More or Less from the BBC. This is the version of the programme first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Harford.
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Hello and welcome to More or Less the programme which boldly goes where no statistics programme has gone before. This week, we inspect the claims the UK treasury and the Scottish government make about the economics of an independent Scotland, discover that millions of scientific papers might be incorrect and test the veracity of this claim.
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Last year, over 90% of Ryan Air
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flights landed on time, beating every other year. But first, this week's Big Story. Even Nigel Farage cannot prevent the annual poptacular that is the Eurovision Song Contest. This year, high hopes were riding on the UK's Bonnie Tyler, But alas, to no avail. Bonny came 19th out of 26. The UK hasn't won the contest since 1997 and we haven't really come close for over a decade now. Many people believe the contest has become an overly political farce since a large number of countries from what was once the Soviet bloc started entering and, rather shockingly, voting for each other.
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10 points go from Romania to Azerbaijan.
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Will the 12 go to Moldova?
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They normally do.
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And finally, our 12 points go to Moldova.
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Yep, there we go. Of course, the UK has, over the years tended to vote for Irish songs, while Ireland has, over the years, tended to vote for the uk, but I'm sure that's a totally different matter. Anyway, we decided it would be interesting to revamp the rules and journey back in time to 1989, before the Berlin Wall fell. Of course countries from Eastern Europe get to enter a song, otherwise that would be unfair. We're just not going to let them vote.
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Hello, Eurovision. Minsk is calling.
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Freed from the shackles of the highly politicized newcomers, I can now reveal the Results of the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest, using only the votes of countries who were competing in 1989. In first place. Instead of Denmark, we have Denmark.
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Oh.
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Actually, the top 10 under either voting system is comprised of the same 10 countries and even the order is largely unchanged. Norway and the Netherlands do a little better, but that's about it. Azerbaijan is nudged down from second place to third place. It's not exactly Milton's Fall of Lucifer. What about Bonnie Tyler's brave effort? It would have risen two spots from 19th place to 17th place. I'm afraid I don't think this wheeze is going to deliver Eurovision glory. I have a better idea. We should let Bonnie try again next year, this time with one of her classic songs updated for the international world. You're listening to More or Less, and our website is BBC.co.uk more or less. This week, both the UK treasury and the Scottish government published reports on the economics of Scottish independence. The argument has been full of statistical talking points. For instance, what's the right way to measure how big a bailout Scottish banks might need in the next great financial crisis? Perhaps one for us to talk about later in the series, just to whet your appetite. One argument has covered the level of Scottish public spending, including a share of British spending, such as defence and interest, on the UK national debt. Is spending in Scotland high or low relative to spending in the uk? The UK treasury has pointed out that public spending in Scotland is higher than spending per head in the UK, to the tune of around £1,000 a person, or roughly 10%. In other words, the Scots spend a lot and can reasonably expect that spending must fall or taxes must rise if the nation becomes independent. But the Scottish government points out that public spending in Scotland is lower than public spending in the UK as a percentage of gross domestic product, or gdp. In other words, there'll be less of a need for austerity if Scotland becomes independent. Hmm, who's right? The Scottish government is certainly presenting the more relevant number. It's gdp, not population, that determines how much money is available for public spending. On the other hand, there's no argument about what the population of Scotland is. There is a substantial argument over what Scotland's GDP is. A look at the footnotes reveals that the Scottish government is including an illustrative geographical share of North Sea oil and gas production. A still deeper look reveals that by illustrative geographical share, the Scottish government means it expects to take control of 90% of North Sea oil and gas. That's not impossible. It's not a foregone conclusion either. And it's a nice piece of fine print. While we're on the subject of oil, the Scottish government has recently become fond of pointing to Norway's gigantic sovereign wealth fund, built on the back of oil revenues. Well, it's one thing to point, it's another thing to accumulate over $700 billion over 23 years. The world's largest sovereign wealth fund. Norway, incidentally, produces twice as much oil and gas as the UK as a whole. A fun fact about Norway's sovereign wealth. It owns, on average, 2.25% of every listed European company. You're listening to More or less on BBC Radio 4. I'm Tim Harford. You can email us at more or lessbc.co.uk, at as Fiona from Edinburgh has done.
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I often travel with Ryanair from Germany to Edinburgh, and it seems to me more often than not, there's a jingle with a claim that welcome.
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You've arrived in yet another on time flight. Last year, over 90% of Ryanair flights
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landed on time, beating every other European airline.
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Now, what puzzles me is that they seem, as far as I can tell, to be making the same claim every year. And can be true.
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Naturally, I fly by private jet. But I asked Charlotte MacDonald, who has more commonplace travel habits, Charlotte, is it true?
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It's certainly true that they play that annoying jingle incessantly. On the bright side, at least they haven't started charging for listening to it yet. But whether the jingle itself is true, that's not so easy to say. Let's take a look at the first part. 90% of flights were on time last year. Certainly, according to the stats Ryanair puts out, it's itself they've been achieving 90% punctuality across their flights last year and for the last few years. But we only have their word for it. The Civil Aviation Authority collects data on flights arriving and departing from 10 UK airports. Now, a website called Flightontime.info crunched that data and worked out that Ryanair is falling some way short of 90%, achieving only 83%. And according to these figures, Ryanair is not the most punctual airline operating out of these airports. If you look at 2012 BMI, Regional and CityJet both did better.
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But if you're only using data for 10 UK airports, it could be that Ryanair's average is brought up by routes to and from other airports in Europe. There are a lot of other airports in Europe that they fly to.
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Yeah, exactly. Now, I have asked Ryanair for a breakdown of their figures. They wouldn't give them to me. But Jim Paton, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Air Transport at Cranfield University, agrees. Ryanair's average could be being brought up by other routes.
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A big proportion of their network in Europe is operations to small airports and airfields that don't suffer from air traffic congestion, such as would be the case around London, for instance, or Paris.
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Right. Ok, let's suppose for the moment that if we were privy to the super secret figures that Ryanair won't give us, we'd agree with them that 90% of the flights were on time last year. What about the second half of the claim? Do they beat every other airline?
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Oh, Tim, I just don't know the answer. I've gone round in circles with Ryanair's press office, it seems that they're comparing their figures to the most recent association of European Airlines statistics. But that organization hasn't published any new figures since 2009. So if they are comparing their 2012 figures with that, well, that's pretty cheeky. But also, that organization has only 32 members. There are around 250 airlines operating in Europe, so I don't think you can use that data to say you beat all others anyway.
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Well, presumably Ryanair can at least claim their beating fellow members of the association.
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That would be cheeky too. Ryanair has never been a member of the association of European Airlines. They seem to be implying that non members don't count for the purposes of their comparison. But then surely they don't count either.
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Ok, so it looks as though we don't know if Ryanair's claim of more than 90% on time flights last year is true. They've given us no reason to think it is. And we do have some reason to think it might not be. And we have no idea how anyone could claim to be more punctual than every European airline, because nobody is publishing punctuality data for every European airline. Can we even say they're punctual at all?
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It's actually not totally clear that it means very much to be punctual. Our listener Fiona, has her suspicions.
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I do wonder if they've simply designated such long flight times that it would be practically impossible for them to be late.
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Now, there is a term for this in the industry. It's called schedule padding. The practice of expanding your scheduled flight times. So if you're a bit late, you can still say you're on time. I asked Ryanair if they did this. They said no. I had a quick look at Fiona's home airport of Edinburgh to see how Ryanair flight times measured up to its rivals. And actually, I found eight routes where competitors were making the same journey. In only one case did Ryanair give a longer flight time than its rivals.
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Ok, that could just mean that all the airlines are exaggerating their flight times.
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You're right, Tim. Jim Paton thinks they do.
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The practice of buffering the airline schedule times is something that is very common almost universally, I would say, in Europe and in other parts of the world. Deciding on the times to put in their schedule, airlines consider a number of factors. They look at the on time performance that they want to achieve, and that will often be based on the image they want to give to the marketplace. And also to avoid having to pay compensation for. For delayed flights. You might have some carriers who have buffers in excess of 5% of the scheduled flight time.
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And just to put this into perspective, today British Airways reports a flight time of 75 minutes to Amsterdam. In 1958, when it was using planes with propellers, it was taking 70 minutes to do the same journey.
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And they had Frank Sinatra back then. Come fly with me.
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Let's fly, let's go.
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Let's not get away from Ryanair's rather ambitious claims. I've got it here in front of me that they are number one in Europe for customer service. That seems to be based in part on their punctuality figures, which, as we've discussed, they failed to prove to us. But here's another part of that. Ryanair presently misplaces less than one bag per 3,000 passengers carried. This is the lowest of any European airline. Now, fair enough. I haven't done any investigating, but I know almost no one puts their bag in the hold on a Ryanair flight, so how can they lose many?
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Excellent point. Again, Ryanair tells me that 20% of their passengers put luggage in the hold. So when they say that only one bag per 3,000 passengers is misplaced, only a fifth of those passengers would have had a bag anyway. And many bags are lost in transit when a passenger has to change airlines. Ryanair fly point to point.
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Thank you, Charlotte. You're listening to More or less. Earlier in the series, we brought you the story of a highly influential economics paper written by two Harvard professors, which had helped shape the debate on austerity in America and Europe. And the story of the graduate student who'd spotted some problems with it.
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I immediately saw the spreadsheet error. They left out five countries and, you know, they say seeing is believing, but I almost didn't really believe my eyes.
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That's Thomas Herndon and the issues he and his professors found with growth in a time of debt. The paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, have become a cause celebre. But there are those who are warning that this paper is by no means the only one out there which has mistakes in it. Some, as in the case of Reinhart and Rogoff's paper, are due to honest error, others, outright fraud. Here's Dr. Elizabeth Wager, a freelance publications consultant and a member of the advisory board for the UK Research Integrity Office.
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The best estimate that we have is that it's perhaps between 1 and 2% of researchers commit the most serious forms of misconduct. And some people argue, well, then, 99% is fine. What are you worrying about? But actually, if you do the maths and look at the numbers, they're quite worrying. If you look in the UK at the universities, they award about 20,000 PhDs each year. So 1% of that would be 200. Researchers in the US publish around 300,000 articles in the peer reviewed literature every year. 1% of that would be 3,000 articles affected the situation.
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In one field of psychology, an area called social priming has prompted a warning from Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who also has a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Kahneman wrote an open letter to those working in social priming after a number of attempts to replicate original findings had failed. Science writer Ed Yong tells the story of one such attempt.
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In the original study, volunteers saw a set of scrambled words and they had to create a sentence from them. Some of the words related to being old. The volunteers weren't consciously aware of that fact. According to the study, those who saw those words relating to old age after they left the room where they did the test then walked more slowly down a corridor. So those words related to old age primed their behavior and made them walk more slowly after they left that testing room. Now, this attempt to replicate that study made a couple of small changes, but notably it found that the people who saw those old age words did not in fact walk more slowly down a corridor. They only did so if the experimenters themselves expected them to do so.
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There's no suggestion that there was any fraud in the original study. It may just be that those conducting it were inadvertently themselves being influenced by the experiment. But what are the wider concerns about unreliable results based on some instances of fraudulent results have been uncovered recently. But Ed Yong says more subtle problems may be more widespread.
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One of the main issues in psychology at the moment is what's known as questionable research practices. These are fairly common ways of basically massaging data, not fabricating it in order to get positive results. So it might be things like carrying on your analysis until such point as you see significant results and then stopping or analyzing lots of different variables together until you find one that gives you a significant result and then only reporting that.
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And both of these, to be clear, the test isn't actually valid if you handle your data in this way.
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Absolutely, they're symptomatic of the pressure to publish or perish the incentives that scientists have to produce a lot of papers in high impact journals that produce novel and interesting findings. And that is the root of the problem. What is good for science is not necessarily what is good for individual scientists.
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Ed Yong, whose blog is called not exactly rocket science, Ed, points to the fact that the career concerns of individual scientists are pushing them to damage scientific endeavor in general. We've got the incentives wrong. I spoke to Betsy Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan. She told me these perverse incentives mean that problems often go unidentified.
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Economists really like the person with new ideas, who is inventive, creative, coming up with a new thing, and somebody who's checking someone else's idea, who's validating or showing that someone else's idea is wrong isn't the person with a new idea. And as a result, what graduate student wants to choose something where they know they'll never really excel?
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Betsey Stevenson herself has felt this problem firsthand. When she identified an error in the way data from the US Census had
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been coded, Many, many, many people were using it. Scholars, the private sector, nonprofits. And I had a colleague say, that's just not a contribution just to fix
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the foundation of hundreds or maybe thousands of other people's work.
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Exactly.
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This is like discovering that every civil engineer is using a calculator with a faulty chip, meaning all their sums are wrong. When you fix the error, people give you no credit. After all, you're not out there building bridges and skyscrapers.
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You.
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You're just fiddling with a calculator. Now, does this matter to anyone other than academics? It should do. If you think academic work has any value and taxpayers do pay for chunks of it, after all, then surely catching fraudsters checking results and correcting errors is valuable, too. But let's think about a specific example. In Duke University in the United States, a medical researcher called Anil Potti was working on the problem of developing individualized cancer treatments. His analysis, which produced vast arrays of data, suggested that a record of a person's genetic activity, called a microarray, could indeed predict how that patient would respond to chemotherapy. Another researcher at Texas University was excited by these results and tried to replicate Anil Pothi's findings. When he did so, he found big problems.
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Columns had got mislabeled. So on a spreadsheet, the people who'd responded had got switched with the people who had not responded. Some whole data line got replicated. Because it was such a big data set, it took a lot of sorting out, and it took a lot of expert statistical time to find the problems. By this time, Potti and his colleagues at Duke had actually started a clinical trial. So the first data that he did was sort of theoretical. He actually started a clinical trial and enrolled over 100 cancer patients trying to use this to predict which kind of chemotherapy to give them. Now, Potti has never actually been found guilty of any kind of misconduct, and we honestly don't know if it was deliberate or just sloppy. But whatever it was, cancer patients were getting the wrong treatment because of it. So it had some really serious consequences.
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Dr. Elizabeth Wager from the Advisory Board for the UK Research Integrity Office. And it's worth pointing out that Anil Potty only resigned from Duke after questions were raised over the way he had written his cv. Discovering fraud or error in complex data sets is a tough job. It's a lot easier to ask whether someone really did get the prestigious scholarship they claimed to have two weeks ago on More or Less. We told you about Meg, our reporter Ben Carter's dog, who recently passed away at the grand old age of 19 years and 4 months. Tradition has it that one dog year equals seven human years, which would have made Meg a frankly suspicious 135 years old. So we looked more closely and discovered that dogs are complicated. They have a huge range of breeds with very different characteristics, all in theory, capable of interbreeding. Small dogs grow to maturity quickly, but in contrast to most mammals, the smaller breeds live longer than the big ones, according to our revised calculations. The petite Meg, a West highland terrier, was 109 when she died. This story encouraged hundreds of you to email in with stories about your dogs and how long they'd lived. We heard about Hero, the 112 year old Chihuahua, Taz, the 1234, year old German shepherd, and Todd, the 133-year-old Border Collie. But amongst the incredible tales of dog longevity, a common question was, do crossbreed dogs live longer than pure breeds? I'm pleased to say our canine correspondent, Ben Carter has the answer. Yes, I do.
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Crossbreeds, or mongrels, as they're also known, occur when the parents of the offspring are two different breeds. For example, if you breed a Labrador and a poodle, you end up with the wonderfully named Labradoodle. Purebreeds are where both parents are the same breed. Now, the Veterinary Companion Animal Surveillance System, or Vet Compass for short, is a research project being run by the Royal Veterinary College. And they've compared average life expectancy in pure breeds to crossbreeds. The numbers show that, on average, crossbreeds live 1.22 years longer than pure breeds.
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And very roughly, that's the equivalent of eight or nine years in human terms. So it's quite a difference. Why might that Be well.
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That's a question I put to Dan O'. Neill. Dan spent 20 years working as a vet and is now doing a PhD at the Royal Veterinary College.
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One of the reasons that's possible behind this is that crossbreeds have a phenomenon called hybrid vigor. Hybrid vigor means that when you have crossbreed animals, they have higher basic health than purebreds. Purebreds tend to be inbred, so it means that you may be bringing more recessive disorders to the fore. So crossbreed animals tend to have higher reproduction ability and higher production ability and viability.
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Dan o', Neill, who naturally lives in Petts Wood. So good news for those of you with crossbreed dogs. There was one other question that our listeners were keen to have answered. What about cats? I'm not sure why so many people are keen to know. As a man who shared a home with various cats over the years, I can assure you they don't care about you. So I've no idea why you should care about them. Now Ben, you're our canine correspondent, so I feel at this point I should toss you aside like a well chewed rubber bone and talk to a cat expert. Do you know any?
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Well, I've been speaking to Kate Creevey, Assistant professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Georgia, and she told me that cats are studied less intensively than dogs, possibly because cats hate being taken to the vet. But she did send me some estimates. According to a large chain of vets in the US, the life expectancy of the cats they treat is 12.1 years.
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And what's that in human years?
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Only 64 years old, I'm afraid. According to expert guidelines issued by the American association of Feline Practitioners.
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Hang on, is that people who practice medicine on cats or just cats who practice medicine?
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The format him. According to their guidelines, cats grow up fast. 10 human years in the first 6 months. But once they reach the age of 2, about 24 in human terms, they then age at 4 human years per cat year. A 14 year old cat is 72 and a 21 year old cat should be in line for a telegram from the Queen.
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Thank you, Ben. And now during our item a couple of weeks ago, we promised that more or less his very own dogulator. Would be up and running on our website. But right at the last minute an over excited springer spaniel stepped on it and broke it. So we called the IT help desk and they said they'd fix it shortly. It turns out that shortly in IT help desk years means in a fortnight. But the dogulator is now at last fixed and you can calculate your dog's age online@BBC.co.uk moreorless I wouldn't expect to see a catch you later on the website anytime soon though. Not if our dogulator performance is any guide. Thank you Ben. And that website address BBC.co.uk more or less is also the place to download more editions of the programme. Absolutely free, to read more or to send us your comments and your questions. Until next week. Goodbye.
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More or Less was presented by Tim Harford, the producer was Ruth Alexander and the editor was Richard Varden. The program is made in association with the Open University. You can Download many more BBC Radio 4 programmes for free. Find these at BBC.co.uk radio4.