The mistake in Trump’s tariff formula

Summary

More or Less – "The mistake in Trump’s tariff formula"

Host: Tim Harford (BBC Radio 4)
Guests: Nathan Gower, Charlotte MacDonald, Tony Travers, Thomas Sampson, Gavin Hailes, Jeff Mogil
Date: April 9, 2025

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Episode Overview

This edition of More or Less is a classic investigation into claims and statistics in politics, public policy, and science, focusing this week on:

• The mathematical and economic flaws underpinning Donald Trump's "reciprocal" tariff policy
• How police officer counts in England and Wales have been misleading and what a recent audit revealed
• Local government communications and the reality of a supposed council tax "freeze" in Wandsworth
• Science behind claims that redheads can tolerate more pain

Tim Harford and his guests debunk myths, clarify official statements, and, as always, inject wry humor and skepticism into the numbers influencing headlines.

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1. The Mistake in Trump’s Tariff Formula

Main Discussion Points

a. Trump’s Reciprocal Tariffs – What Happened?

• President Trump announced "reciprocal tariffs" supposedly to match foreign tariffs on US goods.
• In reality, the tariffs set were neither reciprocal nor coherent: e.g., Switzerland (which has almost no tariffs on US imports) was hit with a 31% tariff, while the EU, with modest tariffs, got 20%.
  (00:56)

b. The (Flawed) Formula

• Writer James Surowiecki discovered the administration’s formula:
  • Tariff = (Exports to US – US imports) / US imports (the bilateral trade deficit as a % of imports), then divided by 2 (as a gesture of “kindness”).
• No consideration for non-tariff barriers (like bans on certain products).
  (01:44)

Key Moment:
"People started to laugh and poke fun. Sad. So the White House press department replied... they issued a complicated equation full of Greek letters."
-- Tim Harford, (03:04)

c. Attempt to Complicate – Epsilon (ε) and Phi (φ)

• Press response: a more ‘complex’ formula using two additional factors: epsilon (ε) and phi (φ), meant to represent trade elasticity and price pass-through.
• But both values (4 and 0.25) always multiply to 1, rendering them mathematically meaningless in practice.
  (03:13 – 04:59)

Notable Quote:
"So the actual calculations they do are as if the epsilon and the phi aren't there. So they could play an interesting role, but in practice they don't because they've used values that make them drop out."
-- Thomas Sampson, (05:21)

d. Why It Matters

• Correct values for ε and φ should multiply to 2–5, not 1. Using 1 results in tariffs 4–5 times too high, even by their own (handpicked) academic sources.
• Even extremely high tariffs won't fix the US trade deficit: the deficit is caused by macroeconomic imbalances—namely, the US investing more than it saves, funded by foreign investment, not trade policy.
  (06:26 – 09:55)

Quote:
"You can't close a trade deficit by imposing tariffs. You can only close a trade deficit by changing the macroeconomics of the US...maybe by persuading the American consumer to do more saving and investing rather than buying consumer goods."
-- Tim Harford, (08:38)

e. Conclusion

• The tariffs are not only misplaced in design but are excessive in magnitude due to botched math.
• Without addressing underlying US economic behavior, the trade deficit will persist.

Timestamps:

• Tariff Announcement and Formula: 00:39 – 02:36
• Greek Letters Debacle: 03:13 – 05:30
• Macroeconomic Perspective: 07:37 – 09:36

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2. Counting Police Officers: Misleading Numbers

Key Insights

a. Government Promise and Reality Check

• Government promises 13,000 more neighbourhood police.
• A data validation exercise revealed nearly 3,000 fewer ‘neighbourhood’ police than previously claimed: much of the prior figure relied on broad or inaccurate categorizations.
  (11:08 – 12:49)

b. What Actually Changed?

• Revised numbers: 10,664 police in neighbourhood roles (down from 13,424).
• Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs): figures slightly revised upwards.
  (12:20 – 12:49)

c. Public Perspective

• Per Crime Survey, visible foot patrols dropped from 40% (2009–12) to 12% in 2023–24. The lack of public-facing officers has been strongly noticed.
  (13:44)

d. Does More Visibility Prevent Crime?
"It's not enough just for police officers to be seen in public. They also need to be actively tackling the problems that are affecting local people, whether that's crime or antisocial behaviour."
-- Gavin Hailes, (14:34)

e. Political Spin

• The decrease in the baseline (number of neighbourhood police) may help the government meet its “add 13,000” target more easily—starting from a lower number.
  (15:03)

Timestamps:

• Counting Police Officers: 11:08 – 13:12
• Crime Survey & Visibility: 13:44
• Prevention & Policy: 14:23 – 15:15

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3. Wandsworth Council Tax: Is "Frozen" Really Frozen?

Key Insights

a. Listener Inquiry

• Advertisement of a council tax "freeze" in Wandsworth; a listener receives a bill showing a 2% increase.
  (16:43)

b. Council’s Language

• Wandsworth’s communication stresses a freeze on the “main element” of tax, but notes an extra 2% “social care precept.” This is misleading: the 2% rise applies to the whole council tax controlled by Wandsworth.

c. The Social Care Precept Explained

• National rules allow a 3% rise, plus 2% more for social care.
• Wandsworth’s communication implies the 2% is a small add-on, but it applies to the full tax, which IS going up.

Quote:
"It would be very easy to read this document and be misled that the council tax as a whole wasn't going up by 2%... It's just an unfortunate use of language to put it kindly."
-- Tony Travers, (19:59)

d. Why Does Wandsworth Usually Have the Lowest Council Tax?

• Historic funding formulas from 1990–93 were designed to keep it low, to the envy of many outside London.
  (20:57 – 21:28)

Timestamps:

• Listener query and Wandsworth response: 16:43 – 19:49
• Lowest council tax, history and politics: 20:49 – 21:28

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4. Are Redheads Really Tougher?

Main Points

a. The Claim

• Redheads can tolerate 25% more pain; claim reported in the New York Times Magazine.

b. The Genetics

• The MC1R gene determines red hair and, unexpectedly, sensitivity to certain painkillers, as discovered in mouse studies and confirmed in humans.
  (23:09 – 25:08)

Quote:
"We were not interested in redheads... We eventually found the gene and the gene happened to be MC1R. And that's when we said to ourselves, oh, we could do this same experiment in humans..."
-- Jeff Mogil, (24:20)

c. The Experiments

• Redheads can tolerate higher levels of electrical current—on average, up to 25% more—before saying “stop”.
  (25:23 – 26:14)

d. Caveats

• Sensitivity to pain varies by type: redheads are more sensitive to thermal (heat/cold) pain than controls.
• Not all redheads have the MC1R variants responsible; some blondes do, some redheads don’t.

Quote:
"It turns out that some people with MC1R variants, through the additional effects of other genes, end up being blonde and not red haired. But they too have non functional melanocortin 1 receptors. So yeah, it's possible that there are some blondes out there that have the same pain phenotype as redheads."
-- Jeff Mogil, (27:28)

Timestamps:

• Genetics and Pain Research: 23:09 – 27:50

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5. Corrections and Listener Engagement

• Tim Harford corrects an earlier mistake about interest rates (they were low, not high, in 2018–20) and reiterates More or Less's commitment to listener feedback and accuracy.
  (15:33)

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Notable Quotes and Moments

• On Trump's tariff math:
  "All that mattered was the value of the goods each country sold to the US and how much each bought from the US. To get the tariff numbers, you use a basic formula... Your so called reciprocal tariff equals the value of exports to the US minus the value of imports..."
  — Tim Harford, (01:44)

• On public misinterpretation:
  "A 2% increase is not a freeze."
  — Tim Harford, (21:33)

• On statistical precision:
  "We obviously wondered, what's all this, then?"
  — Tim Harford, launching into the police numbers segment (11:56)

• On pain resistance and hair colour:
  "It turns out that some people with MC1R variants, through the additional effects of other genes, end up being blonde and not red haired. But they too have non-functional melanocortin 1 receptors. So yeah, it's possible that there are some blondes out there that have the same pain phenotype as redheads."
  — Jeff Mogil, (27:28)

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Episode Structure – Quick Timeline

• 00:05 – Introduction
• 00:39 – Trump Tariffs Math Debacle
• 11:08 – Counting Police Officers
• 16:43 – Council Tax Freeze or Not?
• 22:26 – Redheads and Pain Tolerance
• 28:13 – Wrap up and acknowledgments

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Tone & Style

The episode maintains More or Less’s hallmark: fact-driven, humorous, gently skeptical, with a fondness for puns (“tariffed some penguins,” “eat marathons and opal fruits” instead of Snickers and Starburst). The guests and host make technical economics and science engaging and accessible with wit, analogies, and plain language.

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In Summary:
This episode of More or Less takes listeners through an impressive journey of statistical detective work: exposing political misdirection in tariff policy, scrutinizing official policing numbers, questioning local government communications, and exploring quirky genetics behind pain tolerance. The hosts’ and experts’ banter, sharp analysis, and commitment to the truth come through on every topic.

Transcript

[BBC Announcer]

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.

[Tim Harford]

Hello, and welcome to the last in this series of More or less. We're making a list. We're checking it twice just to make sure we haven't accidentally tariffed some penguins. And I'm Tim Harford this week. When is a tax freeze not a tax freeze?

[Nathan Gower]

Hello, hello, hello.

[Tim Harford]

Strange goings on in the world of counting police officers. Charlotte MacDonald tells me why redheads are tougher than I am. But first, let's start with Liberation Day, the day US trade policy liberated itself from the shackles of rationality.

[Donald Trump]

In a few moments, I will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world. Reciprocal? That means they do it to us and we do it to them. Very simple. Can't get any simpler than that.

[Tim Harford]

Let's just get the obvious stuff out of the way. These tariffs are not reciprocal. The average tariff the EU puts on the US is somewhere between 1 and 5%, depending on who's counting. They got a reciprocal tariff of 20%. Switzerland puts virtually no tariffs on U.S. imports. They got a 31% tariff.

[Nathan Gower]

Aha.

[Tim Harford]

But trade is complicated. Maybe the U.S. has used a clever calculation to account for other trade barriers such as bans on certain kinds of products. Hormone treated beef, chlorine washed chicken, those chocolate bars that taste a little bit like sick. That sort of thing might annoy a red blooded US exporter.

[Donald Trump]

They rip us off. It's so sad to see. It's so pathetic.

[Tim Harford]

Nope, none of that was involved. Writer James Surawecki was the first to twig what was going on. He noticed that the new tariffs had nothing to do with that. All that mattered was the value of the goods each country sold to the US and how much each bought from the us to get the tariff numbers, you use a basic formula. Your so called reciprocal tariff equals the value of exports to the US minus the value of imports, AKA the bilateral trade deficit, and then convert it into a percentage by dividing the whole thing by imports. Then to get the tariff the US would impose, the answer was divided by two. Why? Well, that was because President Trump was being kind.

[Donald Trump]

We are being very kind. We're kind people. Very kind.

[Tim Harford]

When James Surowiecki posted this on Twitter. It's called X now, Tim. Not on my program. We eat marathons and opal fruits, we clean with Jif and we post on Twitter. So as I was saying, James posted this on Twitter and people were astonished that there hadn't been a complicated process that looked in detail at tariffs and trade barriers. But just a very simple formula. People started to laugh and poke fun. Sad. So the White House press department replied to James Surowiecki to say that the formula was actually much more complex. And they issued a complicated equation full of Greek letters.

[Tony Travers]

The increase in tariffs equals exports minus imports divided by imports multiplied by epsilon and phi.

[Tim Harford]

They said learning ancient Greek for 10 years was pointless. Nathan, you just showed them. The new equation is divided by two additional terms, epsilon and phi, which were multiplied together. But the values of These terms were 4 and 0.25, always 4 and 0.25 for every country. Now, those of you who are particularly good at mental arithmetic will realise that if you multiply 0.25 and 4 together, you get 1, and if you multiply by 1, it doesn't make any difference to the rest of the equation. Now, it is tempting, therefore, to dismiss the importance of these terms, but actually including them in the formula did make sense. But there was a problem. There were good reasons to think that the values were wrong. Thomas Sampson is an associate professor at the London School of Economics.

[Thomas Sampson]

The idea is that the epsilon tells you about how much if you increase tariffs, and therefore you increase the price of imports, how much trade responds. And the FI is telling you, if you increase tariffs, how much of that is passed through into import prices? So the combination of the epsilon and the fi tells you, if I increase tariffs, what is the proportional change in trade as a response? So that, in fact, is a really important parameter for anyone who studies international trade. It's what trade economists call the trade elasticity.

[Nathan Gower]

Yeah. If I increase a tariff, do people respond by cutting back or not? Or do they just swallow the tariff and keep exporting?

[Thomas Sampson]

Exactly. But there's a catch, which is that the values of the epsilon and phi they've chosen to use actually multiply together to just give one. And so because epsilon times phi is one, it just drops out of the equation and actually makes no difference to the tariff calculations. So the actual calculations they do are as if the epsilon and the phi aren't there. So they could play an interesting role, but in practice they don't because they've used values that make them drop out.

[Nathan Gower]

Sorry, my head is hurting a little bit.

[Tim Harford]

So is there a reason?

[Nathan Gower]

I mean, are epsilon and phi by definition going to equal one when you multiply them together, does it just happen to be that the values they've chosen happen to equal one?

[Thomas Sampson]

It just happens to be that the values that they've chosen happen to equal one. And in fact, we know something about what those numbers should be. And Typically we would think that they should be a number bigger than one. Once you multiply them together, maybe somewhere between two at a minimum, maybe closer to five on average. So they've in fact chosen a very low value for that epsilon phi combination.

[Nathan Gower]

And I'm just going to hazard a guess. Does that very low value that they've chosen mean very high tariffs?

[Thomas Sampson]

Absolutely it does. For example, if the Epsilon times 5 were equal to 5 instead of 1, the tariff would be one fifth as big.

[Tim Harford]

Rather than dividing by one, they should be dividing by a bigger number, making the tariff much smaller. How did this happen? The administration's press release cites an academic paper suggesting that this Phi value is 0.25. But the academic paper in question actually says the value of phi is is slightly less than 1, which much as Thomas Sampson suggests, means all those tariffs are almost four times too high, even according to their own calculations, relying on their own hand picked sources. Now that might end up being the difference between a global downturn and a global depression. But hey, friends, don't argue over little differences like that.

[Nathan Gower]

So we have an awful lot of maths. A lot of the maths appears to be fake maths and the real maths appears to be fake economics. When push comes to shove, what we've got is countries with whom the US has a big trade deficit are going to have a lot of tariffs imposed on their imports to the us Is that likely to eliminate or reduce the trade deficits?

[Thomas Sampson]

It will certainly have an effect on trade, and for some countries it might reduce the trade deficits. But the other thing we need to bear in mind is that what drives the aggregate US trade deficit is not anything to do with US tariff policy. It's the fact that the US invests more than it saves domestically.

[Tim Harford]

Now for some economists like me, that seems a perfectly natural thing to say. But I'm guessing that some of you will be quite puzzled by that statement. What have savings and investments got to do with any of this? If the US has a trade deficit, it means it's buying more from the outside world than it's selling to them. That's a bit like spending more than you earn. How is that possible? The answer is that the extra money the US spends on imports comes from foreigners investing in the us they might do that by buying US property or shares in US companies, or just by buying US promises to pay later. We call these bonds and treasury bills. You could think of it like this. Instead of exporting T shirts or microwave ovens, the US is exporting shares in Apple And Google. The US has been doing this for a long time, and because it's very good at generating new financial assets, it's been a stable way to pay for all those lovely imports. And US households would rather spend their last few dollars at the end of the month on buying more stuff from Asia than do a lot of saving like they do in China. Fundamentally, you can't close a trade deficit by imposing tariffs. You can only close a trade deficit by changing the macroeconomics of the us, maybe by persuading the American consumer to do more saving and investing rather than buying consumer goods. Or maybe by making the US a less attractive place for foreigners to invest in. Well, the White House might manage that one, yet you never know.

[Thomas Sampson]

So unless there's a change in that savings investment balance in the us, the US is still going to run an aggregate trade deficit. And if you're running an aggregate trade deficit, then there's got to be at least some countries you run a bilateral trade deficit with. So fundamentally, we wouldn't expect this to eliminate those deficits.

[Tim Harford]

Of course, there might be a great 4D chess master plan behind these tariffs, but working on what we actually see, they are calculated to reduce US trade deficits with every country involved to zero. They appear to be massively overpowered to do that. Maybe four or five times bigger than they need to be, by their own calculation. And without changing the saving and investment balance, they can't do that. Anyway. You're listening to More or less. Politicians are always talking about the importance of Bob is on the beat and this government is no different. They're promising more, 13,000 more neighbourhood police, to be precise, to get the ball rolling. They decided to find out how many there actually are bobbing on these beats already. And there were not as many as they thought. Nearly 3,000 fewer, in fact. Hello, hello, hello. We obviously wondered, what's all this, then? Gavin Hailes is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Police foundation think tank.

[Gavin Hailes]

So how we've got to where we are is a history of kind of boom and bust in neighbourhood policing, which started with a great deal of investment in the early 2000s. We then got to austerity from 2010, and neighbourhood policing was one of the victims of austerity and policing. And now we've got a new government and they're making a commitment to reinvest the neighbourhood policing. And so suddenly it matters a great deal that we can count exactly how many people work in neighbourhood policing today. I think that through the austerity years, there were, in some cases, police Forces who perhaps tried to mask the impact of cuts by, for example, deciding that all of their response police officers responding to 999 calls would be counted as neighbourhood police officers. And in a way, that was perhaps an attempt to preserve the impression that neighbourhood policing had been protected when it hadn't.

[Tim Harford]

The definitions here are obviously a bit blurry. What if an officer on patrol responds to a 999 call, but the current government asked police forces to unblur them to do an audit? They called it a data validation exercise and check that everyone knew who was doing what and at least most of the time, and it turned out they didn't.

[Gavin Hailes]

The number of police officers in neighbourhood rolls was thought to be 13,424 the last time these figures were published, last July. The amended figure for them is 10,664. So it's a reduction of more than 2,700 officers, or about 21% in those neighbourhood roles. For the police community support officers, they actually found that there was slightly more than was previously thought. So they've gone up from 6210 to 6359, which is an increase of 149, or just over 2%.

[Tim Harford]

Police community support officers are the people who patrol in uniform but don't have arrest powers.

[Gavin Hailes]

So I should say that these numbers all apply to England and Wales. And the last time the police workforce data was published, there were 147,000 police officers in England and Wales in September 2024. And at the same time, there were 7,417 police community support officers.

[Tim Harford]

So in terms of the police officers, there weren't a massive number categorised as neighbourhood police in the first place, under 10% of the total, and then a load of them disappeared. What happened to them? Gavin says they went AWOL for a few different reasons. Partly it was an unwinding of the slightly iffy categorisations that made the number look bigger than it actually was. Some were apparently just mistakes, but. But we don't have to rely on figures from the police. We can look at things from the public's perspective.

[Gavin Hailes]

So one of the pieces of evidence we can bring in here is from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which is a survey of householders in England and Wales, which typically asks them about their experiences of crime and antisocial behaviour. But it also asks them about things like whether police patrols are highly visible in their local area. What that tells us is that there was a fall from 40% of respondents reporting highly visible foot patrols in the local area in the years between 2009 and 2012 to only 12% of people reporting that by 2023, 24. So the public have noticed that the police are no longer as present in their local communities. And clearly this policy to increase the number of neighbour police officers is in part an attempt to address that gap.

[Tim Harford]

As to the question of whether bobbies on the beat actually prevent crime, the somewhat unsurprising answer is that they can if you target the right areas and do the right things.

[Gavin Hailes]

So. So it's not enough just for police officers to be seen in public. They also need to be actively tackling the problems that are affecting local people, whether that's crime or antisocial behaviour.

[Tim Harford]

For the government, you might think that the missing officers might be bad news for their promise, a promise which includes both police officers, including part time volunteers, and police community support officers. But as some of the promised extra bobbies can be reclassified from the existing police officer pool, that might not be the case.

[Gavin Hailes]

One of the effects of this may be that it makes it slightly easier for the Government's commitments to put an additional 13,000 police personnel into neighbourhood policing. It'll be slightly easier to reach because it's starting from a lower base, thanks

[Tim Harford]

to Gavin Hales from the Police Foundation. Never let it be said that we don't hold ourselves to the same high

[Nathan Gower]

standards we hold others.

[Tim Harford]

So, time for an apology about a mistake we made in an episode two weeks ago talking about the way the Office for National Statistics were re evaluating pension wealth. For some reason I said that interest rates were high from 2018 to 2020. As one anonymous emailer signing off only as loyal listener pointed out to us, they were actually very low. Since I should have known and could have checked, I am not exactly sure how this one got through. Possibly I was distracted by events as I worked on the script. There have been quite a lot of events in any case, sorry. And thanks to our loyal listener for pointing out our error. If you see anything we've got wrong or have any other questions or comments for us, our email address is more or less because BBC.co.uk. last week, citizens up and down the country found themselves presented with increases in a whole swathe of bills. Water, energy, car tax. For millions of people, these went up. Another big one was council tax as many councils across the country increased their rates substantially. But the Labour controlled Wandsworth Borough Council in South London had reassuring words for their residents proclaiming in their quarterly magazine, wandsworth council is freezing your Council tax for the third year in a row. Great news for Wandsworth residents everywhere. Or to be more specific, Wandsworth. But wait. We received an email from Louis Redman, a loyal listener and self described concerned resident of Wandsworth. He had received that very magazine from the council assuring him that that his council tax was going to be frozen. But when he got his bill. That is not what it said. Far from being frozen, the portion of council tax that Wandsworth Borough Council controls is going up by 2%. We asked Professor Tony Travers, an expert in local government from the London School of Economics, to help us get to the bottom of this.

[Tony Travers]

The leaflet that the council sent out is very carefully written. So the leaflet talks about the council freedom, its share of the council tax, but then goes on to talk about a so called social care precept which the council is allowed to put up. The government allows it to put it up within the capping rules that central government sets for local authorities in England each year.

[Nathan Gower]

Why is adult social care being broken out here?

[Tony Travers]

Well, because a few years ago it was realised by central government that the pressure they put on council budgets was such that social care was effectively massively underfunded. So the government allowed councils not only to put up council tax by say 3% a year, but 3% plus 2, with the extra 2% being to fund social care.

[Tim Harford]

Councils in England have limits on how much they can put up council tax. The cap starts at 3%, but they're allowed to add an extra 2% to help them meet the costs of providing adult social care, taking them up to a total of 5% if they want. What Wandsworth Borough Council have done is very strange. On the one hand, they claim they've frozen the main element of council tax. They also talk about an increase of 2% in what is called the adult social care precept. But this makes it Sound like the 2% increase only applies to some separate and smaller portion of the council tax bill, while the rest of the bill is frozen. That's also strongly implied in a separate guide to council tax that Wandsworth sent out to residents. But this is definitely not what's happening. The 2% increase applies to the whole bill. The whole bill is going up by 2%.

[Tony Travers]

The truth is, if you look at it in the round, what they are doing is putting the council tax up by 2%. But they're disguising the way they say it in the language they're using in the document that they send out.

[Tim Harford]

I mean, this strikes me as. Well, you described it as carefully written.

[Nathan Gower]

I mean, I might.

[Tim Harford]

Well, that's one of those wonderful.

[Nathan Gower]

Yes, Prime Minister. Euphra business is very carefully written by

[Tony Travers]

person, but I mean, it's truth. It's true that I think it would be very easy to read this document and be misled that the council tax as a whole wasn't going up by 2% for one's share of it. And it would have been easy to say that the council taxes is going up by 2%, which is less than the 5% we could have put it up by. Because they could have put it up by the full 5% and we still have the lowest council tax in England. But they've worded this in a way that in the end, has made the listener worried.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, well, they said they've frozen it and they haven't.

[Tony Travers]

They haven't frozen it at all. No, they put it up, in effect, by 2%, but the way it's written, you might think they'd frozen it and some other component was going up by 2%. And it's just an unfortunate use of language to put it kindly on the

[Nathan Gower]

subject of the lowest council tax in England. I mean, this seems to usually be true for Wandsworth. Why?

[Tim Harford]

How are they able to do that?

[Tony Travers]

I think all the way back when it began in 1990 with the Poll Tax and then 1993 with the Council Tax, big efforts were made in government to ensure every sinew was stretched, to ensure that the allocation of government funding to them at the time to these councils to including to Wandsworthy, was helpful in delivering a low tax. And it's lived through all the way since. And I have to tell you, many councillors outside London are slightly resentful of the very low tax, even these days, even though the residents presumably love it.

[Tim Harford]

Tony Travers, thank you very much.

[Nathan Gower]

You are a very kind man.

[Tony Travers]

Thank you, too.

[Tim Harford]

We put all this to Wandsworth Borough Council. They told us Wandsworth Council has frozen the main element of council tax for the third year in a row. The 2% increase reflects the adult social care precept, which is ring fenced to fund vital support for older and vulnerable residents. This misses the point, which is that the 2% increase for adult social care applies to all of the council tax bill that Wandsworth controls, not some smaller element. And though it seems mad to have to Repeat this, a 2% increase is not a freeze. You're listening to more or less. What do Lindsay Lohan, Ron Weasley and our very own Charlotte MacDonald all have in common now? They haven't all Driven a magic car. They are all natural redheads outing me

[Charlotte MacDonald]

like this on the radio.

[Tim Harford]

Ah, Charlotte, red is a lovely hair colour. Indeed. Red is the colour of my true love's hair.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Well, I appreciate it now, I guess, but growing up I always ran the risk of being bullied or, you know, being burned at the stake for witchcraft.

[Tim Harford]

Did you grow up in medieval Europe?

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Well, actually it was the East Midlands in the 80s. I'm sure it's the same thing.

[Tim Harford]

Pretty much.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

But anyway, whilst running the risk of some bullying, it turns out redheads could actually have a special ability. According to an article in the New

[Tim Harford]

York Times Magazine, redheads can withstand up to 25% more pain than their blonde and brunette peers.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

And the reason for this special ability? Our secret ingredient, MC1R.

[Tim Harford]

Isn't that a classic 2000s emo band?

[Charlotte MacDonald]

No, that's My Chemical Romance. MC1R is a gene. In fact, it's the thing that makes most of us redheads in the first place. I'll let Professor Jeff Mogill explain. He's the Canada Research Chair in Genetics of Pain.

[Tim Harford]

Genetics of pain. That definitely is a classic chemo band.

[Jeff Mogil]

So the MC1R gene is the gene that codes for, that provides the instructions for the creation of a protein known as the melanocortin 1 receptor. And the melanocortin 1 receptor has a number of roles, but its most well known is its involvement in producing melanin, which is the pigment that makes skin and hair turn different colors. And redheads essentially are those who have inherited variants of that gene such that the protein, once it's made, doesn't work. And so melanocortin 1 doesn't do what it's supposed to do. And so instead of having brown hair like you're supposed to and somewhat darker skin, you end up having red hair and somewhat lighter skin, which is usually prone to freckling.

[Tim Harford]

Right, so that's the redhead part. What about the pain?

[Jeff Mogil]

My lab showed that redheaded mice were more sensitive to a particular class of opioid drugs called kappa opioid drugs. And we found this completely biological accident. We were not interested in redheads. We were not interested in redheaded mice. We were trying to find what the gene was that was responsible for how much kappa opioid analgesia mice would have. We eventually found the gene and the gene happened to be MC1R. And that's when we said to ourselves, oh, we could do this same experiment in humans because we can go get red headed women that are very likely to have these variants of MC1R. And indeed we showed that redheads were more sensitive to the drug as well.

[Tim Harford]

So analgesia, that is the fancy word for pain relief. He's saying that these mice needed to take fewer opioid painkillers than regular mice to get the same pain relief. But what about this figure of withstanding 25% more pain?

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Well, that's Jeff living up to his title of chair in genetics of pain. His team wondered whether the reason that redheads needed fewer opioids could be because the MC1R gene already acted as a natural pain inhibitor. So they joined up with a team in the Netherlands to electrocute redheads.

[Tim Harford]

Wait, what?

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Only a bit though.

[Jeff Mogil]

So in this study, we gave them electrical current to their arm. The intensity of that electrical current was slowly increased until they said stop, I've had enough. The non redhead said stop when the electric current was up to 16 milliamperes. And the redheads didn't say stop until it was up to 21 milliamperes. So that's a difference of 5 out of 16. So yeah, about 25%.

[Tim Harford]

So it seems that redheads can withstand 25% more pain. Job done.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Not quite. A paper published around the same time found that redheaded mice were more sensitive to thermal pain. So hot and cold temperatures.

[Tim Harford]

If that's true, why are there so many redheads in Scotland?

[Charlotte MacDonald]

I don't know. But I do know that there could be two reasons for redheads having higher pain tolerance, for one thing and not the other.

[Tim Harford]

Is it that different types of pain elicit different responses and are processed by the body in a different way?

[Nathan Gower]

Smart.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Yes, that's the first possible reason. The second takes us back to genes again, explain. Not all redheads have the right genes.

[Jeff Mogil]

It turns out that the melanochordin 1 receptor accounts for about 75, 5 or 80% of redheads. But not all. We actually looked at the genetics of our subjects to find out were they really melanocortin 1 receptor redhead and the US group didn't.

[Tim Harford]

So it is theoretically possible that the people less able to handle thermal pain didn't have the MC1R gene?

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Theoretically, yes. But there's another twist in the tale entertainment, the secret redhead.

[Jeff Mogil]

It turns out that some people with MC1R variants, through the additional effects of other genes, end up being blonde and not red haired. But they too have non functional melanocortin 1 receptors. So yeah, it's possible that there are some blondes out there that have the same pain phenotype as redheads.

[Tim Harford]

Very interesting indeed. But Charlotte in the end, what I am hearing is that you really might be able to withstand 25% more electrical pain than others.

[Thomas Sampson]

Yeah.

[Charlotte MacDonald]

Wait, Tim, why are you holding that cattle prod? I might have the wrong genes, Tim.

[Nathan Gower]

Hmm. Thank you, Charlotte.

[Tim Harford]

And that is all we have time for this week and indeed this series. Don't worry, we will be back in the summer and no doubt there will be one or two matters for us to look into by then. If you want more, More or Less. In the meantime, our Saturday podcast is available all year round. Search for More or Less behind the Stats and my other podcast, Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford, is also available weekly from BBC Sounds. Meanwhile, please keep those questions and comments coming in to more or lessbc.co.uk, we will be back on Radio 4 in June. Until then, goodbye. More or Less was presented by me, Tim Harford. The producer was Tom Coles with Nathan Gower, Charlotte MacDonald and Lizzie McNeil. The program was recorded and mixed by James Beard. Our production coordinator was Brenda Brown and our editor is Richard Varden.

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