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WS MoreOrLess: Numbers of the Year part 3.
00:09:43
What is the most important number in the world? Robert Peston tells us and Helen Joyce...
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A
Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast from the BBC. Statistically proven to be the very best numbers program around. This program was first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
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B
Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts welcome to the first
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more or less of 2015 on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Harford. We always think that the start of a new year is the perfect time to reflect on the year that just went by. And that's what we're doing today with the final installment of our Numbers of the Year where we look at the most interesting and important numbers from 2014. One place where the new year doesn't begin on January 1, of course, is China. The and it's the subject of our first number from Robert Peston, the BBC's economics editor.
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C
Well, the number that I've been obsessed with for, you know, actually decades now has been the rate of China's growth for 30 years. It grew at a sort of mind boggling rate, 10% a year.
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A
Which means that the country is, the economy is doubling in size roughly every seven years. That's right.
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C
But that all stopped when the global economy hit the skids in 2008 and actually it fell very sharply. And then the Chinese government did something remarkable which is it persuaded its banks to lend as if there was no tomorrow and they lent for investment. And investment in China went up from an already amazingly high 40 odd percent of GDP to about 50% of of GDP and the growth rate picked up again.
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A
So half of all the money in China is being spent on investment goods rather than consumption.
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C
Unbelievable. I mean, there's been nothing like it in the history of capitalism, basically. I mean, it's astonishing. And financed by debt. The Chinese have worked out that this new way of growing through debt funded investment rather than exports can't go on forever. That it's actually potentially quite dangerous. And so they're trying to reconstruct the economy, but it's not going desperately well. And actually they're still too dependent on investment. So basically growth has come down, it's come down to just under 7.5% now. I'm not sure we can trust these numbers, to be honest. One of the things I was going to preface all this by saying is my world number is sort of actually quite difficult to pin down because I think most of us would say if we're slightly uneasy about most government statistics, we're profoundly uneasy about China's statistics. But we do know that China is slowing down, and there's a big debate about how fast it's slowing down. There's a big debate about how fast it should be slowing down. But what I would simply say is this. The big story that has influenced all our lives over the last 30 years has been the economic revolution in China. I mean, it just changed everything. For years. It improved our living standards by making the stuff we buy cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. It gulled central banks everywhere into thinking they had inflation under control, so they kept interest rates way too low for too long. China generated these enormous surpluses which they then lent to America to finance its colossal deficit. China was the big economic force in the world, and it still is the big economic force in the world, but it's moving in the opposite direction. And, and depending on the speed at which it slows down and the way that it slows down, that will have an influence on the precise pace at which it influences all our lives. But we should be under no illusion that the really big thing in the world which will have an impact on our living standards is what happens in China. Nothing else really matters in comparison.
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A
So that's the number, not just of the year, but, but of the next decade. And we don't even really know what it's been for the last decade.
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C
We don't really know what it's been for the. But it tell. But we don't really know what the precise number has been. But the point is that we can see what's happening in China on the ground. We've seen what it's done to the prices of things that really matter to us, everything from food to energy. I mean, one of the things that I think is very striking is that the oil price appears to be in free fall at the moment. I think that tells you that one bunch of investors at least think that what's happening in China, given that it's the world's greatest consumer of oil, is pretty, pretty serious.
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Robert Peston from one economic powerhouse there in China to a faltering one in Brazil.
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D
I'm Helen Joyce, the international editor of the Economist. And my number of the year, it's actually a ratio, it's seven to one. It means two things to me as a former Brazil correspondent for the Economist, and both of them sad. One of them is the score that Germany got against Brazil in July in the semifinal of the World Cup. Germany got seven. Brazil went out on a humiliating one. It's also just as sadly about the ratio at the moment of inflation in Brazil to growth. You may remember that Brazil was one of the BRIC economies, the large emerging markets that were growing fast and that were going to transform the world's economy. That was a few years ago. Now we have a country that's perilously close to stagflation. It's got 7%, approximately, of its inflation and it's got growing at even less than 1%. For me, this ratio sums up two ways in which Brazil has disappointed in the last few years since its arrival on the world stage. And I hope that this country that I still believe has huge, huge potential and for which I'm rooting, can turn this around and make it one to seven in the future.
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Helen Joyce of the Economist. Along with the World cup, there's another story that dominated the news for large parts of 2014, and that's the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It's something that we've looked into a couple of times on more or less throughout the year, and it's the subject of the number chosen by Dr. Hannah Fry, a complexity scientist at University College London.
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E
So my number that I've chosen is 2.53, which is the basic reproduction number for Ebola in Sierra Leone. So this is the number of the average number of people that one person with Ebola will infect before they either die or cured of the disease, or rather recover, I should say, from the disease.
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And 2.53. So is that a big number or not?
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E
Well, so if a reproduction number is bigger than one, then that means that the more people that get a particular disease, the more people that will get it, and so on and so on, and it will spread through the population as an epidemic. If you have a reproduction number that's less than 1, then it will eventually die away. So the issue with Ebola, then, even though 2.53 is just in Sierra Leone, really, there's a range between 1.5 and 2.7, but they're all above 1, so hence why we've got sort of an epidemic on our hands.
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And so 2.53, that would be each person infecting two and a half more people. And that's happening quite quickly, isn't it?
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E
Yeah. So on average, the generation interval, they call it, is about two weeks. So a person is infectious and can be infecting other people for about two weeks. So the real issue then with Ebola is.
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So you could be more than doubling the number of infected people every four weeks.
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E
Exactly. Now, compared to some other diseases in the past so compared to measles, for example, before people were routinely vaccinated, that reproduction number was actually about 17, which is huge in comparison to Ebola. But the thing that's really terrifying about Ebola is, well, how many people who have it will die, and also that bodies remain infectious after death.
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Now, we spoke a few weeks ago to Hans Rosling, who was in Liberia, I think, and reporting on how the epidemic was going. He said it had switched towards long campaign. It was no longer crisis mode because the reproduction number was falling. Have they managed to get it down below one yet?
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E
Well, so people always talk about bending the curve. So essentially what they're talking about there is. There's a mathematical model that you use to look at the way that these diseases spread and use those to help design your strategies, basically. So by bending the curve, you're trying to flatten off this reproduction number. And you can do that by just isolating people who have Ebola and stopping them from affecting other people. But it turns out that you only actually need to stop about half of the new infected cases to get the basic reproduction number down to under one.
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And that is what they're now trying
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to do and successfully.
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In Nigeria, Dr. Hannah Fry. Bringing our numbers of the year to a close. 2014 may now be firmly behind us, but we'll be back with another edition of More or Less next week. You can listen to old episodes of the program on our website, bbcworldservice.com more or less. And of course, if you see any suspect numbers in the news or elsewhere, then please email us at more or lessbc.co.uk.
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