BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello and welcome to the last in this series of more or less. We've been on a journey together, but this is our final climactic word on the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford. Right, what topics are epic enough to suit the occasion? Let me see. Did a Canadian politician misspeak when describing economic data? Are 1990s pop icons right said Fred right about what they said? Can I run on a treadmill in a funny mask? I really want to scratch my nose. And is a sauna really ten times as hot as Wales? And in case you think we've all gone a bit silly, 25% of those items are more serious than you might imagine. But first, would you be better off working or claiming benefits? That depends on how much your job pays, of course. But there are lots of people who will tell you that it needs to pay a lot. You'd need a £71,000 pre-tax household income to be as well off as a couple with children on benefits. Now it seems that somebody who goes to work has to earn £71,000 in order to match the benefits that are paid to a work-less household who are signed off sick with three kids. You now need to earn around £71,000 before tax, just to match what a jobless household with three children can receive in support. So where does this figure come from and is it a fair comparison? To help us understand, I am joined by our editor and once in a series reporter, Richard Varton. Hello Richard. Hello Tim. So where does the number come from? It comes from research done by the Centre for Social Justice. Which is the think tank set up by the former Conservative leader, Sir Ian Duncan Smith? Yes, they produced a report in December called the Benefits Budget as a response to the government's actual budget in November, where the Chancellor Rachel Reeves got rid of the two-child limit on universal credit. The Centre for Social Justice wanted to highlight the dangers of perverse incentives within the benefit system. So where did they get this £71,000 figure from? Because it does seem like a lot. I mean, we never pay producers on more or less that much. No, of course not. What would they even do with that amount of money? £71,000 would put you near the top 10% of earnings and it's almost twice the median full-time earnings before tax, which is £39,000. So it's a lot of money. But there is more to this comparison than meets the eye. You don't say. First of all, the comparison is between what a whole family could get on benefits and the earnings of one individual. And of course, £71,000 is not a take-home amount. It reflects earnings before income tax and national insurance. That might be obvious to some, but less obviously. The Centre for Social Justice also takes off a 9% student loan repayment and a 3% pension contribution, all of which implies a take-home pay of just over £46,000. I guess not everyone has a student loan to repay, but deducting taxes is reasonable enough. And that's part of the point of the comparison after all. But why compare a family of five to one person? I put that to Joe Shalom, the policy director of the Centre for Social Justice. The reason why we opted for a single salary to kind of provide this comparison was to make clear the level of gross salary needed to reach the kind of income that can be achieved by an out of work household in that context. OK, so the person earning £71,000 takes home £46,000. And we're comparing that with a family on benefits on the other side of the equation. Yes, according to the report, a couple on universal credit with three children can get about £46,000 on benefits. Is that true? Well, benefits calculations are difficult and very individualised. It's a very dependent on where you live, for instance, and the rental costs in your area. But now that the two-child limit is gone, a three-child family in London can get about £25,000 a year in benefits. Outside London, it's about £22,000. That's a long way from £46,000. Yes, that's because of the benefits cap, a policy brought in by the then Chancellor George Osborne in 2013 to limit how much money a household can receive in benefits and therefore encourage people to seek work. It in effect limits how much money the government will pay towards your housing costs. And does this benefit cap apply to everyone? No, there are a few exceptions. But the key one here is that if someone in the household is claiming a benefit for disability or serious illness, the benefit cap does not apply to the household. And the example family used by the Centre for Social Justice is a family where one of the adults has an illness or disability that affects their ability to work. Right, and that can make a £20,000 difference. Yes, it can. The health element of universal credit is worth about £5,000 a year, average personal independence payments are £7,500 a year, and you could make up the rest with increased housing support because you weren't being subject to the benefits cap. So it can kind of make this equation balance in that situation, but does it make sense to compare two very different households? Well, people like Benefits Expert Gareth Morgan of the blog Benefits in the Future don't think it's helpful. The whole comparison is unfair, comparing a single person without disabilities against a family with children and rent and disabilities and all the costs that go along with them. But to Joe Shalom, it's important to recognise incentives in the system, and big rises in claims for conditions like anxiety and depression, which have more than doubled since 2019. If you are able to essentially double your benefit income by going through the gateway that says you are unable to work due to anxiety and or depression and you're entitled to PIP to support your independent living in that way, the additional costs that come with anxiety or depression say, I think we have to treat that as a very real incentive. Of course, others like Gareth Morgan disagree strongly. The incentive to be disabled is a ridiculous kind of concept in the first place, but those people who work in the advice sector will tell you unanimously how difficult it is to get these disability benefits and the tests and the hoops that you have to jump through. It is not something you can decide to claim. You have to prove your disability and that's a very, very lengthy and onerous process. Well, as an economist, I believe incentives are always going to influence human behaviour, but the question is by how much? Yes, and we went looking for evidence and found some IFS research, that's the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that found that lowering the benefit cap in 2016 did induce more households to claim a benefit that would exempt the claimant from the benefit cap in the following year, for example, a disability benefit. But the effect was not big, about a 2% increase in the numbers claiming when compared to those not affected by the benefit cap. That effect might now be bigger because of the cost of living crisis and the increased level of disability benefits, but with the current research base, we can't be sure of that. Thank you, Richard. Last week, our inbox was flooded with requests to investigate a dodgy claim made by a world leader from the stage at the World Economic Forum at Davos. I think we have a clip we can play. Now, Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Ah, yes, I definitely assumed it was going to be Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada. He was essentially arguing that we're seeing a new era of geopolitics, one in which Western powers can no longer count on the United States as a reliable security and economic partner, which sounds worrying. But while taking questions, Mr. Carney had a reassuring statistic. I'll give you again all appeal since it's in the headlines to the Nordics. Nordics plus Canada, it's 20% of global GDP. The Nordics and Canada making up 20% of global GDP, really? Well, when you look at data from the International Monetary Fund for 2025, Mr. Carney is way off. Canada is 2% of global GDP. And if you add on the Nordic nations of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, you get to about 3.5% of global GDP. So what's going on? Well, it turns out Carney meant to say Canada plus the EU. So that doesn't include Norway and Iceland, but it does add in the likes of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and many other rich countries. And that would indeed bring us to 20% of global GDP. And just for context, the US economy accounts for about 25% of global GDP. You're listening to more or less. Social media is the town crier of our times, the way many people get their news. But the problem is that just as anyone can raise their voice and shout in a town square, although I wouldn't recommend it, people start giving you very funny looks, anybody can post something online and claim it is definitely irrefutably fact. Share it, like it, repost it, repeat. Alas, people are often wrong and these alleged facts are often distorted. We came across one of these very online claims the other day and here to tell me more is Lizzie McNeill. Hello Lizzie. Hi Tim, well I can't believe I'm about to say this but I've been fact checking Wright's Headfred. Wright's Headfred, as in 90s pop band Wright's Headfred. Yeah, the I'm too sexy for my shirt, one hit, wonder guys. One hit? I don't think so Lizzie, deeply dippy, was a musical turd of force. Why are we talking about Wright's Headfred on more or less? Well I've been looking at something they tweeted the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, after a recent arson attack on a mosque in Peacehaven, where masked men were seen purposefully setting fire to the building. She said it was deeply concerning. The Freds, as they're known on X, replied, 9,000 crimes against churches in the UK in the last three years. I don't recall you finding those deeply concerning. Okay, but the big question is, is what Wright's Headfred said right? No, what the unspecified Wright's Headfred said is not right. Now to be fair to them, their tweet contained a link to an article by the National Church's Trust which led with the 9,000 figure and this number also appeared in an article by the Telegraph. Ah, so the media is complicit too. Yes, and the statistic comes from a report by the Countryside Alliance, which is a group that campaigns about issues affecting rural communities, and they put in a Freedom of Information request to all of the police forces in the UK. Through this, they found that the police have recorded over 9,000 crimes that took place in churches. Okay, but surely that sounds like the claim is true? Sounds like it, yeah. It's understandable to see the confusion, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. You see, a lot of police forces include all places of worship within their count, so mosques, Buddhist temples and synagogues will be included in these numbers. So it doesn't just mean Christian churches. That's right, and the Telegraph got round this by talking about churches and places of worship, but all of their case studies were Christian churches, so it's a tad misleading. Now churches do vastly outnumber other religious buildings in the UK. There are about 38,000 churches compared to around 1,800 mosques, 450 synagogues and 200 Buddhist temples, so from a numbers perspective, you would expect churches to have more attacks, as there are just more of them. And people use the phrase, crimes against churches. Were these crimes attacks? No, so the majority of incidents were thefts and burglaries. So stealing artwork, antique lecterns, that sort of thing? Yeah, and lead from gutters and roofs. There were over 3,000 cases of criminal damage and 2,102 cases of violence. So not all of these attacks are carried out as a statement against religion? No, and if you take West Yorkshire as an example, their stats include nearly 100 incidents of stalking and harassment, a case of drug trafficking and 11 incidents of rape. Yeah, drug trafficking might be a crime committed in or near a church, but it would be weird to describe it as a crime against a church. Yeah, now some of these crimes could reasonably be described as crimes against churches or mosques or synagogues, but many of them are better described as crimes on the property. Even when a church or its contents is the target, this statistic is about where the crimes took place, not why. Churches may be the target of a religiously motivated crime, but they're also vulnerable to theft or vandalism because they're often in secluded areas, open and unmanned. So looking through the responses to this tweet and other conversations being had, there is a perception that Christians are being attacked for their beliefs and that church fires are a symptom of that and that no one's acknowledging it. Yeah, that is what they're saying, and the countryside alliance data doesn't tell us anything about whether that's true. We could look instead at religious hate crime in the UK, according to the Home Office in the year ending March 2025. The police recorded just over 7,000 religiously motivated hate crimes. 45% of those crimes were against Muslims and 29% against Jews. Only 5% were against Christians. And the rest? 6% seek, 3% Hindu, and the rest were either other, unrecorded or unknown. So the majority of religious hate crimes are being committed against people who are Muslim or Jewish? Yeah. Now this argument kicked off because of a fire at a mosque and the inferences that violence and arson is also happening to Christian places of worship. So is that true? Well, it has definitely happened. I spoke to Ecclesiastical, an insurance company that specializes in heritage buildings. They were set up 180 years ago after a spate of church fires, and they told me that in the last 10 years, their clients have seen 161 fires that were deemed arson and 267 which were accidental. Do we know who's setting these fires? So neither the countryside alliance nor Ecclesiastical insurance can tell us that. I've been looking into newspaper reports, so that's basically just a large collection of anecdotes, but those newspapers generally mention teenagers, people with mental health problems, people who are under the influence, or, and this is very much a church specific hazard, people knocking over votive candles. This was not an exhaustive search, but I couldn't find any evidence of Christian buildings being systematically burnt down by people with anti-Christian intent. Christians are at risk of violence in some countries around the world, but thankfully there is currently very little evidence that Christians in the UK face any real threat of violence. Thank you, Lizzie. Now, the moment we've all been waiting for, the culmination of weeks of planning and hardship. Some of you said a small team like ours didn't need a specialist sauna correspondent. Oh, how wrong you were. And it's all thanks to Mike, Ricky and Bob. These brave and loyal listeners got in touch to ask us to look into a number they heard on Radio 4 program, Inside Health. A number related to that most glorious of things, a sauna. Comparing the temperature outside in Wales to the temperature inside said sauna, physiologist Professor Damian Bailey made the following throwaway comment talking to presenter James Gallagher. Just so we're clear, I'm cold already because it's a wintry day in Wales. Eight degrees at the moment, so 80 degrees centigrade in there, right? Ten times as warm. Ten times as warm, eh? Our listeners smell to sweaty rat. And who else to set the record straight, but our very own sauna correspondent, Tom Culls. It's happening, Tim. I know! We can finally turn down the thermostat in this studio. Yeah, and you can put some clothes on. You'll be lucky. Okay, let's do this. Professor Bailey is no doubt a very fine physiologist, but he did say a silly thing, didn't he? He did. Yeah, I enlisted the help of Professor Callie Morrison, head of physics at Loughborough University to explain what's gone wrong here. I think for the maths, the maths is fine. So 80 is 10 times 8. The problem is what you mean by warmer. So because for the scale that you've chosen to use there, zero degrees Celsius in this instance is not as cold as it can get. So it's at that point that the maths starts to break down. The Celsius temperature scale is relative. Zero is just the temperature that water freezes. It's not the absence of all heat. You can see this problem if you convert a Fahrenheit instead. That's the one they're using in the US and weirdly in British newspapers on a hot summer's day, because saying the temperature is in the 80s is just more exciting than saying the temperature is 27 degrees. The numbers are bigger because the scale is relative to something else. It runs between the freezing point of brine and the temperature of the human body. So although it's quite satisfying for the few what a scorcher headline, it makes less sense when you realise the freezing point of fresh water on the Fahrenheit scale is 32 degrees. For our Welsh sauna, it's 46 degrees Fahrenheit outside in Wintery Wales and 176 degrees in the sauna, which is only four times warmer. Right. So these relative scales make all the multiples meaningless. I mean, how many times warmer is one degree compared to minus one? It doesn't make any sense. So come on then, give us the solution. Right. So in order to do the maths properly, you have to work out the temperature on a different scale, one where zero doesn't just mean frozen water or frozen brine, but one which starts at absolute zero, no heat at all, nada, thermal energy. And the temperature scale that does this is the Kelvin scale. Zero degrees Kelvin is minus 273.15 degrees Celsius. If you wanted to take your eight and 80 degrees Celsius example, you could go from eight degrees Celsius to Kelvin by adding 273. So that would give you 281.15, if you cared about the decimal points, Kelvin for 80 degrees Celsius, that would be 353.15 Kelvin. And the ratio of the two of these is actually 1.256. That's about 1.26 times warmer. So if you are respecting physics, then a sauna is only 1.26 times warmer than outdoor whales in winter. Got it. Just out of curiosity, Tom, how hot would the sauna need to be for it to be actually 10 times warmer? About 2,500 degrees C. That's a thousand degrees hotter than lava or around the temperature of an industrial furnace, which can melt steel like butter. I don't think I'd go into that sauna. Okay, Tom, your worker's sauna correspondent is done. Please, if you would at least cover yourself with a towel, as you wish. In 2017, Elliot Kipchogay, one of the greatest athletes the world has ever seen, tried to redefine the capability of the human body and break one of the most imposing boundaries of human achievement. He tried to run the marathon distance of 26.2 miles in under two hours in a project called Breaking 2. Kipchogay was agonizingly close. He was just 25 seconds away from history. Two years later, he tried again and succeeded. So where does humanity go from here? Should we weep for we have no more worlds to conquer? Well, human achievements all relative. You see, I've got a charity place in the London Marathon in April. It's my first. And I've got my eye on a target that is surely just as impressive. I'm Tim Harford. And this is Yes, can a Radio 4 presenter, his legs atrophied by nearly two decades sitting at a studio desk, run a marathon in under four hours. To find out if this mind boggling target is even feasible, I'm going to need some good hard data. Luckily, Dr Danny Muneeth, a senior lecturer in exercise physiology at the University of Hertfordshire, invited me to their shiny, exciting sports lab, picture oxygen masks, heart rate monitors and fancy treadmills, all set up to capture my vital statistics. And there are two metrics that matter particularly. One is called VO2 max, and the other the lactate threshold. Let's start with VO2 max. Here's Danny. V stands for the volume. O2 is oxygen. So it's the volume of oxygen that you can take in but also consume. And max just stands for the maximum, the highest amount of oxygen that you can use, which is going to happen during intense exercise. VO2 max essentially sets the ceiling of your aerobic metabolism. VO2 max is the amount of oxygen you can take in when you're pushing yourself as hard as you can go over a short distance. Of course, that's not really an option in a marathon. So the key question is how close to your top capacity can you run without becoming so fatigued that you slow down. This is where the lactate threshold comes in. When we are running a marathon, we are not sprinting, we are not running as fast as we can. We need to run at a base that is sustainable for the duration of the event. So those lactate thresholds or physiological thresholds essentially determine how close you can go to your VO2 max. What we tend to see is that trained individuals, elite athletes, not only have a much higher VO2 max, but they can also sustain a much higher percentage of their VO2 max. So they will be exercising at 95, 98 percent of their VO2 max for a long time. Lactate is a substance that's produced in our muscles when we exercise at intense levels. It's a signal of fatigue, a sign that we're not going to be able to sustain that pace. The pace at which I can run the marathon is going to be strongly influenced by a combination of these two factors. VO2 max, my top capacity, and my lactate threshold. The level of that capacity I can sustain without becoming too fatigued. I'm going to be running on this treadmill. How are you going to measure these physiological numbers? So we will be starting at a really low pace, running for a few minutes, three, four minutes, and then we take a small blood sample from the finger and we measure how much lactate is in blood. And we do that at increasing speeds, again going up slowly until we see that lactate starts to increase above resting values. VO2 max, obviously we said that VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen that we can consume. So VO2 max will require you, Tim, to exercise maximally, which means exercising for as long as you can as the speed goes up every minute. I'm absolutely terrified. Is that wrong? Well, it's normal, but I said this to you before, Tim, it's not as bad as it sounds. Okay, well, I'll be the judge of that. Breaking four. So now, Tim, this is when we need to check that this is tight enough. We're going to have a lot of experience with wearing tight masks. Basically, just go with how it feels. Regardless of the rumors. I've always wanted to say this, time for a training montage. So we're going to go up eight kilobytes per hour. So whenever you're ready, you can go for it. And we start now. Now I really want to scratch my nose. Big push, okay. Really good work. I just got tricked again. Come on, Tim. Big effort now. Okay, big push now. Okay, sir. Come on, 15k an hour is 20 minutes. 12k an hour, which I just did, 25 minutes. It must be about 23 minutes. I don't think a wiper is going to do it. It's going to get harder. I know it's going to get harder. How's it doing, Danny? It's doing really well. I've got about a minute left, maybe. Come on, Tim. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. Excellent work. Really, really good. That's fantastic effort. It's a certain point where the brain is just... No, this is very bad. Okay, so I'm done. That's it. Too much. You just think you've had... You want to just walk for a couple of minutes? Nice, how do you think? Sure. Finished the treadmill test about 10, 15 minutes ago. I've got my breath back. So, Danny, what did you find and what does that tell us? We've got some numbers here, so we did estimate your likely threshold to happen at around 11 km per hour. I would suggest that that's a speed that you can probably maintain based on the data for the marathon. That corresponds to a marathon time of three hours and 50 minutes. 350. So, I've got 10 minutes spare. Yes. Which I will need, but I send a hesitation in your voice. It's very difficult to predict the exact marathon and so many things can affect the result on the day from your nutrition, how will you sleep, how you feel on the day, the weather. But based on the numbers, I think that you can go under four hours if you keep training. It's going to be a long three months. My thanks to Dr Danny Munith and his team at the Institute of Sport at the University of Hertfordshire. This is the end of our Radio 4 series, but don't despair you can catch us all year round on our weekly Saturday podcast. We'll be back on Radio 4 in May, by which time, hopefully, I'll have done that marathon. Please send in your questions and your comments to more or less at bbc.co.uk. And until next time, goodbye. More or less was presented by me, Tim Harford. The producer and sauna correspondent was Tom Coles with Nathan Gower and Lizzie McNeill. The production coordinator was Brenda Brown. The programme was recorded and mixed by Gareth Jones. The Breaking Four Sting was created by James Beard. The programme was edited by Richard Varden. Do the wonder products that you see on your social media and supermarket shelves really deliver on their bold claims? From supplements claiming to boost your mind and body? To fake tans promising a safe, streak-free glow? I really like it. I'm Greg Foote and my BBC Radio 4 show Sliced Bread is back to separate more science fact from marketing fiction. I would tend to lean towards it being a positive. All our suggestions come from your emails or voice notes, even if you're a bit under the weather. Hello Greg, I want to know about cough mixture. I'm finding out the answers in my new series of Sliced Bread, available first on BBC Sounds.
