On BBC Sounds, there are podcasts to help you look after your body and your mind from increasing your immunity to feeling more confident or tips on how to focus. Sorry, what were you saying? If it matters to you, it matters to us. Feel good inside and out with What's Up Docs and Complex with Kimblee Wilson. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to More or Less, where your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford. This week, Freakonomics, Feminomics and a sneak peek at the more or less Christmas choir rehearsal. Also, you won't believe how many more parking officers than soldiers the UK has. Actually, we didn't believe it either. But first, this is a time of year when people's thoughts turn to the story of Mary and Joseph, travelling to Bethlehem, and we're going to take part in a census. Hey, Tim, about that. No, Lizzie, we're not fact checking that, but we're just trying to maintain a bit of seasonal atmosphere before turning the corner into a discussion about the UK's next census. Fine. It was announced recently that there will be another census in the UK in 2031. Its future had been uncertain, as the Office for National Statistics had developed plans to replace it with other data sources. I thought I'd ask Georgina Sturge, statistician and author of Some of Us, to tell us about the history of counting people in this country and what the plans are for the future. The first UK census was in 1801. I was expecting you to say 1086. So I'm going to interrupt you straight away to ask you why the Doomsday Book doesn't count as a census. Sure. So, yes, many people think of the Doomsday Book as a type of census, and it was, but it was really more of a census of assets rather than people. And the idea behind that was that the conquering Normans wanted to take stock of what they had basically just acquired. And actually assets such as cows and pigs and land were, in many cases, more important than the actual number of people. So the Doomsday Book famously contains more records of pigs than of women. I actually may be famous, but I had not heard that. OK, so that's 1086. As the 19th century wore on, the census developed into how it looks now. That was in the 1841 census. That's when we got an unbelievably rich picture of what was actually going on in the UK population. It wasn't until we started doing censuses that recorded information about what every single person in the household did for work that the reality became apparent that lots of women were working. And in fact, in some industries, the majority of the workforce was female. And this was kind of a bombshell to statisticians and to politicians at the time, because it had been thought that, well, women's work is something that we don't really need to think about. And the same applies to children in the workforce. That was a sort of open secret, but censuses helped to bring those individuals out of the shadows. And there was just no way for politicians to deny anymore what was going on. So tell me about countries that have different approaches. So there are some countries, a lot of them are European ones, which haven't done the traditional censors for decades. And that's because in most cases, they have a population register. And what that means is it's like a census, but it's constantly being updated. So it's a live database of the full population. And it will record some basic characteristics, but it could also include other information. And it can also be linked to other databases sometimes. And so you've got countries like Denmark, which hasn't done a traditional census since 1970. But they know perfectly well what's going on most of the time. They can go to their statistics that they have kind of permanently on file and sort of do a desk based census that way. I was born in 1973. So if I had been born in Denmark, apart from I'd probably be taller and have blue eyes and stuff like that, I would never have appeared in the census in Denmark. It would just have been included in the population registry. So why is it that the Danes are doing this and we are not? It's definitely not a question of capability because the UK did have a population register during the Second World War. So from 1939, actually until 1952, we had a population register, meaning a live database of everybody who was in the country. And that was a wartime measure. It carried on until the end of rationing. And after that, there was a decision as to whether to carry on with it. And there were some objections to it on kind of civil liberties grounds. And part of the reason for that was we were entering the Cold War. It was seen as a kind of totalitarian state feature to have one where you would walk down the street and you'd have to have an ID card on you at all times and you'd have to keep your details up to date with the state all the time. Another part was the cost. But we just decided that we didn't want to spend that much money on it when we could get data perfectly adequately from censuses and surveys. So we had a census in the UK in 2021. So presumably there's one coming along in 2031. So what are the plans for that? Because I remember there being mutterings about what maybe we're going to get rid of this and replace it with a population register or something. So what's the plan? The Office for National Statistics has been considering the idea of not doing the 10-yearly census anymore or at least not doing a full one. And instead transitioning to a system where we approximate the kind of statistics that a census could give us but using administrative data. So that would be your births and deaths and migration figures and information about, say, NHS use, housing, all of these sources could be combined is their thought to give us a picture of the population that doesn't require this huge, costly and time-consuming survey every 10 years. So why in the end did the Office for National Statistics and the government decide there will be a 2031 census after all? Well, they were on the way towards developing this new admin-based system for generating statistics in various different areas. But at some point there was always going to be a need for this sense check. And then I think assess whether it's possible to switch over to a fully admin-based system and maybe to not have censuses after that. Thanks to Georgina Sturge, author of Some of Us. And if you've enjoyed this historical tour of collecting statistics, you may want to find out about some of the pioneering people who've helped shape modern statistical research, such as Thomas Bayes or Florence Nightingale. Search for the BBC more or less website and follow the links to the Open University. Here at more or less, we like to keep our finger on the pulse of world events. That is literally your job, we hear you cry. Yes, yes it is. And as it's our job, that means we're in the privileged position to be able to tell you that the biggest threat to our country is not from war or hackers or disinformation. It's from traffic violations. We know this because of this article from The Telegraph. Britain has more parking officers than soldiers, as councils rake in billions. Wow. They go on to say... The British parking industry employs 82,000 people, surpassing 73,490 regular force members in the army. Subtle social cues tell me that I am supposed to feel outraged by this. To help me calibrate the level of outrage, I asked Lizzie McNeill to look into these numbers. Hello Lizzie. Hi Tim, well let's start by saying I wouldn't feel too outraged by this one. Well I'm sure the last thing the Telegraph would want is for me to feel outraged, but please explain. So I spoke to the British Parking Association who are a trade body and they conducted the research at The Telegraph based their numbers on and they told me that only 10,000 of the 82,000 members of the Parking Association are parking officers, i.e. the people that go around handing out fines in the form of penalty charge notices or PCNs. Right. So who are the other 72,000? They hold various roles like parking infrastructure coordinators, parking operations managers, IT support, etc. Basically any other job linked to the parking industry. Right. So only 10,000 of these people are parking officers and the other 72,000 are more parking adjacent. They're parallel parking officers if you like. I do like. The number for the army has also been slightly cherry picked. The latest figures from the M.O.D. state that the British armed forces are currently made up of 147,000 personnel and this number includes trained and untrained. 56% are in the army, 23% in the navy and 22% in the air force. Right. Now I noticed you said trained and untrained. Now I am not an expert but I am assuming that ideally the majority of your army are in the trained category. Indeed. The majority are trained so 126,610 members of the armed forces are trained, 70,000 of whom are in the army. To counter-strain in the army you need to have past phase one which is the basic skills training. 70,000 trained soldiers. It doesn't seem like a massive number. No. So the government under Boris Johnson actually had a target to reduce the amount of trained personnel in the army to 73,000. But a review in 2025 has since recommended that there should be no further reductions and that number should actually increase when funding allows which is generally thought to be in the next parliament. And I am assuming that the remaining untrained soldiers are in the process of being trained? Yes. And on top of the trained and untrained soldiers you have army reserves who aren't full-time members of the armed forces but can be called upon when needed and there are almost 30,000 of those on top of the 147,000 figure. So in times of need we have around 177,000 people of various levels of training who we could call up and they do outnumber parking officers quite considerably. Thank you Lizzie. Outrage, dialed pack, blood pressure, normal and just as an aside the Oxford University press word of the year is Ragebait, online content deliberately designed to elicit anger. You are listening to more or less. It's 20 years since the book Freakonomics was published. Written by Stephen Dubner, a journalist and Stephen Levitt, a prize winning academic economist the book was an off the charts bestseller that put economics at the centre of the zeitgeist. Suddenly economists weren't people who talked about interest rates and GDP. Instead we discussed whether sumo wrestlers cheat and the connection between abortion and crime. I sat down with Stephen Dubner to ask him about the journey he, Levitt and this book have been on over the past 20 years. The book was essentially a collection of non-fiction stories that were mostly based on the research that Levitt had been doing over the past 15 or 20 years as an academic economist. The research that he'd been doing as an academic economist set him apart from academic economics because it often had very unusual subjects at the core of his research. Collusion among sumo wrestlers and whether your estate agent is actually looking out for your best interests when they represent you and whether the name that a parent gives a child actually has any impact on that child's life overall or whether something we explored in the US, whether the legalization of abortion led to a decrease in crime, which was one of the central empirical claims that Levitt's research and infreconomics. I guess one of my favourite stories in the book is the chapter why drug dealers live with their mums. Why do drug dealers live with their mums? That was an extremely interesting chapter to write in part because we had data that hadn't been unearthed before. That data came from research done by a sociologist named Sudhir Venkatesh who ended up sort of being embedded in a crack-selling gang in Chicago. He came out of that with different types of data. One was essentially an org chart that showed how a drug dealing gang was organised and it looked kind of like a franchise model where some people at the top are making pretty good money, albeit at great risk. Then once you go down the pyramid, you find that the average drug dealer is making very little money. The reason that they're living with their mums is because they're making very little money. The reason they're willing to do it, a dangerous job for very little money, is simply because there is a somewhat decent chance that they can rise up that pyramid and get near the top. It's not very likely, but it reminded us a lot of other what economists call tournament models where there are a lot, a lot, a lot of people who go after something where if you do make it to the top, the rewards are great. If you look at athletes, if you look at performers and so on, in a way, a crack-selling street drug dealer would have been very much like someone who dreams of making it to the National Football League, someone who dreams of making hit record and becoming a pop star. Even though you know that the reality of that, the odds of that are really, really long, there's an almost endless supply of people willing to try. I wanted to ask about this famous research on the connection between abortion and crime. I think it's probably Steve Levitt's most famous finding with his co-author, John Donahue. The idea that legalization of abortion reduced the number of unwanted children, and then if you wait 16 to 18 years, the number of unwanted 16 to 18-year-olds is dramatically correlated with crime. So when abortion was legalized, crime rates fell 16 to 18 years later. I know that it has been questioned by other academics. There have been coding errors, there have been attempts at replications. Levitt has published his own rebuttal. But I'm curious, as a bystander, someone standing at Levitt's shoulder, do you still believe in the abortion crime finding that you wrote about 20 years ago? I do, yeah. I do firmly. In fact, we revisited the whole topic after Levitt and his colleague on that paper, John Donahue did another version, an updated version with a lot more data. So let's just acknowledge that, A, this kind of research is really hard. B, it's hard to offer a proof beyond doubt. But if you read their papers or if you listen to the episodes we've made, or even if you read the book, I mean, we showed, one thing we did in Freakonomics was we showed our homework a lot. And I think what it leads to is a belief that, no, we shouldn't think about abortion as some crime fighting tool. We should look at this outcome and say, well, if we want children, families, societies, governments, et cetera, to succeed more, what does this evidence tell us? And what the evidence tells us is that when families, especially mothers, are not in a place and time to welcome a child into the world, there's a risk to that because children who grew up in an environment that is sometimes called an unwanted circumstance, they have the odds stacked against them. So looking back 20 years, what is it that you now realize you got wrong and would have changed at the time if you could? I hate to disappoint. I don't think we got anything wrong. Most of what was in Freakonomics was built on empirical research that had taken years to do, often with collaborators, and was peer reviewed and published in peer reviewed journals. So we're working with a pretty decent set of material to start with. When it comes to most of the stories that we told in Freakonomics, most of them were built around big sets of data where the amount of evidence was large and where it was right in front of us. And I would argue that we were writing about a body of work that emanated from the academic community but was not written for an academic readership. Thank you to Stephen Dubner, the author with Stephen Levitt of Freakonomics. Now, if you're a man and you're in a relationship with a woman and you argue with her about housework, I've got bad news. You are probably in the wrong. That's the basic message from Corinne Lowe, an economist at the Wharton School in the US and the author of a new book called Feminomics. She's been analysing diaries that capture how couples in the US spend their time in terms of unpaid work at home and paid work in the market. And she spotted something of a theme. Let's start with how things have changed. What we see is that on average, women used to spend a little bit more than 25 hours a week on housework and that has come down to around 15 hours a week. So that seems good, right? And that's what since the about 1970s. 1975, yeah, the 1970s. And then what we see is that women used to work in the market on average because this is including people who work and people who don't work. They used to work in the market a little bit less than 20 hours a week and now that's risen to around 30 hours a week. OK, so it's a 10 hour change in each direction. That's the sort of gender revolution. Then men used to work 40 hours a week and they still work 40 hours a week. And they used to do about seven hours a week of housework and they still do about seven hours a week of housework. So a shift from unpaid to paid work for women while men keep on trucking as they always have, which doesn't sound too bad, except those numbers don't include childcare. Moms today spend twice as much time with our kids as moms a generation ago. So time with our children has doubled. And so when I look at that, I see that like, OK, for women, this market work and housework changes directly offset each other. It was about 10 hours for each, right? But this time with our children, this extra six or seven hours of childcare time is not accounted for anywhere. Nothing has shifted down to make space for that. So it's come out of our leisure and our sleep time. A man not spending more time with children. And that's a great question because every dad who's listening is saying, well, I spend a lot more time than my dad did. I read a bedtime story the other night. I picked my kid up from school. My dad never did that. We have had a parenting revolution. Both men and women do spend more time with their kids, right? But because women's time has grown so much more, the gender gap on this in the household has actually gotten bigger instead of smaller. So you almost have this comparison fallacy where men are comparing to their dads and they're like, I'm a great dad, right? But if you actually compare them to their wives today, that gender gap is wider than for their parents' generation. There is a school of thought in economics, which suggests that the allocation of paid and unpaid work within a household is governed by economic logic. Each partner will tend to specialize. So they get really good at being a lawyer or at microwaving baby food or whatever. And if husbands have good opportunities to earn more than their wives, you can see why this division of labor might just make sense for everyone. Except if this story was true, you'd expect to see men doing most of the housework when their partner earns most of the money, right? But what we find is that when a woman is the primary breadwinner, she still does almost twice as much cooking and cleaning as her lower earning male partner. It's not driven by childcare. It's driven by cooking and cleaning, which is something that we don't think women should have any kind of natural advantage in. Yeah. So this does not reflect very well on men in the US. And even when they're not really earning much, they're still not doing their fair share of housework. Please tell me that men in the UK perform better. I am so sorry that I have devastating news that, no, we have replicated this stat in the UK and actually in Australia as well. And so, you know, we see the same effect. We see that women who are the primary breadwinner still do a lot more of the cooking and cleaning. Kooin also looked at same sex couples and found that housework was more responsive to the relative earnings in same sex male couples. So men can do it. Kooin Lo, the author of Feminomics, you're listening to more or less. Right, team, settle down. We need to practice for our Radio 4 carol off. Start the week. We're insufferable after what happened last year. So this time we need to smash them. Nathan, Nathan, stop putting tinsel on rich. The sparkles make him confused. You know that. Right. Do we all have a music? Good. OK. Let's go with the first carol. We three Kings. Go. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Again, Lizzie. I don't think the lyrics are accurate. No, don't do this. Were there really three? I swear, Lizzie. And were they Kings? This becomes another three blind mischast. I'm just saying visually impaired is that. Right. Everyone. Tim, wait, no. What are the three rules of more or less choir? Tone. Harmony. Statistically accurate lyrics. Exactly. Go on then. OK. So Carlos Oliveiras. And he's an author and professor of theology at Central Universitario Adventista de Sao Paulo has looked at this in depth and he says that first things first, different Christian traditions state that there were different numbers of them. For example, in Syriac Christianity, the tradition is that there were 12 of them, whereas Western tradition states that there were three. OK, but what does the Bible tell us? It doesn't. Now, the passage of the Bible, this all comes from is Matthew chapter two, verse one. Professor Oliveiras points out that Matthew is usually really precise with numbers. He talks about 12 disciples, 4,000 males, two blind men, etc., etc. But he never gives the number of wise men a single word. He gives the number of wise men or names them. He just says some men. OK, so how did we get to three? So the number actually ranges from two to 12. Origen, who was an early Christian theologian, was the first to say that there were three. And it's thought that Catholics based this number on the amount of gifts they brought, but it would also reflect other things in the Bible, such as the Trinity. But I thought we knew their names. Balthazar, Melchior, Caspar. Ah, so no, not in the Bible. And again, different denominations have different names. So the Syrian names for the wise men came from a Syrian legend, the Cave of Treasures. Ethiopians call them Ator, Sator and Petitoris. The names you just mentioned first appeared in a slightly different iteration in a fifth century Greek work before finally becoming Melchior et al. in around the sixth century from an Armenian text. OK, so we don't know how many there were. That's fine. We'll just change the lyrics. We kings of indeterminate number are... But wait, they weren't kings. What? Yeah, the Bible never calls them kings. There's a psalm that prophesied kings coming to visit Jesus, but they weren't actually described this way in Matthew's text. The Bible Society points out that he used the term magi, which can mean conjurer, sorcerer or a subclass of Persian priests. OK, that is actually quite cool. This is slightly off track because I don't think it's related to the lyrics of the carol, but did they arrive, you know, on Epiphany night, the 6th of January? No, we aren't given a date of arrival in the Bible, and we don't know how long their journey would have been, as we don't really know where they're from. Some suggest Babylon, some suggest Persia. Matthew enigmatically stated that they were from the east. But how far east? Scholars have looked at the various points they could have been from, based on the gifts they gave and the fact that they're magi, and have come up with their visiting Jesus any time between 40 days and two years from his birth. So not at all near what we now celebrate as the Christmas period. But hey, the symbolism remains the same. It sounds like we'd better change the lyrics. So how about we wise men of unknown number are? Not sure where we're from, but probably quite far. Magi, wise men, kings or stargazers. Who knows? Oh, look, a big star. Look, I'm not convinced this is going to work, guys. Have faith, Richard. Here's our friends at the Ealing Coral Society to show us how it's done. We wise men of unknown number. Not sure where we're from, but probably quite far. Stargazers, wise men, made a naughty to us. But there's a big star. And that's all we have time for this week. Enjoy the festive period. We'll be back next week with a special episode. We'll speak to a group of some of our favorite number geeks about what they think are the most telling numbers of the year. Please keep your questions and your comments coming in to more or less the BBC dot co dot UK. And until next time, goodbye. This is Dr. Chris and Dr. Zand here, and we are dropping in to let you know about our new BBC Radio 4 podcast. In WhatsApp docs, we are going to be diving into the messy, complicated world of health and well-being because it can be confusing, can't it? That's right, Chris. The massive information out there can be contradictory. It can be overwhelming. And Chris and I get confused too. That's right. We get seduced by the marketing, the hype, the trends. So we want to be your guides through it. And I think it's fair to say, Zand, we are going to be getting personal. We're absolutely going to be getting personal, Chris. What I want to do is bring in my own health dilemmas in the hope that we can help you with yours. Listen and subscribe to WhatsApp docs on BBC Sounds.
