Numbers of 2012
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What is the format and purpose of this 'Numbers of 2012' special review?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Harford. This week is our special review of the year through the excellent, extraordinary, eccentric numbers of 2012. And who better to start the programme than one of the BBC's most excellent, extraordinary, and some might say eccentric, presenters.
I'm Robert Paston, the BBC's Business Editor. My statistic of the year was given to me by Jean-Claude Trichet. He's the former president of the European Central Bank. And he told me about the 80-20 ratio for Europe and the 20-80 ratio for the United States. In Europe, roughly speaking, banks provide 80% of the finance needed by businesses and households, whereas in the States, banks provide only 80%. 20% of the finance required by businesses and households. Why does this matter? Well, it tells us a huge amount about the crisis in the Eurozone, and it also tells us a huge amount about why the economy of Britain and many of the economies of Europe in general have singularly failed to recover since the great crash of 2008.
Whereas although the American economy isn't off to the races, it has grown rather more strongly than the European economies. So let's explain the significance of being so dependent on banks. When banks are weak, when they have a shortage of capital, which is palpably true of many Eurozone banks and arguably, according to the governor of the Bank of England, true of British banks. they are reluctant to lend. What they try and do is they actually try and shrink. They try, to use a ghastly phrase, deleverage. And when banks deleverage, when money is not going to households and businesses, frankly, our households and businesses can't spend, they can't invest, and the economy can't grow. And also... When you have banks playing such an important role, it also turns out banks are enormous.
They're so big that when they get into trouble, even governments like the Spanish government find it very difficult to afford to bail them out. So the 80-20 ratio tells you two fantastically important things. It tells you why the European economy has been so sluggish, and it also tells you why governments like Spain and Ireland have been on the brink of bankruptcy because their banks are so big they can't afford to rescue them.
them i am bill edgar i cover statistics in football for the times and i'm the author of back of the net 100 golden goals we're just reaching the 20th anniversary of the last time an openly gay footballer played in the league in england that's the top four divisions justin fashioner was the last one and his career in england ended at torquay united So I wanted to work out what the chances were that no league footballer in that time has been gay, whether openly so or not, assuming there was no reason for the proportion of gay footballers to differ from the proportion of gay people in society as a whole. Many surveys have tried to decide what proportion of British men are gay. Answers have ranged wildly from 1.5% to 6%, so I took the lowest figure of 1.5%.
In that 20 years, 13,600 players have appeared in the league. Now the chance of picking 13,600 men randomly from the whole population, and none of those being gay, is one chance in 5 times 10 to the power of 90. That's 1 in 5 with 90 noughts. To make a slightly more understandable number, I then looked at Premier League players, of which there have been 3,200 in the past 20 years.
What did Jean-Claude Trichet's 80-20 banking ratio reveal about Europe's recovery?
The chances of there being no gay footballer among those is 1 in 10 to the power of 21, which is 1 and 21 noughts. Now, to illustrate exactly how unlikely that is, if the entire Earth's surface was covered with drawing pins edge to edge, the chance of you picking up one specific drawing pin at random would be 200 times higher than the chance of there being no gay player in the Premier League over the past 20 years. No doubt there have been many gay players in the Premier League, but perhaps not as many as proportionately as in the country overall.
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