Stamp prices and the first maths book
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This is more or less the programme which finds poetry in data. We make an edition of the programme for BBC Radio 4, but this episode was broadcast on the World Service. Hello, and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford. This week, we bring you the story of the very first maths book.
The beginning of the 13th century, nobody in Europe had ever seen that kind of thing before.
But first, the price of posting a letter is going up sharply in the UK, by 30% for first-class mail and almost 40% for second-class mail. The Royal Mail says it has to put up the price to protect its future, and it says that UK stamp prices are still amongst the best value in Europe. Are they right? And what is the cheapest place in the world to post a letter, or, for that matter, the most expensive? Ruth Alexander's been tending to the great more-or-less spreadsheet.
and what secrets it holds, Tim.
Yes. The Royal Mail has said the UK will remain the cheapest place in Europe to post a letter, or at least a certain type of letter, Ruth.
Yes. If you're posting a heavy letter that weighs more than 50 grams, and if you're posting it second class, and if you adjust the prices to take into account relative purchasing power of the different countries, then the UK service is the cheapest in Europe.
So what the Royal Mail is trying to do there is to say, everything's expensive in Switzerland, let's take that into account when we're evaluating whether posting a letter is expensive. And similarly, in Romania, everything's cheap. Is posting a letter also cheap? It all sounds a bit complicated. The Royal Mail's basically claiming that posting letters in the UK is cracking value every alternate Tuesday during leap year. If we skip over these convoluted calculations... What if you post a standard letter, just one or two sheets of paper, first class, is the UK still the cheapest place in Europe?
No, it isn't.
I knew you'd say that.
If you post a standard first class letter, the UK is actually in the top ten of the most expensive countries.
I see, that's quite a difference. I notice the Royal Mail hasn't really been trumpeting that fact.
No, it hasn't. Our calculations show the UK is the fifth most expensive in Europe, with a first-class stamp soon to cost 60p, or almost one US dollar. It's behind Finland, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway is in first place. There, a stamp costs $1.67. If you adjust for the relative purchasing power of the different countries, the UK is in seventh place and the countries ahead of us are quite different. We're behind Denmark in sixth place, Norway in fifth, then Poland, Latvia, Slovakia and Bulgaria is in the top spot for relative expense. When the Royal Mail does these calculations, it places us in ninth position. We haven't been able to establish exactly why our numbers differ, but it's probably because we're using slightly different purchasing power calculations.
Well, any which way you look at it, the UK is still in the top ten of relative expense. And looking at the whole world, which is the most expensive country of all?
How much are UK stamp prices rising and why?
Well, we haven't been able to get the data for every single country in the world, but we've had a good go and got the cost of a stamp in 65 countries into the More or Less spreadsheet. And the most expensive of all is Norway, if you're just looking at straight prices. And if you adjust for purchasing power, it's Jamaica.
So posting a letter feels most expensive for people living in Jamaica.
Yes, it costs $120. $120? $120 Jamaican dollars, which in fairness is only $1.39. But that is still the most expensive postage in the world that we could find. On the other hand, for that price, you can send a letter not just within Jamaica, but to most of the Caribbean, to Central, South America and North America.
Two continents, that's not bad value then maybe.
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