The Census and what does 'rare' mean?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thanks for downloading this edition of More or Less. This is the version from BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Harford.
Hello and welcome to More or Less, opening the curtains and letting the light in on murky statistics and the lazy use of numbers. This week we commit an act of more or less heresy by admitting that sometimes words are better than numbers. And we'll be wiping the smug smile off the faces of these laughing rats. But first, the census data released this week shows that the number of foreign-born residents in England and Wales has risen by nearly 3 million since 2001 to 7.5 million people. A third of these new arrivals, that's 1 million, are from the European countries that have joined the EU since 2004. A few would have arrived before EU accession, but most came after. Compare this wave of immigration to the number the Labour government was expecting back in 2003.
It said net migration from those countries would be between 5,000 and 13,000 each year. Even if the higher figure had been right, the total number would now only be 91,000, less than a tenth of the actual figure. So how did they get it so wrong? The estimate was based on work by researchers at University College London and the Centre for Research and Analysis on Migration. The problem was they had very little decent data to rely on. There were no migration figures for the 10 countries who were due to join in 2004. The team had to go on what migrants from other countries in different political and economic circumstances had done in the past. If you look at the original report, it's loaded with caveats.
But alas, the politicians, the media and the chatterati don't do caveats. It's the number that people remember. The lead author was Christian Dustman. He says one of the difficulties was that migration would be heavily dependent on which other EU countries kept their borders open or closed to the new migrant workers. If others closed their borders, then the UK might well end up receiving extra migrants, which was, of course, what happened.
We predicted net migrations to Germany to be in the magnitude of 200,000. We also pointed out in the report that in the case migration to Germany would not take place because Germany would opt out of free movement of labor and that is precisely what Germany did. substantial part of that migration flow would be diverted to the UK. The estimates we gave, which again we pointed out had to be taken with a lot of caution, was that possibly one third of the migration to Germany would have been diverted to the UK. Now for the largest scenario we had calculated for Germany, that would have been in the magnitude of about 70,000 net migration.
So that would nearly have doubled the estimate, which still wouldn't have taken this forecast close to the reality, as it turned out. Now, you might think it was obvious that a million people would show up when the UK opened its borders to migrants from much poorer countries in Central and Eastern Europe. But hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Why did the 2003 migration estimate for Eastern Europeans to the UK turn out so wrong?
Take Migration Watch, a pressure group concerned about excessive immigration. Migration Watch criticised the estimate of 5,000 to 13,000 a year and suggested that the true figure might be 40,000 a year. That's still less than half the eventual number. The census figures also give some context to a couple of stories pointed out by listeners from the last year. First, Greg Broadbent pointed us to this headline in the Daily Mail.
Immigrant crime wave warning. Foreign nationals were accused of a quarter of all crimes in London.
While Graham Kendall also pointed out a similar headline in the London Evening Standard last month.
Foreigners make up more than a quarter of London's crime suspects.
A quarter sounds like a lot, but if you check the census figures, you can see that 24% of the population of London is made up of non-UK nationals, so this would be pretty much what you would expect. you're listening to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 in association with The Open University. Now, Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, has a reputation for being violently allergic to economists.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:18
2
Why did the 2003 migration estimate for Eastern Europeans to the UK turn out so wrong?
3:18–6:14
3
How did researchers estimate migration with limited pre-accession data?
6:14–17:20
4
How do census figures change the headlines about immigrant crime rates?
17:20–20:29
5
What is Nassim Taleb’s idea of anti-fragility and why does it matter?
20:29–27:56