WS MoreOrLess: Numbers of the Year part 2.
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Harford. Today we bring you the second instalment of our Numbers of the Year programme, when our guests tell us their most memorable number from 2014. And our first number is certainly the biggest. It's brought to you by a former economic adviser to President George W Bush. Her name is Pippa Malmgren.
My number is a quadrillion.
That's a big number. A quadrillion is, if I remember, a thousand times a trillion. So why should we be talking about quadrillions?
Well, I think this number is going to come up a lot more often. It's come up in the last year because the Japanese debt now exceeds one quadrillion. So in economics, we have a practical example of this matter. In the financial markets, we talk about regulating the financial markets and you ask, well, how big are they? And The estimate now is that derivative transactions come to more than one quadrillion.
Dr Pippa Malmgren. We're now going to go from that huge number to something a little bit smaller. And it comes from one of our colleagues here at the BBC, the economist and broadcaster Evan Davis. Tim, I'm going to take the number one third.
Now, I will explain why. This year has been a very interesting one in public opinion terms. The public have been restive in this country and in a lot of other countries. They've been discontented. They've been turning to populist parties. And I have found myself looking at opinion polls, not just who's up or who's down, but looking at genuine public opinion. And I've been very interested by a pretty big poll, 32,000 people in 20 different countries carried out by Ipsos. It's called their Global Trend Survey. And a third is what I think we might call people who kind of think the world is going well. So here's a question, Tim. To what extent do you feel that today's youth will have had a better or worse life than their parents' generation?
Or will it be the same? And a third of the global respondents basically think today's youth will have a better life than their parents. So that's why I've said a third. It's a kind of, that is the group we think the world is getting better. But here's the little interesting bit. In a lot of the countries, half the countries, it was above a third. And in half the countries, it was below the third. And so which ones?
Why does Pippa Malmgren pick a quadrillion as 2014’s striking number?
Well, what you get is a real sense of what is happening in the world. So these are the ones that were above average, that were sort of thought the world is getting better. China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, South Africa. South Korea and Japan were at average. And then when you go to the ones that were below average, see if you can spot the pattern. Australia, Italy, Germany, Canada, Britain, Sweden, the US, Spain, Belgium, France. And so there are one or two exceptions that I left out there.
People in rich countries think things can only get worse.
It is basically that. And in a way, I think that tells you why it's in the richer countries you're seeing populist parties coming out and saying, hang on a minute, what is going on here? We don't like what's changing around us. There's a sort of deep-rooted sense of discontent and detachment from global change. And in the emerging world, very clearly people are thinking, hey, this is actually beginning to benefit us and our children. It's just a nice symbol, really, of where the world is at the moment, that you do have a kind of passing of economic power from an old world to a new world. And what you're witnessing in 2014 is some of the political and global ructions of that shift.
What interests me there, Evan, is in developing countries, China, India, they are growing very quickly. It must be possible living in those countries to see people getting richer almost in front of your eyes.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:53
2
Why does Pippa Malmgren pick a quadrillion as 2014’s striking number?
2:53–4:15
3
How do global derivatives and Japanese debt reach quadrillion-scale figures?
4:15–8:21
4
What does Ipsos’ Global Trends poll reveal about optimism for the next generation?
8:21–9:39