WS MoreOrLess: The numbers of 2013 - part 1
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What is the purpose of this More or Less year‑in‑numbers special?
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Harford. It's become a seasonal tradition of ours to take a look back at the most intriguing, striking or just plain delightful numbers of 2013. First up is David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University in the UK.
My number of the year is 7.3. This is the average response given by about 165,000 people when the Office for National Statistics asked them, on a scale from 0 to 10, how happy were you yesterday? It's about the same as last year. About 15% were completely manic and said 10%, 1% were really miserable and said 0%, but only 10% said 4% or less. The question, are you satisfied with your life, got an average of 7.5. Higher if people were married, lower if they're unemployed, slightly higher for females. The most miserable age is 45 to 54. I remember it very well. And the highest is 65 to 79. I can't wait. Those smug Danes, when they were asked how happy they were yesterday, said 8.4, even in spite of the gloomy crime dramas they watch.
While Bulgarians said 5.5 were the worst in Europe. That means though that if the happiest Bulgarians come to the UK, the average happiness in both countries will go down. Now, this is a curious effect known as the Will Rogers phenomenon. He was an American humorist who said that when he was talking about the Oklahoma migrants going to California before the Second World War, he said, when the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states. What Will Rogers was getting at, that if the dimmest Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, where they were brighter than the brightest Californians... then the average intelligence level in both states would go up.
David Spiegelhalter.
The average number across the Eurozone was 7.1, which lags behind those cheerful North Americans who gave a figure of 7.6. But the average in African countries was only 4.4, and out of the 156 countries included in the World Happiness Survey, the Togolese were the least happy, recording a number of just 2.9. One group of people who may find themselves being happier are the very rich, who are, well, getting even richer. As Linda Yu, the BBC's chief business correspondent, explains.
My number of the year is 95 because it's the eye-catching figure of the economic recovery five years on from the worst crash in a century. Income inequality has risen sharply during the recovery. In the US, the top 1% of income earners have captured 95% of the incomes gained since 2009. A study at the University of California at Berkeley found that the richest 1% saw their incomes rise by 31.4%, while the bottom 99%, so the rest of us, saw their incomes go up by only 0.4%. Because so few people have seen their incomes rise, it's really hard to see how the recovery could be broad-based. This was the gist of the disagreement between two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.
Stiglitz sees this inequality as a main cause of why the recovery is so slow. Well, Krugman thinks that is too simple an explanation. I think if you look at how this recovery has been done, in other words, supported by lots of easy money instead of, say, more government spending, and that easy money has fed into stock markets around the world hitting record highs, if that's the main source of growth, as in stock prices going up, then maybe it's not too surprising that the riches who own more stocks than the poor see their incomes go up, in which case they would see more of the gains, but that's not enough to support the rest of the economy. And that's one of the reasons why we still don't have economies recovered, for instance, in Britain at pre-crisis levels.
Linda Yu. All this economic talk's all very well, but not terribly delicious.
What does the UK happiness score of 7.3 reveal about age, marriage and national differences?
Simon Singh has that covered. He's been thinking about that most Christmassy of foods, the pancake.
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