Faith and Charity?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2014
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"Religion Makes People More Generous"- according to The Daily Telegraph's interpretation of a new BBC poll on charitable giving. Tim Harford investigates whether there is a link between practising a religion and whether we give. Plus: Big data - the hype says it will help deliver everything from increased corporate profits to better healthcare but are we being blinded to basic statistical lessons learned over the past two hundred years? And it feels like a huge coincidence, but you only need 23 people to have a better than even chance of meeting someone with the same birthday. This is the birthday paradox, and the best place to look for proof is the World Cup, where 32 squads of 23 players provide an ideal data-set. Alex Bellos crunches the numbers for us.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading more or less from the BBC. This is the version first broadcast on |
| 0:04.7 | Radio 4. Here's to him, Halford. Hello and welcome to the last in this series of more or less. |
| 0:12.1 | You can insert your own statistical pun here. This week we put a famous probability puzzle, |
| 0:18.1 | the birthday paradox, to the test on a World Cup stage. And we shine the spotlight on the |
| 0:23.6 | business craze for big data. There's this enormous mythology that somehow |
| 0:28.8 | the larger the data, the closer it is to truth. And I think it's at that level of mythology |
| 0:33.6 | that we need to be most careful and most critical. But first, the BBC commissioned a poll recently |
| 0:39.3 | and one set of figures got some humanists up in arms. Here are the numbers reported on Radio 4's |
| 0:46.0 | Religious Fair Show Sunday. Well, this cert Comra's poll asked whether people are given to charity |
| 0:51.6 | in the last month, and it actually found that seven in ten adults had done so, so overall we are |
| 0:56.1 | a generous nation. And then we asked whether people practiced a religion, and we defined that as |
| 1:00.9 | whether you pray, read a holy book, attend a religious gathering once a month. And whether you'd |
| 1:07.1 | give into charity in the last month, and we found that three quarters of people living in England |
| 1:11.4 | who practice a religion have given to charity in the last month, and that compares to only two thirds |
| 1:16.4 | who don't practice a religion. The presenter, Edward Sturton, wanted to be clear about this. |
| 1:21.4 | Can you look at the differences thrown up in your poll, and legitimately conclude on the |
| 1:27.6 | negative side that if you're not religious, you're less likely to give money to charity? |
| 1:31.4 | The pollsters tell us that it is a significant difference, and it's entirely valid to say that |
| 1:36.4 | you're less likely to give if you don't practice a religion. Well, Paven Dalewal from the British |
| 1:41.9 | Humanist Association contacted more or less and asked us to take a look at the figures, was the |
| 1:47.2 | survey fair? Well, I've got Charlotte McDonald here with me. Hello, Charlotte. |
| 1:51.6 | Hi, the poll was commissioned by the BBC English Regions Religion and Ethics Unit. |
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