Heart deaths, Organised crime and Gender data gaps

More or Less: Behind the Stats

BBC

Business, Mathematics, Science, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Are deaths from heart disease on the rise? This week the British Heart Foundation had us all stopping mid-biscuit with the news that the number of under 75s dying from cardiovascular disease is going up for the first time in half a century. It sounds like bad news – but is it? Does Huawei contribute £1.7billion to the UK economy? People were sceptical that the Chinese telecom company could contribute such a large amount to the UK economy. We take a deeper look at the number and discuss whether it is reasonable to include such a broad range of activities connected to the company to reach that figure. Deaths from organised crime The National Crime Agency (NCA) said this week that organised crime kills more people in the UK than terrorism, war and natural disasters combined. But what does the evidence say? The NCA also said that there are 181,000 offenders in the UK fueling serious and organised crime. That’s more than twice the strength of the British Army. We try to find out where those figures came from. The absence of women’s lives in data Do government and economic statistics capture the lives of women fairly? If not, does it matter? How could things be changed? Tim Harford speaks to Caroline Criado-Perez about her new book ‘Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.’ Image: Human heart attack, illustration Credit: Science Photo Library

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:04.7	Hello and welcome to more or less. On this programme we firmly believe that numbers
0:10.7	can and should be used to shed light on the world around us. But we have to admit it, sometimes
0:17.1	the statistical claims that are made in the news can be pretty dodgy. So I invite you
0:22.5	to test your stat spotting skills. We will play you three items of news, which of them
0:28.7	are totally trustworthy and which are distinctly dubious.
0:32.2	Now the British Heart Foundation has warned that deaths from heart and artery disease
0:37.9	among most of the population are rising for the first time in five decades. The charity
0:42.5	says the historic pace of progress in reducing death rates has slowed to a near standstill.
0:47.2	A report commissioned by the controversial Chinese telecoms firm Huawei says it contributed
0:53.6	£1.7 billion to the UK economy last year. They are violent, technologically advanced
1:00.5	and the outnumber Britain's regular army by two to one. That's the chilling assessment
1:04.7	of serious and organised criminals in the UK by the head of the National Crime Agency.
1:09.3	At Linoins the Director General of the NCA says the scale of organised crime is truly staggering.
1:14.8	He says it kills more people than terrorism, war and natural disasters put together. It
1:19.2	is the greatest national security threat to the UK.
1:22.8	What do you think? Well, alas, we are pretty skeptical of all of them. I'm afraid that
1:28.4	while those were BBC stories, the same statistical sims were committed across a wide variety of
1:34.7	the UK's media outlets. Let's start with those heart attacks. I nearly choked on my
1:40.4	chip butty this morning when I heard that deaths from heart and artery diseases are rising
1:45.2	in most of the population for the first time in 50 years. Heart attacks and strokes
1:50.7	are of course not the aim, potentially deadly and certainly dangerous. But I had assumed
	...

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