WS More or Less: The life expectancy of a Pope
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2016
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
Life expectancy of a Pope
In 2014 Pope Francis alluded to the fact he didn’t expect to live more than another two or three years. A group of statisticians have taken a look at the life expectancy of popes over the centuries and decided that he may have been rather pessimistic.
The curse of the London Olympics
In a similar vein, is there an unusually high death count among athletes who took part in the London Olympics in 2012? The French press seem to think there is. Currently news reports estimate that 18 people have so far died since taking part in the sports event. The athletes come from teams around the world and have died from all sorts of causes – from cancer to drowning, murder, suicide, a helicopter crash among other things. But is there really a link between taking part in the London Olympics and the chances of dying? Or is it to be expected, statistically speaking, that 18 people have died over the last four years?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Tim Harford here. This is the shorter World Service edition of More or Less, first broadcast |
| 0:05.6 | on Friday the 15th of April. We're discussing the longevity of popes and whether the London Olympics |
| 0:11.2 | put some kind of curse on the athletes who competed there. |
| 0:15.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:20.0 | We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:25.1 | This week a special edition about, well, about death. |
| 0:30.4 | Sorry to bring that up, but this fellow started it and who are we to argue with the Pope. |
| 0:35.6 | I try to think of my sins, my mistakes, so as not to think that I am somebody important |
| 0:47.0 | because I know this is going to last a short time, two or three years, and then to the House of the Father. |
| 0:56.0 | Yes, that was Pope Francis raising eyebrows in the summer of 2014 by predicting that |
| 1:01.0 | in two or three years I'll be off to the Father's house. |
| 1:05.4 | His holiness is still very much alive and close to exceeding his own fatalistic forecast. |
| 1:11.7 | And according to analysis from a team of statisticians the Pope may be around for many years to come. |
| 1:17.0 | Here's Dr Julian Stander of Plymouth University in the UK. |
| 1:21.0 | We collected data on the popes from the 15th century to the present day and then |
| 1:26.5 | we analysed that data using a statistical technique called survival analysis and that helped us to explain how the post-election survival time for popes depend on their age when they were elected and their year of election. The data set includes 62 |
| 1:45.5 | popes which is a lot of popes I wish I knew the collective noun for a group of |
| 1:49.5 | popes an infallibility of popes well Well, anyway, of the 62 only eight popes were still in office on their 80th birthday, |
| 1:57.6 | including the two previous popes, Benedict the 16th, who stepped down at the age of 85 and John Paul II who died at the age of 84. |
| 2:06.9 | And then there's the venerable Pope Clement the 12th who died in 1740 aged 87. |
| 2:13.6 | There are advantages to studying only popes. |
| 2:16.6 | For example, a model doesn't need to include a statistical term for gender because every |
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