Iain Wilton directs the Royal Statistical Society’s policy, public affairs and external relations work. His team’s responsibilities include the production of the RSS member newsletter, Significance magazine and the RSS’s policy briefing papers for MPs and peers. Iain’s team also organises the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Statistics as well as the RSS Statistical Ambassador network and the annual Statistical Excellence Awards. Iain has a doctorate from Queen Mary, University of London and has previously worked for the BBC, the Cabinet Office and the University of Essex. He has also written a biography of the sportsman, writer and politician CB Fry.
+ Full Transcript
Pennington: It seems like everyone and their brother is announcing their picks for book of the year, album of the year, or movie of the year, and the movie is Star Wars. The Royal Statistical Society has just announced its Statistics of the Year. They range from statistics about poverty or life expectancy, to those centered upon environmental issues and car crashes. The RSS’ Statistics of the Year are the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I’m Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism, and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me in the studio are regular panelists John Bailer, Chair of Miami Statistics department, and Richard Campbell of Media, Journalism and Film. Our guest today is Iain Wilton. Wilton is Director of Policy and Public Affairs at RSS and helps coordinate the selection of winners for the Statistic of the Year contest. Iain thank you so much for being here.
Iain Wilton: It’s my pleasure.
Pennington: I’m just going to ask, before we start talking about who won, why does the RSS do this?
Wilton: Well, I think we basically took inspiration from some of the other organizations that you mentioned. In particular, the Stats of the Year idea was really initially developed by Keaton Shaw, who is the Director at the Royal Statistical Society. I think Keaton is quite open. He was inspired by what the Oxford English Dictionary does when it announces its Word of the Year. So, we have basically taken inspiration from that. We now announce every December the RSS’ Statistics of the Year, and a bonus this year, in 2019, is we’re doing Statistics of the Decade as well, to take us up to the end of the 2019 period.
John Bailer: Can you just talk a little bit about the criteria that you use for identifying this and who you have as judges for it?
Wilton: There aren’t really a set of firm criteria. One of the things we say is that, ideally, the figures that we put out there are ones that will capture the zeitgeist of the year. Sometimes we think there are figures that are really important, but which haven’t really been given the attention they deserve. So, by naming them as a winning or commended Statistic of the Year, we can’t give them the profile that we think they warrant. And as far as the judges are concerned, the panel is now chaired by Professor Jen Rogers, who is the Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society, and we have some very eminent judges supporting Jen. Not to single people out, but off the top of my head there is Joe Matheson, who is a former UK national statistician. And we also have Professor Roland Geyer, who is an environmental statistician from the University of California at Santa Barbara. And one of the reasons why Roland was invited to join the panel was that his research threw up the figure that was named as the International Statistic of the Year last year. So, picking up on that, and because we wanted to strengthen the panels non-UK credentials and strengthen its environmental credentials, we invited Professor Geyer to join us.
Bailer: That’s great. We were also very excited to see that three of your judges have been guests on Stats and Stories, so we’re thinking you have good taste.
[Laughter]
Wilton: Yeah, three down, seven to go I think.
[Laughter]
Pennington: So, can you talk about what the International Statistic of the Year is, since you brought up Roland as one of the judges?
Wilton: Yes, the International Statistic of the Year is 72.6 years, and that is because that is now the global average life expectancy across the world, as a whole, for people born in 2019. We think that’s a really important figure. In itself, it’s a record high figure, but also it was chosen because, certainly if you’re based in London as I am, I think if you read anything in the media about life expectancy it tends to be something about declining life expectancy in the United States, or stalling life expectancy in the UK. So, the judges like this figure because it basically looks beyond the US, beyond the UK, and looks at the world as a whole. And what is happening globally is very different from what’s happening in the US and the UK. So, hence they chose this record high figure, 72.6 years, as their winning International Statistic of the Year.
Richard Campbell: Can you also let us know about the UK Statistic of the Year, what that was and how that was determined?
Wilton: Yeah, the UK Statistic of the Year is like the grim award of the year. It is 58%, and that is the proportion of those in relative poverty who live in a working household in the UK. And I think the reason why that was the ultimate pick of the judging panel was because there’s been a big shift about the debate about poverty in the UK in the last 10-20 years ago when the big challenge seemed to be poverty as a result of unemployment. That situation has changed, thankfully, with the record high employment rate and unemployment in the UK having fallen remarkably over recent times. What this figure shows is that while the problem of unemployment is less big than it was before, it’s been replaced by the problem of in-work poverty. So, it shows how different welfare challenges arise at different times, and once you think you’ve cracked one fundamental welfare problem it’s quite likely that another one is going to arise, so you’re going to need to start tackling that one. So, in a sense it’s a sign that you can never rest easy. And if you’re tackling one problem from yesteryear, a new one is arising that you need to address.
Bailer: So, I was curious with that- I mean we’ve talked with some folks from official statistics who talk about the challenges in trying to measure things. And part of that is definition. So, do you have a little background about how relative poverty was defined or what is a working household?
Wilton: I couldn’t really go into that in huge detail, but obviously when a figure is chosen by the judges it’s certainly gone through quite a process before it reaches them, and then we have about two weeks after the judging meeting itself, and we go out and we work with a number of people to do due diligence on the figures that the judges have favored. And this one ultimately made the cut because it was felt that the figures were not only incisive but also very robust. The 58% figure comes from the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the UK, which is a very very highly regarded independent think tank, and in turn the IFS based its calculations on official figures for the UK’s Department for Worker Pension. So, the figures went through a big process of due diligence that they felt were very incisive and robust, and they were looked at by a number of experts in the field. And the RSS has a network of what we call Statistical Ambassadors, and one of our ambassadors is incredibly good at giving up a lot of time to go through all the figures that are in the final mix, if you like, and he checks them out to make sure that we as commended or winning statistics from the RSS.
Campbell: I was interested in one of the statistics that was commended the one from the University of Virginia on women car passengers wearing seatbelts more likely to be seriously injured than men. Can you talk a little bit about that one?
Wilton: Yeah, that’s a really interesting figure, and I think that first came to our attention as a result of a very highly regarded and I think popular book by Caroline Criado-Perez called Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. And this was, I think, one of the stand-out figures from her book, and we sort of dug into it a little bit deeper and discovered that the key figures have been produced by a team at the University of Virginia, and they found that women are, off the top of my head, 73% more likely to be seriously injured than men are in a frontal car crash. So I think the judges chose that because there’s been a lot of focus, for example, in the UK this year on things like the gender pay gap that’s gotten a tremendous amount of attention, but this showed that there are some other fundamental issues beneath that. In particular that 73% figure and between women’s risk of serious injury and men’s risk of serious injury- that was felt to be a very striking one. When you read Caroline’s book she goes into some of the reasons for that, including the fact that car safety is often designed around crash test dummies that are based on the male anatomy. I think we did some further work on that and discovered actually that not only is that a problem in itself, but the sort of template for the crash test dummies- not just male rather than female, it’s a male from I think about the 1970s when crash dummies first started to be used. So, the size of the typical male crash test dummy is wrong, basically. It got a lot bigger over the intervening period, and so yeah, the design of the crash test dummy doesn’t help size-wise, but particularly being based on the male rather than the female anatomy.
Bailer: You know with the International Statistic of the Year, I thought it was striking in the press release to see that the average life expectancy at birth was 45.7 years in 1950 and has gone up to 72.6 years in the most recent report.
Wilton: Yeah, I was amazed by that and we had some stuff in the press release about that and I just thought, wow, that is such a big increase year after year after year on average, that I did the math. I checked it out myself and was reassured that it was true, and was also amazed by the fact that the increase has been so sharp over that period. So yeah, it is an extraordinary increase, and hopefully being named as the Statistic of the Year will help it to get a bit more of the attention that we think it deserves.
Pennington: Iain you’ve been doing this for several years now, what has the reception to the Stat of the Year been after you guys have been announcing it?
Wilton: I think the most extraordinary time we had was last year when a figure on plastic waste was named as the International Statistic of the Year. That’s the one based on Roland Geyer’s research, and the research of the team that he led. And that really did seem to strike a chord with people. There’d been a lot of stuff on television in the UK that year about plastic in the oceans, particularly the Blue Planet series, and it really did seem to strike a chord. And that is the statistic that we named as Statistic of the Year, and it just got so much coverage all over the world, and the Media Monitoring Services was still picking up references to it only about a month ago in all kinds of unlikely places. And one of the satisfying things about it was that it did have, in a small way, have a bit of real-world impact because we had about an Australian businessman who’d been inspired by the stat that we announced. And he’d been thinking about setting up a mineral water business in Australia and he decided to do that. And his USP was that he would sell mineral water, not in plastic bottles, but he’d sell it in cans knowing that the cans were very likely to be recycled in a way that probably wouldn’t happen with the bottles. So, there’s now a business in Australia called Wallaby Water and if you look on the side of the can it basically says this is inspired by the RSS’ Statistic of the Year.
Bailer: Well that is very cool.
Pennington: Oh, that’s great.
Wilton: I just noticed in the UK in a supermarket recently for the first time ever, you go to buy some water you can actually buy it in a can rather than a bottle, so I thought that was a fantastic example of how these statistics that we put out there can actually lead to real world changes in behavior. So that was really satisfying.
Campbell: At RSS also you won an award for this campaign from last year right? 2018. Talk about that, campaigning on a shoestring.
Wilton: Yes, it’s an organization called Memcom, which brings together a lot of membership organizations across the UK. They have annual awards in a whole range of categories, and they have a category called campaign on a shoestring, and Statistic of the Year won that last time around. It was great because it was a double for us because we’d won the previous year as well for a political lobbying campaign, to basically prevent governing ministers and their spin-doctors from having privileged advance access to government statistics. Particularly market-sensitive government statistics, that had had access for a long time before our campaign, and our campaign was about 90% of what we wanted, so those people no longer get privileged access to market-sensitive official stats.
Bailer: Can you just talk a little bit about the highly commended entries? You mentioned the rate for front seat passengers for women who are with seatbelts in the front seat. There were some other related to pollution, some related to to under five child mortality, some others related to sugar content and hybrid, so could you just do a quick rundown of those?
Wilton: Yes, I think the very highly commended the one that is closest to my heart is the one about the record level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because that is just such a fundamentally important issue. And so, the relevant observatory in Hawaii prefers time registered CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at 15.62 parts per million, so that is one of our commended Stats of the Year. And I was really struck when I saw the comments that Roland Geyer put in the press release on that. He said this statistic is as important as it is terrifying. So I think its really something we absolutely need to take account of, and to have someone like him saying this is a terrifying level of CO2 in the atmosphere, it really should concentrate people’s minds and make them think about what governments can do to tackle this problem, but also what you can do on an individual basis to hep address it as well. So, that I think is maybe the most important of our highly commended Statistics of the Year.
There’s one on declining child mortality rates, I think a bit like the one on life expectancy that shows how a lot of things are improving slowly, or maybe not slowly but steadily, across the world as a whole maybe something we don’t focus on sufficiently. And the two UK highly commended statistics this year, one is about how electric and hybrid cars in the UK have managed to capture a record market share, and so those account for the first time more than 10%of new vehicle registrations. So that does show that gradually electric and hybrid cars are becoming mainstream choices for UK vehicle buyers. And the final UK commended statistic is -28.8%, and this basically shows the effectiveness of a so-called sin tax, because a few years ago the government announced that it was going to start putting a tax on particularly sugary drinks, and it’s actually went very well because consumers themselves are moving from the highly sugared drinks to less sugary ones, and a lot of the manufacturers have reformulated their drinks. They’re obviously trying to keep the taste as similar as they possibly can, but they’ve done a reformulation so there is less sugar in their product, so they don’t have to pay that sugar levy. And it does show you that on occasion sin taxes can produce quite significant changes in behavior so yeah, UK soft drinks are now much less sugary than they were before. But if you look at other areas such as breakfast cereals, the progress there has been a voluntary approach in conjunction with manufacturers progress that has been much more glacial. So, it’s interesting to see. Certainly, as far as the sugar taxes are concerned it seems to be producing the desired results in making soft drinks in the UK much less sugary than before.
Pennington: You’re listening to Stats and Stories and today we’re talking with Iain Wilton Director of Policy and Foreign Affairs at RSS. Now Iain, I know in addition to this years Statistics of the Year, RSS is announcing Statistics of the Decade, and I wondered if you could take a moment to explain why you decided to choose statistics for the decade, and what the International Statistic of the Decade is?
Wilton: Yes, Statistic of the Decade, I’ll be absolutely honest with you, it was an in-the-shower moment.
[Laughter]
Wilton: And something occurred to me that it was 2019, so not only could we do Statistic of the Year, but we can do Statistic of the Decade covering the period from 2010 to the end of 2019. So, it’s basically a way of us getting more bang for the buck, if you like, having two opportunities to put our favorite statistics out there with just a few days in between. So, we’re complementing the Stats of the Year with a whole set of winning and commended Statistics of the Decade, and if you’d like me to give you the winner.
Bailer: We should have a drumroll now, shouldn’t we?
[Thumping on table]
Wilton: In fact, it was a big contrast to prolong the tension there’s a big contrast between the size of the international winner, which is very big, and the size of the UK which is very small. So here we go, the winner for International Statistic of the Year is 8.4 million, and that is the estimated accumulated area of the Amazon that has been deforested over the past ten years, and that area is equivalent is equivalent to around 8.4 million football pitches. And just to give you a bit of extra data on that, those aren’t small football pitches. We take measurements from FIFA regulations, and the measurement that we use basically is the equivalent of the playing area that you get in most of the English Premier Leagues. So, for example the dimensions that we used represent the size of the pitch at the Etihad Stadium, which is home to the current English champions at the moment, hopefully soon to be dethroned by Liverpool. [Laughter]
Pennington: That is not a conversation to have right now.
Wilton: So yeah, they are not small football pitches, these are serious FIFA-endorsed size regulations that are typical of the English Premier League. So, 8.4 million of them is basically what has been deforested in the Amazon over the last decade. So, I think that’s a scary statistic, and hopefully puts that subject into a frame that makes it easier for people to identify with. So that’s the International Statistic of the Decade. And the UK Statistic of the Decade is naught point three percent, and that is the estimated average increase in UK productivity in the decade or so since the financial crash. And that figure is about 1/7th of the previous trend of UK productivity growth. So, it does show you how UK productivity has been very stagnant basically over the last decade, and then, as we see in the press release, I think a lot of things would be very different if you gave productivity on its previous trend, rather than having this big plateau that it actually has had over the last ten years.
Pennington: The UK statistics for this year and for the decade both- depressing, is that the right word? They’re not super encouraging. I mean on the one hand you have the fact that there’s this high-level of working poverty in the UK, and then this Statistic of the Decade is that productivity has not increased. It paints this kind of bleak picture about what’s happening in the United Kingdom.
Wilton: Yeah it’s not great. What we try and do when we put out our Statistic of the Year, and our Statistic of the Decade as well, we make sure that there is this broad spread. We don’t want to have nothing but statistics that can leave everyone fundamentally depressed. So, if you look at it as a whole, we try and strike a good balance. But in terms of the subjects that we cover but also between positive development and ones that are a bit more negative or regrettable. So, I think if you look at everything in the round, I hope it’s a reasonable balance of positives and negatives and a good spread of subjects environmental, economic, social, and so on.
Pennington: Although there are a lot fewer jaffa cakes in this year’s statistics.
Wilton: I’m very pleased that you picked up on the shrinkflation one.
[Laughter]
Pennington: Yeah I enjoy jaffa cake, so that stuck out to me.
Wilton: We did actually have a couple of very strong contenders on shrinkflation. So, what happened to java cakes is basically what happened to tins of Quality Street. Quality Street sweets are a sort of favored gift at Christmas. And basically, those tins have shrunk about by nearly 50% over the last ten years in terms of their content; and hobnob biscuits, if you’re familiar with those. Pennington: Oh yes, I’m familiar with hobnobs.
Wilton: Scandalous.
[Laughter]
Wilton: So shrinkflation did get considered, but ultimately didn’t make the cut for two years in a row.
Bailer: So, some of the commended entries were pretty interesting as well, both for the UK and internationally. Would you like to tell us about those as well?
Wilton: Yes certainly. So, if we look at the UK commended statistics, there’s one very positive one in terms of UK productivity and this one is the figure is 30.6%. That’s because women now hold 30.6% of all board positions in the UKs 350 biggest listed companies, and that was included because there was a major change over the decade concerned, so that is more than three times the proportion that we had in early 2011 when the figure was just 9.5%. So the 30% threshold has been passed this year, and we think that’s really encouraging trend because there was an organization called the 30% Club about ten years ago, and effectively it has achieved what its original objective was, which was to make sure that women hold more than 30% of board positions in the UK. And there’s obviously further progress to be made, but we think that it is an important landmark that has been published this year, and the 30% Club has achieved the objective that is inherent in its name, so we think that’s a positive statistic as one of our commended. The second UK commended one is about the number of young adults who live with their parents still. And I don’t know if that’s something that applies in other countries as well.
All: Yes.
Wilton: Yeah okay, the boomerang generation, where they leave the family home to go off to college or university or whatever, and then after a number of years they return home because they’re struggling to afford rent or they’re off a bigger amount than before to get the deposit they need for a home of their own, so you have the boomerang generation going back to live with their mom and dad. So, the figure that we’ve announced today relates to the number of young adults now living back at home with their parents, compared to the figure from ten years ago.
Pennington: One of the commended statistics for the international scope is related to the number of SUVs that are on the road. Could you talk a bit about that one?
Wilton: Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting figure, because- certainly in terms of the statistics of the year. That was a UK commended statistic talking about how electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles have come much more into the UK mainstream. I’m sure that the same is true in other countries as well. But the figure about SUVs is interesting, I think, because it shows that all the benefits that are coming about through more people having electric cars, and more people having hybrid cars – all those environmental benefits are actually being massively outweighed by the huge increase in the number of people who have moved from standard type cars to sports utility vehicles over the last ten years. So, the International Energy Agency did some work on this, and they calculated that the numbers of SUVs worldwide have increased by 165 million over the last ten years. And as we know SUVs tend to have higher emissions than standard cars because they are bigger, bulkier, less aerodynamic, and so on. So, the progress that’s been made through hybrid and electric vehicles is sadly being more than offset by the massive spike in SUVs around the world in the last ten years.
Campbell: And yet I think in this year’s statistics there’s been an increase in hybrids right? 10%; you broke that threshold for the first time.
Wilton: That’s right, yeah.
Campbell: Do we know how many of those hybrids are SUV hybrids?
[Laughter]
Wilton: Some SUVs obviously are hybrids or even electric, but the vast majority aren’t. And as I said, that can be the problem with SUVs. And I hold my hands up here. For various reasons we needed to get one a few years ago, and they do consume more petrol and they check out more emissions than conventional vehicles. So, and it’s a worldwide phenomenon: 165 million more SUVs now than ten years ago, and with all the environmental consequences that you can imagine.
Bailer: I thought there was also this positive highly commended entry under the International Stats of the Decade, the-
Wilton: That’s right its 19%, and that basically is the reduction in deaths from air pollution over the period from 2007 – 2017, and we cover that in Stats of the Decade because the figures themselves have only come out comparatively recently. So that covers the most recent ten-year period that is available to us. So that is obviously a welcome statistic, and, I think again, it’s one of those counterintuitive ones. I think a lot of people would say that air pollution is overall getting worse. There’s certainly been a lot of coverage in the UK about air pollution in our biggest towns and cities, especially in London. But overall the number of deaths caused by air pollution has actually fallen fairly markedly over the last ten years.
Pennington: Well Iain that’s all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Thank you so much for being here.
Wilton: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
Pennington: Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places where you find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.