Does half the UK get more in benefits than they pay in tax?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Tires matter.

They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road, and they're responsible for so much.

Acceleration, braking, steering, and handling.

Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

You'll get fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options.

Try mobile installation.

They'll bring your new tires to your home or office and install them on site.

Tire Rack has the best selection of tires from world-class brands, and they don't just sell tires, they test them on the road and on their test track.

Learn how the tires you want tackle evasive maneuvers, drive and stop in the rain, or just handle your everyday commute.

Go to tirerack.com to see their tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews.

And be sure to check out all the current special offers.

That's tirerack.com.

TireRack.com.

The way tire buying should be.

Hello and welcome to More or Less, the show that puts the sass into statistics.

Before we came along it was just plain old t-t-tick.

I'm Tim Harford.

This week we ask if elderly people are sharper and smarter than they've ever been.

And if young people are so hapless that three-quarters of them are bringing their parents along to job interviews with them, two separate stories there, and at least one of them is based on good data.

In the department of questions we never thought we'd have to answer, we ask whether some British billionaires earn more in a night than the population of Bournemouth earns in a year.

And in more conventional ground, we are prompted by the Daily Mail to ask whether the UK is now a nation of benefit scroungers.

So, first,

new Green Party leader Zach Polanski took to the stage in Bournemouth last week to make his big speech at the party conference.

A major theme was his desire to increase taxes on the UK's wealthiest 1%

and this is what he said.

We need to make sure that every single person in this country knows there will be people who go to sleep at night

and without lifting a finger When they wake up, they will be richer much richer They will make more money in one night than everyone in this room could probably earn in an entire year.

More than the whole of Bournemouth could earn in an entire year.

The whole of Bournemouth, you say.

The line caught the attention of BBC Verifies Anthony Rubin.

I did some back-of-an-envelope calculations to get an idea of whether this claim is reasonably likely to be true.

So first we need to get an idea of how much the population of Bournemouth could earn in a year.

The population of Bournemouth is about 200,000 and we could take a reasonable guess that about 120,000 of them will be of working age.

The average salary of a full-time worker is about £37,500 so the approximate potential earnings of Bournemouth comes in at about £4.5 billion a year.

So the back of the envelope provides one figure, £4.5 billion.

Zach Polanski says there are people who are making that money overnight.

So how much are they earning in a year?

We need a second envelope.

If rich people sleep eight hours a night, that's a third of their day.

So they're making three times the earnings of Bournemouth per day, which is £13.5 billion.

Multiply that by £365 and they're making a touch under £5 trillion a year.

That's a lot of money.

That's double the UK's GDP.

It's also more than three times the total wealth of Britain's richest 1%, according to the Office for National Statistics.

There obviously aren't people in the UK who earn anything like that overnight.

So Anthony asked the party what on earth was going on.

The Green Party press office told me that Zach Polanski was not talking about a single very rich person or even the 1% of richest people in Britain, but the world's richest 1%.

And he didn't really mean they earned that much in a night, he meant the whole day.

But if that's the case, he was informing people that the world's richest 82 million people, that's the 1%,

earn more in a day than 120,000 or so people in Bournemouth make in a year, which doesn't seem that surprising at all.

I mean, it doesn't sound like he's talking about the richest 82 million people in the world, some of whom surely live in Bournemouth already.

Thanks to Anthony Rubin.

Loyal listener Alastair got in touch to ask about a surprising sentence he read in an article in The Economist about the aging of society.

The average 70-year-old in 2022 had the same cognitive abilities as a 53-year-old in 2000.

Alastair thought that this maybe implied that he had not aged at all during this century, cognitively speaking, which would be nice.

But is that what this stat really means?

I've been speaking to Dr.

Michaela Bloomberg from University College London who researches cognition and aging.

This claim that the average 70-year-old in 2022 had the same cognitive abilities as a 53-year-old in the year 2000, very exciting.

Is it a sensible thing to say?

It is sensible in that it's drawn from a fairly robust study.

It's sort of an average of 41 different countries, so there's going to be a lot of country variability.

But they didn't just make it up.

They didn't just make it up, absolutely not.

Let's zoom into the detail a little bit then.

So who were they and what were they doing when they produced the data to make this claim?

Yep, so it comes from an IMF report.

So it was a group of economists.

Oh, as economists, what do we know about cognitive function?

We don't know.

Anyway, go on.

But what they did is they looked at how cognitive function changed over time in these 41 different countries over a period of around 2000 to 2022.

So they do that using these four different cognitive tests of memory, orientation, time, verbal fluency, and mathematical ability.

These tests vary pretty widely in difficulty.

Orientation in time is basically knowing the time and date.

That's really a test of serious cognitive decline.

Most people pass it.

Memory is remembering 10 nouns and repeating them back.

This kind of test is even used on precedents.

Person, woman, man.

Camera, TV.

10 minutes, 15, 20 minutes later, they say, remember the first question?

Not the first, but the 10th question?

Give us that again.

Can you do that again?

And you go, person,

woman, man,

camera, TV.

They say, that's amazing.

How did you do that?

I do it because I have like a good memory, because I'm cognitively there.

Mathematical fluency is taking seven away from 100 over and over again.

Then there's verbal fluency.

You just name as many animals as you can within one minute.

So that's the verbal fluency test.

Oh, okay.

Oh, well, I kind of want to do that, but I don't think we've got a minute.

So zebra and yeah, and the rest.

Yep, yep.

There you go.

This study from the IMF, that's the International Monetary Fund, compiled test results from all over the world and did a bit of statistical tweaking to line them all up.

They found that average cognitive function has improved over the last couple of decades.

The actual absolute improvement in cognitive scores is relatively small.

That translates to a sort of large shift in the distribution, but the fact is that these cognitive tests, it'll be like a one-point increase or something.

And if you work in this field, this improvement in cognitive function from generation to generation is exactly what you'd expect.

Yeah, it's not at all controversial.

It's a very well-established effect that there's birth cohort improvements in cognitive function and a lot of different health outcomes, which is to say just that there's generational increases in cognitive function.

So with each successive generation, people tend to do better on these cognitive tests.

My kids are smarter than me.

Well they might end up doing better on the cognitive tests.

There are lots of reasons for this trend.

One is that on average around the world people are spending more time in education.

Another is that perhaps as a result they're doing more cognitively stimulating jobs.

And then our general health is better.

We smoke less and have less cardiovascular disease.

All of these trends improve the test scores, but the improvements are bigger in less wealthy countries.

The improvement in the emerging economies is actually larger than that of the other countries.

And that's what we'd expect because there's a ceiling effect at play here, which is to say that on these particular cognitive tests, higher-income countries may already be at or near the upper range, so further gains aren't well captured.

Still, in her own research, Michaela has found that even in a relatively wealthy place, such as England, there has still been cognitive improvement.

So, what I found in England was that an average 70 year old in 2018 or 2019 had similar memory scores to someone in their late 50s in 2002.

For fluency, that was early 50s, and there was really no change at all in orientation and time.

However, this claim is built around the assumption that for the average individual, cognitive function does eventually start to fall.

At around age 50, people are still doing very well on these cognitive tests.

And

it's kind of around midlife is where we start to see decline.

So you kind of think of people being around near to their peak at age 50.

And then 70 is

when we've already started to see a fair bit of aging related decline.

So the fact that 70 year olds in 2022 score the same on these tests as 53 year olds in 2000 is a clear sign of improvement.

But what this stat is not saying, sorry, Alistair, is that the same person has stayed their 50 year old mental peak into their 70s.

No, the thing is, is that it's you're declining from a higher starting point.

So it's not individual decline.

It's that you have basically higher midlife cognitive abilities.

And so when you start to cognitively decline, you do so from a higher starting point.

And as a result, you perform cognitively better to an older age.

Right.

So basically, today's 70-year-olds had more marbles when they were in their 50s.

And they may have lost some,

but they had more marbles to lose.

Exactly.

Thanks to Dr.

Michaela Bloomberg.

You're listening to more or less.

Nick Lynch got in touch asking us to take a closer look at an article he saw in the Daily Mail, which offered the headline, Over half of UK population live in households that get more in benefits than they pay in tax.

And it's set to get worse.

Nick asked, Not once do they mention that a large proportion could be pensions.

Can we break the data down?

Excellent instincts, Nick.

Sounds like you're a loyal listener.

Thanks for the great presenters.

Not just him.

Loyalty is owed to to the king, Nick, so let's all pretend you didn't say that.

Anyway, back to your question.

Over half the UK getting more in benefits than they pay in tax?

Well, it does sound alarming.

To help us break the data down with some cool, calm analysis, we turned to Mike Brewer, chief economist at the think tank, the Resolution Foundation.

Well, the figure is definitely correct.

It comes from a high-quality piece of research done by the Office for National Statistics, and they are basing that on a large survey of households, and we know what they pay in tax, what they receive and benefits, and what sort of public services they're consuming.

So yes, it's a good quality survey.

Good quality survey.

Okay, the devil will be in the detail.

The first detail that immediately sprang to my mind was

when they say benefits, are they including the state pension?

Well, it's probably worse than that, Tim, because the definition of benefits being used in the headline, it goes much further than the state pension.

So it includes all of the cash benefits.

I mean, that's what I think of when I hear the word benefits.

So it includes the state pension.

It includes all the other cash benefits paid to working-aged people, but it also includes some of the public services that the government provides, which in the article, the Office of National Statistics call benefits in kind.

So first of all, if someone is on the state pension, according to this headline, they're on benefits because they're receiving the state pension.

So if someone uses the NHS, visits a GP, goes to A ⁇ E,

they're on benefits at that point?

This definition of benefits is very broad.

Yes, it captures people's use of the NHS.

It captures all the spending on education, social care, childcare subsidies, transport subsidies, housing subsidies, and so on.

But it misses out...

what economists call your classic public goods.

So that might be police, law and order, defense, environmental protection.

So So it gets about two-thirds and it misses the other third.

The Daily Mail piece does mention that the term benefits includes both cash benefits and the value of public services.

And in fairness, the Office for National Statistics, that's the ONS, their write-up of this data also uses the term benefits in this way.

But it's not the way most people use the word benefits, of course, so readers of the Daily Mail might misunderstand what's being said.

And the Daily Mail piece certainly doesn't mention that a good chunk of those currently getting out more than they pay in are retired, many of whom will be receiving the state pension.

So there are about 36 million people who are living in households that are receiving more than they're paying on this definition.

10.3 million of those are retired.

That's about 29% of the total who are receiving more than they're contributing.

So if we strip those out, we're down to 25 million people who are living in households that are not retired and are receiving more than they're contributing.

So looking at these non-retired households, are we able to break it down and say how

much of the benefits they're receiving are benefits in kind versus how much are our cash benefits?

Yes, the ONS article does that for us.

And I think the surprising fact is that it's only the minority of benefits that non-retired households receive.

They're actually coming in the form of cash.

So on average, that's about £6,000 per household.

But the ONS think that we get £16,000 of value from the public services that it looks at.

So that's more than two-thirds of the total value is coming in these in-kind benefits.

And I think that's a really powerful reminder that what the welfare state is doing for us, it's not really in the cash redistribution.

It's in providing a basic level of public services.

Yeah, so people listening to this and thinking, well, I don't get anything in benefits.

Well, your kids go to a school.

You don't have to pay for that.

You don't have to pay when you go to the doctor.

You don't have to pay when you go to hospital.

There's a vast range of services that most of us use either for free or for much less than they cost.

So £16,000 per household?

Yes, amongst non-retired households, yes.

I mean, there is, of course, a very strong age gradient to this.

I think all of us parents love our children, but we can't claim they are net fiscal contributors.

So children do tend to cost the welfare state money.

And of course, once you reach the state's pension age, you know, you also cost the welfare state quite a lot of money.

Now, no one's having a go at pensioners here.

Today's pensioners are yesterday's heavy lifters.

Their taxes paid for the functions of the state during their working life, including the state pensions paid out to those who were retired at the time.

So it's hardly a shock to hear that the vast majority of retired people are receiving more in current benefits than they're paying in current taxes.

I'm curious, has that tendency increased over time or reduced over time?

Or is it consistent, this idea that there's a majority of people

who are paying less in tax than they receive?

Well, the ONS article

has been going on for decades.

And so we can see a long time series.

And it is the case that more and more households on this definition are receiving more than they're contributing.

And that's true.

both for non-retired households and for retired households.

So there is something going on here, yes.

So this is partly a story about the fact that most people living in the country are receiving a wide variety of benefits, including things they wouldn't normally think of as benefits.

But it must also be about who pays most of the taxes.

And I was wondering if you could tell us anything about the

progressiveness of the tax system and who is paying taxes and whether that's changed over the last few years.

Yep, so the ONS tells us very clearly that

richest richest people pay more taxes.

In particular, in the last year of data, 45%

of all tax revenues they look at come from the richest fifth in society.

And that's for two reasons.

That's firstly because rich people are rich, so they have a lot of income to pay tax on.

But it's also because we have a progressive tax system.

So we skew our tax rates.

Our tax rates go up the more income you have.

So totally unsurprising, therefore, that richer people do tend to pay a lot more than their normal share of tax revenue.

But the other thing that's going on is that the distribution of income is changing, particularly at the top.

And who contributes to our income tax revenues is really very dependent on the number of very high earners and exactly how much they're earning.

And that has changed over time, too, in a way that has also concentrated our tax take among the very richest people.

Our thanks to Mike Brewer from the Resolution Foundation.

Tires matter.

They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.

Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options.

Go to tirerack.com to see tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews.

And be sure to check out all the special offers.

TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.

Our loyal-ish editor, Richard, came across this while doing his usual thing and scrolling on Twitter.

77% of Gen Zers have brought a parent to an interview.

Now, I am all for hands-on parenting, but that seems

excessive?

Awkward?

No, that's not quite the word.

What's the word?

Unlikely.

Unlikely is the word, Tim.

Oh, hello, Lizzy.

Yes, unlikely might just be the word.

But here to provide adult supervision during this story is Lizzie McNeil herself.

Hi, Tim.

Now, in the interest of impartiality, I need to check.

Lizzie, you're not Gen Z, are you?

No, I mean, I did originate in the 90s, but I'm an older vintage person.

Good.

So, what is the story?

Well, there are actually two claims knocking around, both from the same source, an American resume writing website, resumetemplates.com, and they commissioned a company, Polefish, to conduct conduct two questionnaires for them about how much parental assistance Gen Z get during the job application process.

And the questionnaire last year found that one in four Gen Zers took a parent to a job interview with them.

And the questionnaire this year found that three in four did.

That is a big rise.

A suspiciously big rise?

Yeah, it will probably get a bit less mysterious as we go through this.

Okay, so did they find that one in four Gen Zers take their parents to job interviews or three in four, whatever?

Yeah, that is what the surveys found.

However, the story isn't quite as simple as all that.

I am shocked, shocked.

I'm sure.

The first wrinkle, well, it's really less of a wrinkle, more of an iron crease, is how the survey was conducted.

I spoke to a friend of the programme to find out more.

My name is Annette Jekle.

I'm professor of survey methodology at the University of Essex.

and I'm deputy director of the UK Household Longitudinal Study.

Ah, an academic who knows how to run a survey.

So what did she make of it?

Well, first things first, the survey was conducted by Polfish who use random device engagement specifically for Android phone users.

This is an interesting methodology where developers of mobile apps for Android phones can monetize their apps by including a piece of code that will link the app itself to a survey platform.

And so users of their app will at random moments be invited to participate in surveys and they will be offered an incentive to do so.

Hmm.

What kind of incentives?

Non-monetary, so things like extra lives in the game they're playing on the app.

Right, well if someone's midway through playing a game, I can see how offering them an extra life in the game would incentivize them to do the survey, but would it incentivize them to do it well?

Probably not.

So most likely their main motivation is to get through this questionnaire so they can get their bonus.

And that's a very different scenario from situations where we ask members of the general population to take part in surveys for official statistics or run by universities, academic surveys, where I think it's very clear to the respondents that they're contributing to research and that what they say matters, you know, that the quality of their answers matters.

I don't think that would be clear to respondents in this case at all, that what they say matters in any way.

That is an issue for reliable data.

Quite so.

And there's another issue with this method of recruiting people.

This is only for mobile apps developed for Android devices.

So it excludes any part of the population that uses iOS or Apple devices.

Which is half of all Gen Z phone users in the US.

And we know in the US, but also in Europe, on average, Android users have lower incomes.

These devices tend to be cheaper than the Apple devices.

So there's already a selection there.

In each survey, they had about a thousand respondents.

And the only screening they did was to check respondents were aged between 18 and 28 and that they worked full-time.

But the problem with that is that some apps and games have an age limit, so people often lie and say they're over 18.

They might not actually be that age, and the working full-time part also requires people to be genuine about it.

They also didn't weight the population, so all in all, it's very unlikely that this group of people surveyed were a true representation of the whole of Gen Z.

Understood.

But what about the results themselves?

Well, let's start with the 2024 survey.

Over a thousand people took part in this survey and of those people, 26% said that they had brought a parent to a job interview.

So there's your one in four.

So that's about 300 people bringing a parent?

Yeah.

Of them, 31% said it was an in-person interview.

So about 100 and what the others were online?

Yeah, so the parent was just in the house with them.

Right, but what does that even mean?

Brings a parent to an online interview.

So is the parent sitting shoulder to shoulder or is the parent behind the camera holding up coaching notes on flashcards?

I wouldn't worry about it too much, Tim, for reasons that will become clear.

But just sticking with the in-person interviews, there are about 100 people who said their parents came with them, but only eight said their parents sat in on the interview.

And only five of those parents introduced themselves to a manager.

So we're talking about really small numbers here.

We are.

Plus, I love the idea that three parents sat in the interview and didn't introduce themselves.

Such a power move.

It really is.

The most recent study has similar breakdowns, although the numbers are much higher.

But Annette is doubtful that this reflects a true rise in people taking their parents into the interview room.

So, what is happening then?

So, a lot of the questions offered a scale of frequency with four responses.

So, for example, from doing something all the time down to never doing it, there was a pretty even split of people clicking on each question.

Two answers had 23%, one had 16%, and the other said 13%.

Right.

And if you're trying to work out whether more people have done something rather than never done it, and the scale is frequency from always to never, then if people are just randomly stabbing their thumbs at an answer so that they can get back to their game, you're going to get more people saying they have done it at least once because there are more of those options to randomly hit.

Exactly.

And so reading through this report, it struck me that there are an awful lot of answers where the report says around about 50% said this or that.

And there are others where, you know, the sort of most frequent numbers that come up are

about one-third or about two-thirds of respondents,

about half

or about three-quarters.

And that suggests to me this is consistent with people just randomly picking answers.

So if they only had two answer categories, you know, and people are just sort of randomly clicking, then you'd get a roughly 50-50 distribution.

If you had four categories, you know, and then depending how they've combined the response categories, you might get these three-quarter, one-quarter distributions.

So reading the report, that struck me as really unusual, the response distributions.

So that's another indicator for me to think.

I don't think people were really paying attention and answering these questions carefully.

Right.

So, no, we cannot claim that all American Gen Zers take their parents to interviews.

It is likely that many parents drive them to interviews, it's likely they help write resumes, but it isn't likely that they sit in and answer questions for them.

Thank you, Lizzie.

By the way, who's that sitting behind you?

Oh, that's just my mum.

Say hi, mum.

Thanks to Lizzie McNeil and her mum and to Professor Annette Yekler.

And that's all we have time for this week, but please keep your questions and comments coming in to moreorless at bbc.co.uk.

We will be back next week.

And until then, goodbye.

More or less was presented by me, Tim Harford.

The producer was Tom Coles with Nathan Gower and Lizzie McNeil.

The production coordinator was Maria O'Gunderly.

The programme was recorded and mixed by Duncan Hannant and our editor is Richard Varden.

Nature Bang.

Hello, hello, and welcome to Nature Bang.

I'm Becky Ripley, I'm Emily Knights, and in this series from BBC Radio 4, we look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions.

Like, how can a brainless slime mold help us solve complex mapping problems?

And what can an octopus teach us about the relationship between mind and body?

It really stretches your understanding of consciousness.

With the help of evolutionary biologists?

I'm actually always very comfortable comparing us to other species.

Philosophers.

You never really know what it could be like to be another creature.

And spongologists.

Is that your job title?

Are you a spongologist?

Well, I am in certain spheres.

It's science meets storytelling with a philosophical twist.

It really gets to the heart of free will and what it means to be you.

So if you want to find out more about yourself via cockatoos that dance, frogs that freeze, and single-cell amoebas that design border policies, subscribe to Nature Bang from BBC Radio 4, available on BBC Sounds.

This is the story of the one.

As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast.

It's why he partners with Granger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers.

Also that he can help students, staff, and teachers stay healthy and focused.

Call 1-800GRANGER, clickgranger.com or just stop by.

Granger for the ones who get it done.

This is the story of the one.

As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority.

That's why he chooses Granger.

Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Granger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs.

And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork.

Call 1-800GRANGER, clickranger.com, or just stop by.

Granger for the ones who get it done.