Numbers of the year 2024

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hello, and thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast. We're the programme that looks at the numbers in the news, and I'm Charlotte McDonald. 2024. What a year you've been. We've had baby hippos going viral, empops going really viral, and martial law that lasted less time than it would take to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But what we're really interested in are the numbers that describe what kind of world we're in right now. So we've gathered some of our more or less regulars to explain the numbers that stood out most to them this year. Our first number comes from India. Hi, I'm Rukmini S. I'm the founder and director of Data for India, a public platform that tries to advance the understanding of India through the data. My number is...

Not the biggest number, but size doesn't equate impact.

The number two is India's total fertility rate, which is the number of children that an average woman can be expected to have in her lifetime. For regular listeners, you'll know we talk about fertility rate a lot. If it's below 2.1 per woman, then the population stops growing. India is traditionally seen as one of the main drivers of global population growth. India has a population of 1.4 billion, more than any other country.

But this story is slowly changing. India in the 1950s had a very high fertility rate of over five children per woman tending to close to six. And it's really seen this truly dramatic decline in its TFR in this total fertility rate, particularly in the last 20 years. Now, none of this should come as a surprise because demographers around the world will tell you that

When people get richer and when women get better access to health and education, families choose to have smaller families. The picture isn't the same across the board. For example, Bihar has a fertility rate of three, whereas urban parts of Western Bengal now has a fertility rate of 1.39.

That's on par with Japan. The gaps are narrowing, but it's still posing some important questions. So the working age population is going to be much more concentrated in the center and in the east, in the poorer parts of the country. And you see significant aging in the rest of the country. So one question that he narrowly needs to contemplate is that as the south and the west, the richer parts of the country grow older, who is going to do the jobs of the future and is there

enough of a conversation around internal migration going on. Although the fertility rate has fallen over time, it still caught many in India off-guard. Some see it as a good thing. A symbol of higher education rates for women and better child mortality outcomes. But others...

They've gone very quickly from panicking about too many people to panicking about too few children. Though there's a Southern Indian state that until a few months ago had a legal restriction on contesting local elections if you had more than two children. So this was meant to be a coercive policy tactic to encourage people to have fewer children.

They are now contemplating bringing in a law that doesn't allow you to contest in local elections if you have fewer than two children. You can't please everyone. Thank you to Rukmini S. And now, for our next number of the year, from Sir David Spiegelhalter, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge.

And my number of the year is 66, which I count as the number of countries in the world that had presidential or general elections. But you have to add to that the elections for the EU Parliament, which will add in a lot more countries. So the total number is somewhat open to interpretation, but we're still looking at an overall electorate of about half the world's population.

Some were very small. I count 9,700 in total voters for the presidential election in Palau and some large 642 million voters in India. Not all of the world's elections were smooth sailing. Some were marred by accusations of fraud. Others were delayed due to unrest and they certainly didn't result in an all-change moment across the globe.

Vladimir Putin got 87% in the Russian presidential election, but this was dwarfed by Paul Kagame in Rwanda who won 99.1% of the vote. But when there was change, drilling down on the numbers sometimes provided added perspective.

Voting systems can produce some really imbalances between the vote share and the final representation. In the US election, Donald Trump won 312 of the Electoral College votes, compared with 226 by Kamala Harris. But in terms of the popular vote, it was much closer. At the last count, Trump got 49.79%, a tiny fraction less than a half.

whereas Harris got 48.31%, very close, only a 1.4% difference. In the UK, the contrast was even stronger. The Labour Party got just 33.8% of the vote, just over a third, but won more than 60% of the parliamentary seats. Altogether, 2024 has been a fascinating year for the statistics of elections.

Thank you to Sir David Spielhalter. Our final number is the biggest of them all. I'm Hannah Ritchie. I'm Deputy Editor of Our Road and Data. And my number of the year is 150 million.

So that's the number of children that have been saved by childhood vaccines in the last 50 years. If you do some very back-of-the-envelope calculations, that means that every minute around six children are saved to vaccines, or one every ten seconds.

The figure comes from a study that was published by the Lancet this year by a team of global researchers led by Andrew Shatok. In the paper, they took data from between 1974 and 2024, then figured out what the world would have looked like if we hadn't had vaccine programs.

And here they were looking at 14 different pathogens that we know is really serious to human health and can lead to childhood death. So they modeled an alternative scenario where these vaccines hadn't been rolled out and uptake hadn't increased.

And of course there are a number of assumptions you have to make there, right? You have to model what the transmission of these different diseases look like. You need to take into account what the potential fatality rates of these diseases are. But you end up with two scenarios. One is the world that we've lived in, with vaccines, and there's an alternative world where these hadn't increased. And the difference between these two scenarios is this estimate of around 150 million deaths that have been averted thanks to vaccines.

So it's had a really significant impact in the huge declines we've seen in infant mortality across the world. Now of course infant mortality has not only reduced thanks to vaccinations, there are a number of other reasons like sanitation, like access to energy, improved nutrition, but vaccinations have played a really key role. So the researchers estimate that vaccines have contributed to around 40% of the decline in infant mortality.

The measles vaccine had one of the biggest impacts. Measles is a highly contagious disease. By far, the biggest impact has been on measles, whereas estimated at around 94 million deaths have been averted. So the World Health Organization estimates that in 2000, less than 20% of children had received the two doses necessary of the measles vaccine that has increased to now more than 70%.

That's all we have time for this week, thanks to Hannah Ritchie and all of our experts. As always, if you have any questions, comments or sightings of suspicious statistics, please email in to more or less at bbc.co.uk. Until next week, goodbye.

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