It was heard said..
It was mentioned one day that a geography teacher had come across some quite interesting statistics. Well, if you are a geography teacher I suppose you would find this sort of statistic to be quite interesting. The question had been asked: How far away from where you are now living were you born? He had noticed that of people living in the UK 60% had been born within 30 miles of where they now live. In France that rose to 70% (presumably the French figure was in kilometres so the extra 1.7km would skew the answer slightly, in fact by about 6%, so even making this allowance and adjusting the 60% by 6% still shows that the French are 6% more indolent (not used pejoratively in case you are wondering) than the British).
Now the question may of course have been asked the other way around: How far away from where you were born are you now living? This produces some quite interesting and different results. The graph below shows the results in percentage terms of birth population movements for a number of different countries and other groupings. Not all nations and grouping are shown. In order to make it easier to read we have only three of the countries of the UK, France, Germany and the world as a whole (the grey line). You may be able to see some faint lines representing other nations, but I shall not comment on them here.
Looking first at the grey world line, we see that roughly 70% of people live within 50 miles of their birth place or as the French would say: accueil familial.
We notice first of all significant disparity within the United Kingdom. Whilst England (the orange line) shows slightly more mobility than the world as a whole (only 63% live within 50 miles of their place of origin) Scotland (the blue line) for example shows great movement, only 15% live within 50 miles. It seems however that most Welsh born are still within the principality (93% within 50 miles). The reasons for these we shall speculate upon shortly.
I have not included its line as the graph quickly becomes quite hard to read, but China is worth a mention. The figures are perhaps difficult to compare with other nations because of its great size, so greater movement might be expected, but there are a number of conflicting things going on. There are the local restrictions which prevent you from moving far, but on the other hand there are not insignificant large scale centralised movements of population, and nothing very much in between. Interestingly the world total pretty much tracks the results for China and India when taken together; perhaps as they are such vast regions who together comprise 36% of the world’s population it is though interesting unremarkable.
We have already commented on France (the green line) above, but the results for France on this alternate basis bear out the earlier suggestion. 80% of French born are within 80 kilometers of the place of birth. This is not a continental matter, for the results for Germany show only 45% at this point. It is to be understood however, as a desire to remain where you are. The local degustation is familiar to you, as are the cheeses and wines of your own département, why would you move to another one? Quite a contrast with England where the cheese of one area has become quite ubiquitous, so it hardly matters where you live at all. The results in Germany (the dark blue line) clearly show us the effect of unification, with large scale movements crossing what was the border. Only 45% live within 50Km, increasing to 84% within 1000.
When we look at England (the orange line); the figures are, as already noted, below the mean until you get up to over 1000 miles. The conclusion drawn is that the English just want the sun and most of those who went for it now regret that they went to live in France and Spain and so were unable to vote in the referendum which led to their alienation from their homeland of choice rather than of birth.
Turning to Wales (the yellow line) and Scotland (the bright blue) we see that they are even further removed from the world mean, and extremely so. Wales is north of the mean, and Scotland far to the south. The reasons for this if you look at the graph in incremental rather than cumulative form as here (if you are really interested I can let you have the incremental graph, but I decided not to post it here as it is rather lumpy, used in the technical sense beloved of statisticians, which only makes a complex issue even more complex). The most interesting of the two cases however is perhaps Wales, which seems to indicate not an indolent but a contented population. In Wales there seems to be little movement, 93% are within 50 miles, as people want to stay where they are. It cannot be the cheeses and wines, but something else. They are a happy and contented people, and when they do move they have to make sure they are within a couple of hours of Cardiff Arms Park which sets limits on their mobility. Those who do move far make sure that they go far enough away that they do not rue the fact they cannot get back to Cardiff for the Game.
In Scotland however we have quite a different picture. Even at 65 miles we have only 15%, but then a rapid increase; 50% at 300; 84% at 500. Where have they gone? Well such distances can only be achieved by crossing the southern border. It is suggested that it is a fear of secession from the UK hence a desire to move quickly across the border which prompts this demographic change, otherwise there is little movement because there is nowhere to go.
As interesting as such analysis might be, perhaps the conclusion that we can really draw from this is that, even though we can say 60% of people in the UK live within 30 miles of where they were born, 70% live within 100 miles, 90% live within 1000 and 100% live within about 12000 miles of where they were born, that it is astonishing, when we look at the world as a whole, in which live more than 7.1 milliards of living souls, that none of them have moved further than 20 million meters from their place of birth.
Figures courtesy of the UN, ONS and AF
With apologies in advance for errors of syntax, orthography and grammar which may be found embedded in this document whether arising from oversight, incorrect application of language packs or any other misadventure; and in general for any offence given, received or taken inadvertently, inappropriately or deliberately and, if you have managed to read this far, for any errors or omissions whether wilful, unintended, innocent or deliberate in the content of this article.