More or Less: Behind the Stats
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More or Less: Behind the Stats
Tim Harford and the More or Less team try to make sense of the statistics which surround us. From BBC Radio 4
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Are millions of people getting Motability cars for anxiety and ADHD?
Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. This week:
The Conservative party conference has been told that millions of people are...
Are 72% of prison inmates in Switzerland foreign?
In a recent speech to the UN, US president Donald Trump set out some remarkable figures on the proportion of inmates in European prisons who were fore...
Does half the UK get more in benefits than they pay in tax?
Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. This week:
The Daily Mail says that over half of the UK population live in households...
Is the world getting less miserable?
When you follow the news, particularly in countries like the UK and the US, it sometimes feels like people are less optimistic about their lives than...
Has Donald Trump ended seven 'unendable' wars?
Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. This week:
US President Donald Trump claims he has ended seven “unendable” wars. Is th...
The Case of the Missing US Data
In early February 2025, something strange started happening across US government websites.
Decades of data began disappearing from webpages for...
Was it easier to deport migrants to France before Brexit?
Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. This week:
Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey says it was easier to deport illegal migrants t...
Is JD Vance right about left-wing violence?
On September the 10th 2025, right-wing political activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at an event in Utah. In t...
Is it true that out-of-work benefits have almost doubled?
Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. This week:
Nigel Farage says 6.5 million people are on out-of-work benefits – with som...
Will the world really be 50 million workers short by 2030?
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the world faces a severe labour shortage – 50 million workers by the end of the decade.
The boss of the world’s mos...
Are Afghan nationals more likely to be convicted of sexual offences?
Tim Harford looks at some of the numbers in the news. This week:
Is it true that interest payments on the UK’s national debt are equivalent to £...
Do 11,000 sharks die every hour?
Hollywood has given sharks a terrible reputation. But in reality, the finned fish should be far more scared of us, than we of them.
Millions of...
Are self-driving cars safer than cars with drivers?
Fully autonomous cars are here. In a handful of cities across the US and China, robotaxis are transporting human passengers around town, but with no h...
Do women feel the cold more than men?
Are office temperatures set too low in the summer for women to be comfortable?
This idea has featured in news headlines and comedy videos which...
How weird was the Med Sea heatwave?
In early July, the Mediterranean Sea experienced a marine heatwave. The surface of the water reached temperatures of 30 degrees in some places.
...
Why it matters that Trump fired data chief
On Friday 1st August the US Bureau of Labor Statistics put out their job report data for August. It included revisions to their estimates for the jobs...
Are abortion numbers rising in the US?
In June 2022 the United States Supreme Court passed what became known as ‘the Dobbs decision’. In doing so they overturned the long standing constitut...
Does a single AI query use a bottle of water?
We’re living through boom-times for Artificial Intelligence, with more and more of us using AI assistants like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Grok and Copilot to...
Are one in six children living through war?
In the midst of the television coverage of Soccer Aid, a celebrity soccer match organised by Unicef, the audience was told that “one in six children a...
Why Manchester United can afford to play badly
Manchester United are terrible, even according to their own manager. Last season saw their worst ever performance in Premier League history.
But...
Can drinking one less bottle of coke a day halve obesity?
Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news and in life. This week:
Is the secret to halving obesity rates really just a matter of...
The economics of war: Vikings, Conquistadors and Vietnam
How does economics help us understand conflicts through history?
That’s the question that economist and journalist Duncan Weldon tries to answe...
Is the UK seeing a Christian revival?
Tim Harford looks at some of the numbers in the news and in life. This week:
Is church-going making a comeback in the UK?
Is it true that...
Has Russia suffered a million casualties in the Ukraine war?
It’s been over three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the human toll is growing on both sides.
Recently, politicians and...
Why is data on grooming gangs so bad?
Tim Harford looks at some of the numbers in the news and in life. In this episode:
Why is the data on the ethnicity of grooming gangs of such po...
How to spot a suspicious statistic
Untruths sneak into our lives in all kinds of ways. Sometimes they’re outright lies. Blatant misinformation.
But in this episode, we’re going t...
Are 4% of young women in the UK on OnlyFans?
Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news, and in life. This week:
We debunk a false claim that the hotel bill for immigrants is...
Could you be hit by a falling satellite?
The number of satellites orbiting our planet has been rapidly increasing in recent years. But what are the risks when they start falling back down to...
How do you make something 10-times more lethal?
What does the government mean when it commits to developing a “10-times more lethal” army?
Why was the much-missed Sycamore Gap tree said to be...
Is the world’s population being miscounted?
Exactly how many people live on our planet is one of those difficult-to-answer questions. The UN estimates is 8.2 billion, but that’s largely based o...
Does the average American have fewer than three friends?
Tim Harford is here to sprinkle a refreshing shower of statistical insight over the parched lawns of misinformation.
This week, we try to unpick...
Factchecking the Trump administration’s Autism claims
Picking Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known vaccine sceptic, as the Secretary for Public Health might not be the most ‘out there’ thing the Trump administr...
Is the UN underestimating the global fall in fertility?
Every two years, the UN release their predictions for the future population of humanity – currently expected to peak in the 2080s at around 10.3 billi...
How dead is the internet?
In the early 2020s, a conspiracy theory started circulating online known as the “dead internet theory”.
This suggested that, instead of a vibra...
Warren Buffett’s brilliant bets
Warren Buffett has announced he is stepping down as CEO of his company, Berkshire Hathaway.
Buffett is one of the richest people in the world,...
Bonus episode: The Autism Curve
An interruption to your regular podcast feed: the first episode of a new BBC Radio 4 series investigating the steep rise in autism diagnoses.
T...
Donald Trump: 100 days fact-check
On the 29th April US President Donald Trump took to the stage in Michigan to celebrate his first 100 days in office.
This is a milestone in Ame...
Are 80% of women really only attracted to 20% of men?
Netflix’s psychological drama Adolescence has started a debate about teenage boys and misogyny in modern society. It tells the story of a seemingly no...
The pioneers of proof
Here are More or Less we’ll all about the facts. Every day we use a toolkit of known proofs to try and answer our listeners’ questions. But who do we...
How much is a human life worth?
What is the cash value of a human life?
That’s the question at the heart of The Price of Life, a book by journalist Jenny Kleeman.