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More or Less

Tim Harford explains - and sometimes debunks - the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life

science mathematics

All Episodes

28:26

Are Afghan nationals more likely to be convicted of...

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2025/09/10

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 £240 per month for everyone in the country?Reform UK claim that Afghan migrants are 22 times more likely to be convicted of sex offences. Is that number correct?We try to make sense of a claim that one in 10 women are being driven to leave work by their menopause symptoms.And we investigate a claim comparing the speed of a snail and the war in Ukraine.If

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8:57

Do 11,000 sharks die every hour?

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2025/09/06

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 sharks are killed in fishing nets and lines every year.One statistical claim seems to sum up the scale of this slaughter – that 100 million sharks are killed every year, or roughly 11,000 per hour.But how was this figure calculated, and what exactly does it mean?We go straight to the source and speak to the researcher who worked it out, Dr Boris Worm, a

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8:58

Are self-driving cars safer than cars with drivers?

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2025/08/30

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 human behind the wheel.Loyal Listener Amberish wrote in to More or Less to ask about a couple of safety statistics he’d seen regarding these self-driving cars on social media. These claimed that Waymo self-driving taxis were five times safer than human drivers in the US, and that Tesla’s self-driving cars are 10 times safer. But, are these claims true

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8:57

Do women feel the cold more than men?

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2025/08/23

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 describe the summer as a “women’s winter”. But is there evidence behind the claims of a gender bias in air conditioning? To find out, we speak to Gail Brager, Director of the Center for Environmental Design Research at UC Berkeley, and Boris Kingma, a senior researcher at CNO, the Netherlands Applied Research Institute.Presenter: Lizzy McNeill Producer:

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8:58

How weird was the Med Sea heatwave?

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2025/08/16

In early July, the Mediterranean Sea experienced a marine heatwave. The surface of the water reached temperatures of 30 degrees in some places. A social media post at the time claimed that some of these sea temperatures were so different to the normal sea temperature at this time of year, that the sea was experiencing a “1-in-216,000,000,000-year sea temperature anomaly”. This would suggest that the likelihood of the event was on a timescale far longer than the amount of time the entire universe

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8:58

Why it matters that Trump fired data chief

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2025/08/09

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 created in May and June which stated there were 258,000 fewer jobs than they had previously estimated.This news was not received well by the White House. President Trump fired the head of the bureau, Erika McEntarfer, calling the numbers ‘phony, rigged, a scam’ and spreading conspiracy theories that McEntarfer had fudged the data. We speak to

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8:58

Are abortion numbers rising in the US?

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2025/08/06

In June 2022 the United States Supreme Court passed what became known as ‘the Dobbs decision’. In doing so they overturned the long standing constitutional right for women to access abortion in the US. Since then a number of states have banned abortion completely with many others having highly prohibitive rules. You’d expect the numbers of abortions to go down. They haven’t. How is it possible that more people are accessing abortions in a post Dobbs society and why is it not true that states

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8:59

Does a single AI query use a bottle of water?

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2025/08/06

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 do basic research and writing tasks. But what is the environmental impact of these technologies? Many listeners have got in touch with More or Less to ask us to investigate various claims about the energy and water use of AI.One claim in particular has caught your attention - the idea that the equivalent of a small bottle of drinking water is consumed

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8:58

Does a single AI query use a bottle of water?

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2025/07/26

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 do basic research and writing tasks. But what is the environmental impact of these technologies? Many listeners have got in touch with More or Less to ask us to investigate various claims about the energy and water use of AI.One claim in particular has caught your attention - the idea that the equivalent of a small bottle of drinking water is consumed

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8:58

Are one in six children living through war?

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2025/07/19

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 around the world are currently living through war”. Listener Isla got in touch with More or Less to ask whether the claim was correct, so we tracked down the source to an organisation called the Peace Research Institute Oslo.Research director Siri Aas Rustad tells us how they worked out a figure for the number of children living near to a “conflict” and

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8:58

Why Manchester United can afford to play badly

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2025/07/12

Manchester United are terrible, even according to their own manager. Last season saw their worst ever performance in Premier League history.But at the same time, according to Forbes magazine, they’re still the second most valuable football club in the world. How is that possible?Tim talks to Kieran Maguire, a football finance expert and the author of The Price of Football, to find out the secret of Manchester United’s financial success. Presenter: Tim HarfordProducer: Nicholas Barrett Series

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26:40

Can drinking one less bottle of coke a day halve...

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2025/07/09

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 cutting back on one fizzy drink a day?How many new babies in the City of London have a foreign-born parent? And since fewer than one baby a week is actually born in the City of London, how much should we care?Electricity in the UK is more expensive than almost anywhere else. Why? And is it anything to do with wind turbines?And we help out rival Radio 4

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8:58

The economics of war: Vikings, Conquistadors and Vietnam

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2025/07/05

How does economics help us understand conflicts through history? That’s the question that economist and journalist Duncan Weldon tries to answer in his new book, Blood and Treasure. Tim talks to Duncan about the economic perspective on Viking raiders, Spanish conquest and the Vietnam war.Presenter: Tim HarfordProducer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Neil Churchill Editor: Richard Vadon

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28:17

Is the UK seeing a Christian revival?

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2025/07/02

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 every day, 1000 people begin claiming personal independence payments, or PIP?When the government talks about how it “returns” illegal immigrants, what does it mean?Can a new telescope really see golf balls on the moon?If you’ve seen a number you think looks suspicious, email the More or Less team: moreorless@bbc.co.ukMore or Less is produced in partnership with the

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8:59

Has Russia suffered a million casualties in the...

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2025/06/28

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 journalists have declared a grim milestone, one million Russian casualties.But is this number accurate? Tim talks to Seth Jones, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Olga Ivshina, from the BBC Russian service, to investigate this statistic.If you’ve seen a number in the news you think we should take a look at, email the More or Less

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28:48

Why is data on grooming gangs so bad?

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2025/06/25

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 poor quality?Iran has apparently enriched uranium to 60%, but what does that number mean?Adam Curtis’s latest series, Shifty, includes claims about Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power. We ask Sir John Curtice, polling king of election night, if they’re accurate.And we ask an economist to explain why being pillaged by a Viking might be more lucrative than you’d

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8:58

How to spot a suspicious statistic

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2025/06/21

Untruths sneak into our lives in all kinds of ways. Sometimes they’re outright lies. Blatant misinformation. But in this episode, we’re going to talk about something else - those sneaky numbers and claims that bounce around our society and that aren’t exactly false, but are leading you down the wrong path. That’s the subject of a book called May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School. Tim talks to Alex about the statistical claims that might not be wrong, but

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28:49

Are 4% of young women in the UK on OnlyFans?

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2025/06/18

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 the size of the tax bill for Manchester.An article in the Spectator claimed that 4% of women aged between 18 and 34 in the UK are OnlyFans creators. We track down the source and discover that it is not very good.Do people in Scotland use much more water than people in Yorkshire? If so, why?And we examine a popular claim that today’s working mothers spend more

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9:55

Could you be hit by a falling satellite?

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2025/06/14

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 earth?The European Space agency estimate that by 2030 there will be 100,000 satellites in orbit. We look at whether that estimate is realistic and what it means for those of us living on the ground below, with the help of Jonathan McDowell and Fionagh Thomson. Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Lizzy McNeill Series Producer: Tom Colls Production

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28:28

How do you make something 10-times more lethal?

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2025/06/11

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 worth a strikingly exact £622,191? Are there really twice as many people teaching Yoga as there are in the fishing industry? Is the number of workers per pensioner really falling from 4 to 3 to 2? And what did Donald Trump mean when he said the price of eggs had fallen by 400%?Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. If you want us to look

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