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PODCAST

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

8:58

Is the world getting less miserable?

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2025/10/04

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 they were in the past.But a new piece of analysis from polling company Gallup suggests this might just be the local view, not the global one. Using data from the Gallup World Poll, it suggests that “people in more countries are living better lives and expressing more hope for the future” than at any point in the last decade.Tim Harford speaks to

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28:24

Has Donald Trump ended seven 'unendable' wars?

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2025/10/01

Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. This week:US President Donald Trump claims he has ended seven “unendable” wars. Is that true?Chancellor Rachel Reeves says the UK was the fastest growing economy in the G7 for the first six months of 2025. What do you need to know about that stat?The Daily Mail has described a recent scientific paper as describing a global cancer “explosion”. Is that the whole story?And why have Oxford and Cambridge dropped down a university league table?If

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8:58

The Case of the Missing US Data

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2025/09/27

In early February 2025, something strange started happening across US government websites. Decades of data began disappearing from webpages for agencies such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Census Bureau. In many cases the entire website went dark. Within a few days some 8,000 government pages and 3,000 datasets had been taken down. Since then, many have been reinstated - but some have not. We speak to Professors Maggie Levinstein and

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28:48

Was it easier to deport migrants to France before...

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2025/09/24

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 to Europe when we were in the EU. Is that true?Did the governor of the Bank of England get his numbers wrong on the UK’s ageing population?Why is the price of beef up by 25% in a year?Is it possible to prove that MPs are using AI to write their speeches?If you’ve seen a number you think we should take a look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.ukPresenter:

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8:58

Is JD Vance right about left-wing violence?

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2025/09/20

On September the 10th 2025, right-wing political activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at an event in Utah. In the aftermath, his friend JD Vance, the US Vice President, hosted a special memorial edition of ‘The Charlie Kirk Show’, live from the White House, during which he called for unity, but said that could only be found by “climbing the mountain of truth”. “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the

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29:09

Is it true that out-of-work benefits have almost...

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2025/09/17

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 some benefits up 80% since 2018. Are those numbers right?Do French pensioners really earn more than their working-age compatriots?How is it possible for one kilogram of fish food to produce one kilogram of salmon?And do we really have five senses?If you’ve seen a number you think we should take a look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Tim

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8:58

Will the world really be 50 million workers short by...

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2025/09/13

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 most valuable company thinks humanoid robots will be needed to fill the gap.But is this prediction based on solid evidence?Tim Harford looks at the calculations behind the claim with Rajiv Gupta, a technology expert at Boston Consulting Group, who is the likely source of the 50 million figure.If you’ve seen a number in the news you think we should look at,

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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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1,085 results

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