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BBC Radio 4

Tim Harford and the More or Less team try to make sense of the statistics which surround us. From BBC Radio 4

More or Less: Behind the Stats

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.uk

Presenter: Tim Harford
Reporter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Maria Ogundele
Sound mix: Neil Churchill
Editor: Richard Vadon

Is it true that out-of-work benefits have almost doubled?

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, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Sound mix: Hal Haines
Editor: Richard Vadon

Will the world really be 50 million workers short by 2030?

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 you’ve seen a number you think we should look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Tim Harford
Reporter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Maria Ogundele
Sound mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon

Are Afghan nationals more likely to be convicted of sexual offences?

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 professor in marine conservation at Dalhousie University in Canada.

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production coordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Annie Gardiner
Editor: Richard Vadon

Do 11,000 sharks die every hour?

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? 

We speak to Mark MacCarthy, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation, to find out.

If you’ve seen some numbers you think we should look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Neil Churchill
Editor: Richard Vadon

Are self-driving cars safer than cars with drivers?

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 TNO, the Netherlands Applied Research Institute.

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nicholas Barrett
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge
Sound mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon

Do women feel the cold more than men?

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 has existed. 
Is the claim true? Dr Jules Kajtar, a physical oceanographer from the National Oceanography Centre, takes a look at the statistics. 
We heard about this story because a listener spotted it and emailed the team. Get in touch if you’ve seen a number you think we should look at. moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge 
Sound mix: Neil Churchill
Editor: Richard Vadon

How weird was the Med Sea heatwave?

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 economist Michael Strain from the American Enterprise Institute, to understand why the revisions happened and the potential consequences of throwing doubt on one of the US’s most important statistical agencies.
If you’ve seen a number in the news you think we should take a look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Lizzy McNeill 
Series Producer: Tom Colls
Production Co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge
Sound mix: Neil Churchill
Editor: Sam Bonham

Why it matters that Trump fired data chief

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 which have total bans have zero abortions per year?
 
 
Presenter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Lizzy McNeill
Series Producer: Tom Colls
Production Co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge
Studio Manager: Neil Churchill
Editor: Richard Vadon, Bridget Harney.

Are abortion numbers rising in the US?

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 by computer processors every time you ask an AI a question, or get it to write a simple email. 

So, where does that claim come from, and is it true?

Reporter: Paul Connolly
Producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Donald McDonald
Editor: Richard Vadon

Does a single AI query use a bottle of water?

Tim Harford looks at the different claims made about how many people have been killed in the apparent chemical attack in Syria. The cost of care has forced a million families to sell their homes in the past five years, it’s been reported – but is it true? What can statistics tell us about the safety of Super Puma helicopters? Tim finds out whether left-handers really die nine years earlier than right-handers. And, he assesses the facts behind the claim that 300,000 attempts have been made to access pornographic websites at Parliament in a year.

The Death Toll in Syria

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