More or Less

Tim Harford on Spitfire pilots, and whether football triggers violence in the home.

How can we calculate excess mortality after a natural disaster?

Tim Harford on child carers, shareholder income, football vs museums and dangerous sports

What is the difference between 96% similarity or sharing 20% of our DNA?

Tim Harford with statistics on suicide, good schools and sexism in tennis. Plus goats

A listener asks whether his Volvo is the safest car on the road?

Tim Harford questions the usefulness of a popular heart age calculator.

Tim Harford talks to Bobby Duffy about why we are often wrong about a lot of basic facts

Tim Harford fact checks EU trade deals with Africa, and whether one drink is one too many

BONUS PODCAST: For the rest of August, in addition to More or Less you’ll get a brand new podcast, Economics with Subtitles. It’s your everyday guide to economics and why you should care. In this edition, Ayeisha and Steve make sense of interest rates. Why did they lead to coffins full of car getting sent to the US Federal Reserve? What factors affect what you have to pay on your loans? And what d...

Computer programmes are being developed to combat fake news.

What would have been the most efficient way to get to Mordor?

BONUS PODCAST: For the rest of August, in addition to More or Less you’ll get a brand new podcast, Economics with Subtitles. It’s your everyday guide to economics and why you should care. In this show, Ayeisha and Steve make sense of inflation. They’ll explain how hyperinflation is affecting how Venezuelans have sex, why you can’t afford a ticket to see your favourite band in concert anymore and w...

Are Wildfires in the United States and Southern Europe burning more land than before?

A Twitter debate erupted recently over an article in the Economist about the number of wildfires. We take a look at the numbers to see whether they have increased or decreased in the US and Europe. As usual, the story is more complicated than first appears.

BONUS PODCAST: For the rest of August, in addition to More or Less you’ll get a brand new podcast, Economics with Subtitles. It’s your everyday guide to economics and why you should care. In this show, Ayeisha and Steve explore government debt. Why did an anonymous mother send her bracelet to the government to be turned into a bullet? How are you lending the government money without even realising...

How do you get a hashtag to trend around the world?

BONUS PODCAST: For the rest of August, in addition to More or Less, you’ll get four bonus editions of Economics with Subtitles. It’s a brand new podcast that will bring you an everyday guide to economics and why you should care. In this edition, Ayeisha and Steve look at how we quantify economic success. Should dodgy drug deals be included? What is Steve’s contribution to GDP? And should we ban pe...

Does a baked potato contain the equivalent of 19 cubes of sugar?

How big are your testicles and what does that mean?

Having one fewer child could be the biggest thing you do to reduce your carbon footprint

How much better are the pros than the rest of us and how effective is slipstreaming?

The planet is warming up and some people are giving up on having children to try and save it. Are they right? More Or Less looks at just how bad having children is for the environment and whether not having them could halt climate change. (image: A one child family playing in the park. Credit: Shutterstock.)

The astronomer, Carl Sagan, famously said that there were more stars in our Universe than grains of sand on the Earth’s beaches. But was it actually true? More or Less tries to count the nearly uncountable. Content warning: This episode includes gigantically large numbers. (Photo: The barred spiral galaxy M83. Credit: Nasa).

This week we take a look at some of the statistics which have caught our attention at the World Cup. There has been much debate in both the press and social media about the large distances which Russian football players have run in their first two games. We look at how they compare to other teams and what it might signify. Also –is it just bad luck that Germany has crashed out of the competition?...