More or Less

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. Sinc...

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?...

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”...

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’v...

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 li...

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 m...

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...

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 hum...

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 seni...

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 t...

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 t...

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, ri...

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 tha...

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...

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 tha...

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 tha...

This year, the UK has had its hottest May and June days on record, with the mercury hitting the high thirties. But while the markings on a thermometer seem scientific and regular, the way we split up our calendar does not. Why, for instance, does May have 31 days and June have 30? To find out why our calendar has its modern form, we speak to Kristen Lippincott, former director of the Royal Observa...

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 Aa...

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...

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...

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 Harford Producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Neil Churchill Edi...

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 s...

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 s...

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 accur...

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...