What do the loneliness epidemic, falling UK life expectancy, Andy Burnham’s “Manchester miracle”, the size of Wales, the moon’s impact on crime rates and the history of the modern calendar all have in common? No, these aren’t the inspiration for a newly imagined Britpop album – they’re all topics covered on the last season of Radio 4’s flagship statistical thriller More or Less.
When the BBC first came up with the idea back in 2001, it was envisioned as just six programmes, presented by the economist Andrew Dilnot who had been head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The laws of supply and demand dictated an extension. We are now up to around 70 series, and over 1,000 episodes, with the latest – presented of course by undercover economist Tim Harford who has been in the hotseat since 2007 – kicking off today. It is so popular that a shorter version is broadcast on the World Service even when the main series is off-air, so people all over the world can still get their fix of debunking dodgy stats.
How does a show that takes listeners back to the maths classroom (a recent episode that calculated the probability of no Tory MPs getting a question at PMQs would surely help any GCSE student) have such enduring appeal? Maybe because More or Less isn’t so much about statistics as how they can be used – or, rather, abused. No one likes being manipulated, and over the decades the show has provided listeners with an inoculation against seductive but misleading data.
“The programme was an idea born of the sense that numbers were the principal language of public argument,” explained the BBC back in 2009. “And yet there were few places where it was thought necessary to step back and think about the way we use figures – in the way we often step back to think about language. What do they really measure? What kind of truth, if any, do they capture?”
If that was thought important back then, how much more relevant is it today? We’ve now been living in the world of “alternative facts” – a term coined by erstwhile Trump aide Kellyanne Conway to argue the 2017 inauguration crowd wasn’t as pitifully small as it obviously was – for almost a decade. The increasingly soundbite nature of political interviews, turbocharged by social media and shortening attention spans, makes it virtually impossible to hold public figures account for the numbers they throw around in real time.
So Harford and his team are there to follow up. Spot a figure you think sounds too outlandish to be accurate? More or Less will painstakingly investigate its origins (as I found out when fact-checked myself – an ordeal I am relieved to say I passed).
This is public sector broadcasting at its best: informing, educating and entertaining. And it’s surprising how entertaining More or Less can be given the dryness of much of its subject matter and the challenge of explaining statistical mechanisms without graphs or videos. Harford is clearly having a huge amount of fun as he – gently, courteously, with unstinting British politeness – tears apart politicians who thought they could get away with misusing numbers.
“Double adjustment – j’accuse!” he says of Jeremy Hunt in a recent episode, who has been rumbled fiddling the figures when comparing the incomes benefit claimants can receive with workers on the minimum wage, before teasing the former chancellor about his penchant for flat whites. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp also gets a battering for disingenuously suggesting “nearly half of all new homes Labour delivers vanish before a British family gets a look in.” “That’s very odd,” Harford responds with mock confusion. “He’s making it sound like the government is building the homes (which it isn’t), and has made a list of who gets them, which it hasn’t, and it’s decided to house all migrants in them (which, again, it hasn’t).” Back to the classroom, Chris.
Sometimes, though, the whimsy brings itself. It’s not all GDP figures and statistical probabilities: “From the infinite mysteries of the primes as they float in Plato’s realm of Forms, to… Manchester” begins one programme that starts off pragmatically confronting Burnham’s record, and ends up lost in philosophical rapture over the greatest mathematical enigmas. Not surprising, given one of the show’s earliest episodes, back in 2003, mused on whether God was a mathematician.
So who knows what numerical secrets the latest series will unlock (I’ve been told today’s might involve seagulls). Its forensic number-crunching is an antidote needed now more than ever. Data has become a weapon, and when it comes to the thorniest political challenges of today – immigration, climate change, economic growth, life prospects, inequality – it is frequently wielded with little regard for veracity. Whatever else Britain may start to run out of, the More or Less team won’t be short of material.
[Further reading: The great cliché of having “blood on your hands”]
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Subscribe here to commentIn the interests of accuracy, I think the second word in this (very good) article should be “do”
At last, someone is recognising its brilliance – and its importance. A truly great programme.
And perhaps in the penultimate paragraph it should be GDP figures rather than GPD figures.