This interview was originally published in October 2007

Tim, what attracted you to becoming the new More or Less presenter?

Tim: Well, I think it’s very important that we understand the numbers that surround us. In every news report, you’ll see statistics quoted, research cited, and it’s often done very lazily or with a deliberate intention to mislead. So I think one of the reasons why More or Less is so important, is that it’s obviously about statistics, which I see a lot in my role as a writer about economics, but of course it’s not just economics, it’s science, demography, sociology and the rest.

And something else which I think is important is there’s a real role for a programme like More or Less to bring good use of statistics to light. There is a lot of very careful work out there being done by everybody from economists to epidemiologists, who are really trying to work out what works and what doesn’t, whether you’re talking about the education system, whether you’re talking about treating diseases, and what these people say has a big effect on how we’re governed as well.

you don’t need to be a numbers boffin to understand the statistics behind everyday questions

So I think if you can understand this sort of research, you really understand the world around you when you can understand the ways the governments are thinking. So that’s very important. And I don’t think, by any means, that it has to be particularly complicated, you don’t need to be a numbers boffin to understand the statistics behind everyday questions, such as, 'Does it matter who my child goes to school with or not'. I mean this is the kind of thing that the parents think about all the time but we’re just trying to present credible answers to that sort of question.

How does your economics background help you to present this confusing world of numbers?

Tim: Well, I think, for one thing, economists have a bit of a nose for the dodgy statistic. When I was taught economics, one of the first things I was taught was how to spot bad statistics, which I think is a very useful skill, and of course it’s much easier to spot bad statistics than it is to create good statistics from scratch, but still that debunking point is very important. But the other thing that economics gives you, I think, is a real sense of the right sort of comparison, so an idea of, you know, are we talking about a coincidence here or are we talking about real causation? Where we see this number, what are we actually comparing it to? These are the sort of things that economists have to do all the time. So I think it’s a very common sense approach to statistics, and I think that common sense is what More or Less is all about, so I hope that my economics is going to fit in well with that.

What’s a bad statistic?

Tim: A bad statistic is one that accidentally, or quite often deliberately, completely misleads, either because it’s false, or because although it’s true, it just gives utterly the wrong impression because the concept is wrong. I discussed this with Andrew Dilnot, the previous presenter of More or Less, when I met him recently, and in his view the worst statistic of all time was that the number of children killed in the United States has doubled every year since 1953. And it doesn’t take very much maths to say okay well that would be, let’s just say there’s one in 1953 and two in 1954, it would mean four in 1955, eight in 1956, sixteen in 1957, and pretty soon you work out that by about 1980 the entire population of the United States will have died out. So that’s just an example of a bad statistic, but there are plenty out there, but there are also very, very good, valuable, important statistics, excellent work being done by statisticians, and I think we ought to focus on the good statistics as well as the bad in More or Less.

Kevin, you and your OU colleagues help people to understand and assess numbers and statistics, how does More or Less add to the work you do?

Kevin: Well, in my part of the faculty, we do a lot of direct teaching of OU students about statistics, mathematics, and in other parts of the University economics is taught as well. However, what’s going on there is we’re taking people who have specifically chosen to study some maths, some statistics, some economics, whatever it might be, and therefore, you can kind of assume that they’re open to the ideas in that or they wouldn’t have signed up for the course.

Also, they’re studying for maybe twenty hours a week, in some cases even more, and that’s really quite a substantial time commitment, and they’re sometimes studying things that are technically quite difficult. But that’s far from being all there is to numbers, to statistics. There’s a lot that can be understood without any major technical background, simply by people applying common sense and having some exposure to the right sort of questions to ask. These are questions that anybody can ask, and anybody more or less could understand the answers to, so we’re not talking about rocket science, to come out with the old cliché.

numerical information is in every news bulletin, its part of our lives

There’s also the thing that people who work with numbers haven’t always got a terribly good public image. You know, the economists are seen as dealing with doom and gloom and thinking about nothing but pound signs, that’s not true but that’s what some people think. Mathematicians are seen as a lot of sociopathic weirdoes that don’t think in the same way as anybody else in our part of the universe, and statisticians are well, statistics is boring, so people who work in it all the time must be terribly boring. But, actually, it isn’t like that. I mean, numerical information is in every news bulletin, its part of our lives, we’re actually all terribly interested in it in certain contexts - in relation to sport, in relation to opinion polls, and things like that.

So More or Less allows us to reach out to a much wider audience than we do in our direct teaching courses and the books we write and so on, to tell people, without preaching to them, without apparently teaching them in any way, this is stuff that you can do, this is stuff that you actually need to think about to be an engaged citizen in our world. We can do that to some extent with the courses but we can do it much more widely with More or Less.

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Content last updated: 22/10/2007