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Tim Harford explains the numbers and statistics in the news and in life

Tim Harford explains the numbers and statistics in the news and in life.

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More or Less: Why January makes us want to scream

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20/01/2017 GMT

Why January makes us want to scream

BBC World Service - More or Less, Why January makes us want to scream

Blue Monday and Oxfam’s claims about billionaires–the stories that come around every year

Blue Monday and Oxfam’s comparison wealth of billionaires and the poor –the stories that come around every year.

There are two things that you can be sure of in January and both of them make us want to scream. Firstly, Oxfam put out their ‘x number of billionaires hold the same wealth as the poorest half of the world’ stat. But as we’ve said in the past the comparison doesn’t make sense. The bottom half can include people with a pretty comfortable income but just because they have lots of debt they has negative wealth and on the other hand there could be people with barely any income – living off less than $1.25 a day - who have a small asset, such as a bike or a shack who are way up the wealth distribution.
 
The second head-banger is ‘Blue Monday’, the formula that supposedly tells us that the third Monday in January is when people are at their saddest.  It’s like a virus that has infected the media. Each year it appears on different press releases promoting different products and the press lap it up. But there is no science to it at all. The formula is a stupid invention dreamt up to promote a TV channel in 1995 and it refuses to die.

In this programme we revisit both these issues to see if we can put them to rest once and for all.

(Image: Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' 1893. No copyright / in the Public Domain)

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