Has the UK’s productivity puzzle been solved?
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Has the UK’s productivity puzzle been solved?

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 23, 202629 min
  • Interview
  • Business & money

Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. This week: (00:42) Frustrated economists have been left rending their garments and howling in the streets after the UK’s ‘productivity puzzle’ - a decade-long head-scratching, soul-searching conundrum - disappeared with a click of the fingers and a tweak of the methodology. Should the Office for National Statistics have acted sooner? We ask Financial Times economic guru Chris Giles. (07:26) Can it really be true that by the 1960s, one in ten Irish children entered religious orders? Reporter Lizzy McNeill has the answer, and the history. (13...

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You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? You may ask yourself, am I right? Am

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we've all been misled about the UK economy for the last 15 years.

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0:00

Hello and welcome to More or Less, where your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. I'm Tim Harford. You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? You may ask yourself, am I right? Am I wrong? We have certainly been asking ourselves just such questions, after new data suggested

0:19

we've all been misled about the UK economy for the last 15 years. We'll also bring data to analyse the popular belief that most albums end with a quieter sadder song. Is that true? And if so, why? We'll compare the climate impact of data centres with the climate impact of the hugely

0:39

popular multinational oil company ExxonMobil. And we'll be examining a number that's second to none. None numbers, in fact. Grab your wimple and strap in. But first, for years, the hive mind of UK economics has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work out what's been going on with a particularly intractable puzzle.

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