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Tim Harford reads from his new book revealing how we can evaluate the statistical claims that surround us with confidence, curiosity and a healthy level of scepticism.

Statistics are vital in helping us understand the world. We see them in the papers and on social media, and we hear them used in everyday conversation. Yet we doubt them more than ever. But numbers – in the right hands – have the power to change the world for the better.

Tim argues that, contrary to popular belief, good statistics are not a trick, although they are a kind of magic. Good statistics are like a telescope for an astronomer, a microscope for a bacteriologist or an X-ray for a radiologist. If we are willing to let them, good statistics help us see things about the world that we would not be able to see in any other way.

Tim Harford is a senior columnist at the Financial Times and the presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less and Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy, as well as author of the best-selling The Undercover Economist.

In this third episode, Tim examines the role of big data and algorithms in our lives in the wake of this summer’s furore over A Level and GCSE grades. He draws a fascinating analogy between the secret algorithms of big companies today and the secrecy of the doomed alchemists of the seventeenth century.

Abridged and produced by Jane Greenwood
Read by Tim Harford
A Loftus Media production for ±«Óãtv Radio 4