More or Less

The way ‘economics’ should be taught. However recently the FBI changed crime statistics up so mabe Trump was correct in the ‘debate’ such as it was. Thank you Mr Harford

More or Less brings the research to the questions of the day! But you’ve been failing in your analysis. Your expert, university professor champions the idea that it’s not that big! The numbers provided were, the Trump administration says it’s 71B but your expert says a lot of that was refunded so it’s closer to 36B - the show takeaway was Trump is wrong again. More or Less has missed the point. Your program isn’t to split hairs. It should be to help people understand the numbers. The actual number your expert accepted was just half, 36B, but that is enough to worry about. More or Less should salute efforts to look at the numbers and return 36M of fraud back to the public good. More or less could have then said: the average grandma may receive on the order of 18k annually- 36B is the equivalent of 2,000,000 grandmas not getting paid. That’s the story and what More or Leas should do, bring facts and relevance to the numbers. Many of the DOGE cuts are tied up in court or bureaucratic hurdles but 7 million accounts were removed, I’ve not heard an outcry than many people were missing their checks, why? Because I would guess, they were predominantly fraudsters. But More or Less didn’t ask this question either. Think about the meaning of the statistics and not the actual number. I expect more from More or Less

Dear Mr Harfort, I am writing about your very interesting and solidly supported podcast —as is all the material you produce—on the US maternal-related mortality statistics,. You rightly conclude that the upward trend in the last two decades for the US results from a statistical mirage—the coverage of the more accurate new format proposed by the relevant international agency progressed piecemeal, one state at a time over two decades, accounting for the index's substantial growth. That is, the growth is only partly due to the improved accuracy of the new format and most probably due to the increasing temporal coverage of the sample. I put together a graph showing this, together with equivalent indices for the major European countries. (Unfortunately this format does not allow attaching a picture.) The graph shows a near-constant level over time for the latter and a marked increase in the American one, as you pointed out. However, you also conclude that US information is utterly worthless, and with this, I disagree. Although one should dismiss the growth trend, we cannot overlook the differential in the levels, which shows that even the lowest US figure (at the beginning of the period) is much higher than any other major advanced economy. Thus, in 2003, the US index, which supposedly underestimated mortality since the new format was not in place, was already about 50% higher than the highest European one. By the end of the period, when supposedly the US data becomes comparable to the European, it is 2.5 times as high. I think this finding is most revealing of the US's precarious, backward healthcare condition. And to this extent, it is not worthless.

They ask the experts and that is so refreshing.