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More or Less: Behind the Stats
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What Happens When Maths Goes Wrong?
Office for National Statistics, the OAS, published data on productivity in the seven rich countries of the G7. Productivity is output divided by hours worked. The ONS essentially misaligned two columns, which meant that it was dividing one year's economic output by the previous year's hours worked in that year. In 2021, remember, UK productivity was supposed to have grown by 22%. That's what happens when your productivity calculation is mistakenly squeezing the output from 2021 out of the hours from 2020. Humble Pie author Matt Parker came into the studio to discuss the messy world of spreadsheet mistakes.
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