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Hello and welcome to More or Less, back from the festival stage and safely

ensconced with our spreadsheets in the studio. This week, the Cake Bakey Show says that one

in two people will get cancer, but do we really trust the epidemiological insights of a bunch

of egg-beating piping baggers? Everyone's up in arms about access to higher education in Glasgow.

We look at what one expert tells us is the strangest argument she's seen in a long time.

And we reveal the hidden mysteries of existence with the help of the godfather of more or less

Michael Blastland and an unspecified number of sheep.

But first, loyal listeners who heard last week's programme will know that we were at the

hay festival causing trouble. Turns out we weren't the only one stirring things up.

Behavioral scientist Paul Dolan at the London School of Economics was giving a talk about his new book.

He made a series of claims which subsequently made their way into a guardian article called

Women are happier without children or a spouse says happiness expert.

The article said

Now the science backs it up. Unmarried and charless women are the happiest subgroup in the population.

He said,

married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room

when they're asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present, flipping miserable.

The article got picked up and spread all over the world. It attracted a lot of attention and

criticism particularly from people who have very strong feelings either way about the joys of

marriage. He caught our attention because some people became suspicious that Professor Dolan had made

a significant error. One of them is Gray Kimber. An economist who's research often uses the data set

...