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Hello and welcome to more or less, you're ever friendly guide to the numbers in the news.

This week it seems that 41% of listeners to the programme wrote in to express their lack

of confidence in at least one of last week's items, which I think is a convincing, decisive

show of support for our leadership. This week we'll deal with your complaints about

long billions and wet miles, we'll fact check comedy claims about pyramids. We'll find out

what's happening to the life expectancy of British women, and we'll evaluate the probability

of identical triplets, a long shot, but perhaps not quite as long as the BBC website asserts.

But first, while all the economic talk is about the cost of living with rising inflation,

rising energy bills and rising taxes, there has been some good news. Unemployment is at its

lowest rate in 50 years. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of job vacancies too, it's hard for

businesses to get the right people. Good news for workers who find themselves very much

in demand. It's with this backdrop in mind that loyal listener David Wheeler got in touch to

say he'd been puzzled by the contrast between two recent headlines, one from the BBC.

Job vacancies outpace unemployment for first time. And one from the spectator. How are five million

Brit without work? Yes, that does seem puzzling. One sounds like there are loads of jobs and not

many people looking, the other sounds like there are loads of Brit sitting around with nothing to do.

Here to help is Louise Murphy, she's an economist at the Resolution Foundation, I think Tank.

At first glance, these two headlines seem to contradict each other, but actually when we kind of

look beneath the surface a little bit, they are in fact both true because we're looking at

slightly different things. So on the one hand, the first headline is looking at the unemployment rate,

and that is the number of people who are out of work, but who are actively looking for work and

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