This is the BBC.

Hello, this is me, Tim Harford.

Thank you very much for downloading the longer Radio 4 edition of More or Less,

which was first broadcast on Friday the 9th of December.

Hello and welcome to more or less.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life,

and I'm Tim Harford. This week we'll be looking at media claims that cancer rates

are rising in children. Modern life is killing them, we're told. Fidel Castro is dead, but communism is alive and well, at least if you're having a romantic dinner for two.

And Ed Balls. But we begin with the time lord of Surrey Heath, Michael Gove, telling the House of Commons

that despite the referendum vote, the British economy was doing pretty well. The 17 million people who voted to leave the European Union in this country

know a darn sight more about economics than the members of the IMF, the OECD, the IFS

and all these other squad diesel experts who have ugh on their face.

Most economists thought that leaving the European Union would damage the British economy.

But Mr Gove, one of the leaders of the successful campaign

to leave the European Union, clearly thinks they've been proved wrong. Many of them were long-term

forecasts, looking ahead to 2030.

Now perhaps Mr Gove has been using his Tardis, but so far we've learned very little about what the

British economy may look like and whether those expert forecasts will be proved right or wrong.

Still there were many forecasts of the near-term impact of a vote to leave the EU.

Here's George Osborne, a man who used to have an important job. A vote to leave will push our economy into a recession.

Within two years the size of our economy our GDP would be at least 3% smaller as a result of leaving the EU and it could be as much as 6% smaller.

We'd have a year of negative growth, that's a recession.

...