Hello this is Tim Harford.

Thank you very much for downloading the podcast of more or less.

This is the longer Radio 4 edition,

first broadcast on Friday the 25th of November.

In keeping with our new regime,

there's no overlap with the shorter

podcast and if you like it, please consider reviewing it wherever you get your

podcasts because it does help other people to find the program. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome to more or less your ever ready guide to the numbers all around us

in the news and in life. This week, when you lose a friend in a crowded place, should you go looking for them or stay

still and wait for them to find you?

Are renewables now the world's leading source of power?

And we'll be reading tweets about throwing up with the aim of making

the UK a healthier place. But first, the new Chancellor, Philip Hammond, gave his first autumn statement

this week and apparently his last since he's going to

scrap the whole business and there was one promise he made that caught our attention.

Oversees Aid Budget and we will meet our pledge to our country's pensioners through the triple lock.

Mr Hammond there standing up for hard-up pensioners, but are pensioners hard-up these days.

We decided to speak to those helpful people at the

Institute for Fiscal Studies. I'm Paul Johnson I'm director of the Institute for

Fiscal Studies. So the Triple Lock means that the basic state pension or the new flat rate pension rises each year in line with the higher of price inflation earnings growth or 2.5%.

The Triple Lock was introduced by the coalition government in 2010,

...