Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.

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

I'm Charlotte McDonald. This week has seen the announcement of the winners of the

biggest prize of its kind, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

It's worth over a million dollars between them. They are David Card of the University of

California at Berkeley, Joshua Anguist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT,

and Guido Inbons of Stanford University.

So today Tim Harford, you're here with me not as the presenter of More or Less, but as the economist

and author of How to Make the World Add Up. Welcome to the programme.

Did you miss me? Lots. Okay, so three men have been given the prize this week. What can next

their work? They are all statistical detectives. They've all helped us understand how to get

real insight out of data. So you've got your classic cliché, which is correlation is not causation,

which is true. You think of lots of the sorts of problems you might be interested in.

For example, rich places have lots of immigrants. Is that because immigrants go to where the money is

or is that because immigrants help boost productivity and incomes? Or people with more education

tend to earn more? Is that because the education boosted their earnings, their income potential?

Or is it because people who are smart and driven do well at school and then do well in the office?

So you've got all these interesting problems that you want answers to and your classic statistical

responses just correlation is not causation, correlation is not causation. So the three men who

shared the Nobel Memorial Prize, David Card, Joshua Angrist and Gido Inbons, developed tools and did

work that showed us how to do better. Okay, so the men that we're honouring this week, the things

that they did went to the heart of some of the most important political issues like minimum

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