Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC

makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

Hello, this is Tim Harford.

Thank you very much for downloading the shorter World Service Edition of More or Less.

First broadcast on Friday the 21st of April.

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

with me Tim Harford.

America may be one of the richest countries in the world,

but the struggles of the men not having a place in the world, the loss of blue collar jobs.

That's a very popular story.

It's a story I've been hearing for most of my life.

That narrative intensified with the growing popularity of Donald Trump.

For many people, Trump's supporter conch as an image of a white working-class American guy in a red baseball cap. But beyond the folk music and the caricatures,

there are the hard numbers, and here on more or less, hard numbers are our bread and butter.

Few pieces of research have made more of an impact than a pair of studies published by two

Princeton economists, Anne Kays and Sir Angus Deaton, who's also winner of the Nobel

Memorial Prize in economics.

...