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Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We are weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford.

In this program we'll be looking at three of the numbers that have been making the news over the last year

in the world of culture and sport. We'll later be hearing contributions about cricket and football.

But first, novelists and broadcaster, Ferre Chudaya,

is worried that her fellow Americans

aren't giving themselves enough time to be creative.

My number of the year is 224 billion U.S. dollars.

That is how much unused vacation time in money Americans don't spend,

meaning that Americans tend to earn a lot of vacation that they don't take

because our economy in terms of labor economy tends to be

one of scarcity and frankly a little bit of fear.

I say this after having studied it for about four years as a reporter working on a book called

the episodic career, but really trying to get a sense of how Americans think of the workplace and having an international context for that.

Part of my family is from Southern Africa, from Zimbabwe, and the labor economy there is very different from the US. And so is the labor economy there is very different from the US and so is the labor economy

in countries where friends of mine are from from Sri Lanka to Finland to the UK.

And so I look at things like how much vacation people have in the US, even with the best of jobs, you often only start with about two weeks of vacation, whereas in many other developed nations you get up to six

weeks of vacation a year, and even people who have the authorization to take vacation don't feel particularly comfortable about

taking it because there's this idea that more time in the office means more

...