Thank you for downloading this week's more or less podcast. Here's Tim Harford.

Hello, and welcome to More or Less, in which we take a look at the numbers behind the week's news and in the world around us.

The government launched its social mobility strategy this week,

but our views of social mobility being distorted by an old statistical problem.

And as Portugal asks for a bailout, we'll try to fix the economy closer to home.

In Trumpton.

Oh dear, what are the next?

But first, we've frequently told that young people have never had it so bad.

They can't get on the housing ladder, and it's increasingly difficult to get a job.

The last official set of figures revealed that nearly a million 16 to 24-year-olds were unemployed.

The latest unemployment stats are out next week, but do they actually tell the real story?

While Hannah Barnes has been looking into this,

and Hannah, there have been some pretty high-level complaints about how the unemployment numbers are presented.

Yeah, notably from Ian Duncan-Smith, the work and pension secretary.

He's written to the Office for National Statistics, who published the figures,

saying he's concerned that they can be used to present a misleading picture.

Chris Graylings, the Employment Minister, and I asked him why he and his boss are worried.

Well, the issue we have is that the headline figure for youth unemployment in the country today is 974,000.

But nearly 300,000 of that total is actually made up of people who are full-time students,

and those people are telling the surveyors that they are interested in getting a job to top up their income.

But the system is showing them up as being full-time unemployed.

Now, that's clearly nonsense. Somebody who is full-time at college, I do not think should be counted,

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