Ben Goldacre
speaker
65 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2010
last heard May 2012
Ben Goldacre’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Therefore, we can save you 20% on the entirety of local government expenditure.
Everybody knows that the mobile phone industry kind of makes money out of having really annoyingly complicated tariffs that are so fiddly that it would take you more time to work out.
how to get the best deal than it would to earn the money to work around not having the best deal.
Now, it's great if somebody says that they want to make sure that everybody in local government has the best deal on their mobile phones, but the problem is that only reflects...
£600,000 in their sample of all of the local government expenditure.
That's the tiniest, teeniest corner.
So what they've done is they've said, we can get you a massive 20% saving in procurement costs on this teeny, tiny corner, the teeniest, tiniest corner of local government procurement expenditure where you are most able to get a good saving.
And then they've extrapolated that they could therefore get you a 20% saving on the entirety of local government procurement costs.
To see it being wheeled out in Parliament three months, four months after the figure was shown definitively to be absurd, is it not amazing?
It's obviously ridiculous, isn't it?
I mean, you can't brandish around ridiculous figures like this one and then not expect to have to defend the methods by which they were created.
So it's not good enough to say, go and read the PDF.
I've read the PDF and it's nonsense.
And that's why we want you here on the naughty step, Minister, to defend it.
MUSIC PLAYS
My number for 2010 is 74%.
That is the proportion of trials on the antidepressant drug riboxetine that were withheld from doctors and patients by the drug company.
It's actually very common that drug companies do trials, and then if the results aren't very good, they are still allowed to not publish them in academic journals.
So doctors and patients generally don't find out about them, and we make decisions in the dark.
Roboxetine is a drug that I prescribed myself, and I'm a pretty nerdy doctor.
Showing 41–60 of 65 · page 3 of 4
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