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Making statistics do the hard work

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Why you can trust SCMP
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TO understand God's thoughts,' Florence Nightingale said, 'we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.' So, in the firm conviction that statistics are pleasing to the Almighty, we offer you the following comparison.

There are, give or take a few thousand, 180,000 foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong. There are also 188,000 unemployed and 185,000 civil servants.

It is surprising such figures are available given the Director of Audit's revelation that the Census and Statistics Department works the sort of hours usually favoured by the unemployed.

We also wonder about their reliability. Some people in Government, notably the Chief Executive, are known to work the hours of a domestic helper, while some of the unemployed are probably leading double lives as members of the Water Supplies Department.

But, generally, the three sets of figures are comparable. They may also be interchangeable.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The Government has already done some of the intellectual groundwork for us. Secretary for Education and Manpower Joseph Wong Wing-ping recently suggested jobless people fill in for domestic helpers on holiday.

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