SO WHY, ASKS one reader, were you not right off the mark yesterday to comment on those latest unemployment figures? Was it because they did not go your way? You only write the figures up when they show what you want them to show, do you?
Well, perhaps sometimes, but on this occasion when I turned on my overused laptop on Tuesday to check what the updates on the CEIC database would show, the screen went 'pop' and, without the Net, e-mail or database, my window on the world shut down. My thanks to that super-efficient crew at the IBM service centre for a quick repair job that got my laptop back to me the same day.
But there was not much to say about those unemployment statistics anyway other than that statistical quirks are a fact of life. The figures said the labour force declined by 4,000 people in December and the employment rolls by 3,900, which means that 100 fewer people were unemployed.
Given the lower figure for the labour force, however, this also means that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate rose to 7.2 per cent from 7.1 per cent although it was unchanged on the raw numbers.
Make of that what you will. I make little of it. As the chart shows, little up and down blips are a regular feature of these figures and sometimes they are big up-and-down blips. For instance, I have never understood how we managed to create 91,000 new jobs from July to December of 1997 when our economy went into the biggest tailspin it had suffered since 1974. But this is what the figures say happened.
Statistical quirks are a fact of life and will always be with us unless each and every one of us is prepared to sit down for hours every month with a thick government survey booklet containing hundreds of questions, answer each question truthfully, make inquiries if we do not understand a question, do it as soon as the booklet arrives and send the results back immediately.
In fact if we did it, the unemployment rate would immediately plummet, given the tens of thousands of more people that Census and Statistics would have to employ to tabulate the results, and our fiscal deficit would rise.
