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FT’s editor Roula Khalaf chose her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Statistics are suffering from a crisis of confidence. The UK has a series of flawed economic data. Earlier this month, chief statistician Ian Diamond resigned on health concerns. Statistical reliability and interpretation are also in court. Royal Statistical Society Waiting In the case of Lucy Letby, the former neonatal nurse was convicted of murdering seven babies, noting that the correlation did not prove to be causal.
The demand for reliability is axiom; economic statistics are everything from interest rates to government policies to corporate investments. So, for example, the World Bank has spent $700 million in its statistical efforts over the past four years.
However, after the seeds of Greek debt crisis and the crucifixion, ten years after the crucifixion Inflation link Investors in Argentina, the government’s low-key inflation, inaccurate or manipulation of data are surging.
Funding can be a problem. The United States is in layoff mode. Cutting Investigation and restore sampling size. one ask In the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ problems, technology modernization prevents technology modernization due to insufficient funds. More of them are offline.
In the UK, NSA missed nearly 1 million workers from 2019 to 2024 estimate Solve the basics, think tanks. The quality issue is partly due to the increasing indifference of respondents to the survey, which complicates the ONS issues. UK’s labour market dataset loses certification in its official statistics Low point In 2023, the response rate dropped to 17%.
Like the UK, it seems meaningless to initiate another comment. From Bean report, Published about ten years ago and no action has been taken. This delayed transitional labor survey will not expire until the end of next year.
what to do? For the investigation, the larger sample is only part of the fix. Eliminating bias is also key. For example, unemployed people may have more time to fill labor surveys than workers.
The answer may come from Silicon Valley. After all, no one is better at leveraging digital data sources and large quantities. Respondents may be reluctant to conduct surveys, but information about their likes, annoyances, habits and deals is available for free to companies such as Alphabet’s Google and Meta’s Facebook.
Governments, including the UK, have begun considering network scratching and scanning transaction data such as train tickets, or access to data types held by trade publications – used car markets, holiday destinations and private rentals.
Charles Bean, author of the 2016 report on the same name, believes that ONS access to raw data is placed in the POL position to develop the necessary alternative metrics. However, this may be more real in the private sector. It is by no means simple to add up the points between the two, but this idea will hope that one day the official numbers can be added up.
louise.lucas@ft.com
