Oh dear: Unemployment at a six year high

[wendigo100]

Not using 0 based axis in order to make steepness of change show off better is a sign of a liar using stats to prove his point: should be a fireable offence.

Whoa, hold on a minute. Small deviations would be much harder to view and to analyse. It is perfectly valid to explore only the top of a graph.

A 1% change in unemployment is a very significant event, but you would be pushed to see it on a zero-based graph.

Suppose you applied that principle to a patient's temperature graph in hospital. Life-threatening deviations might go undetected.

[AtW]

Have you seen average (for whole hospital) tempreture charts? They were common place in USSR and hospitals were judged on the basis of whether average temp was okay, come to think of it sounds very much NL and NHS

Let's say you've got baseline unemployment that is around 1 mln. One month it deeps down 10k people, which is 1% and you would not even notice it if the chart is done properly - from zero. However if you get it close to your eyes (which is what change of cut off point does), then suddenly that 1% may well be a huge increase - in this case it is used solely to influence weak human brains because objectively 1% change in situation is not a big thing, unless we talk critical values like in case of tempreture (anything below 36C and above 37C for example should be monitored on its own scale)

[hyperD]

no, you are guessing it is noise because it suits your objective.

Not my objective. I don't make up the figures.

[Numptycorner]

Not my objective. I don't make up the figures.

You say the fact that it's going down is noise, who knows if it's noise or not?

[hyperD]

You say the fact that it's going down is noise, who knows if it's noise or not?

Because of the intrinsic link between total unemployment and unemployment benefit claimants. I would have said the same had total unemployment been going down and unemployment benefits had spiked upwards.

I would have had as much contempt for Cameron saying the latter as I already have for bliar for publically stating the former.

[AtW]

The big unknown is number of people on disability benefits - graph of them should have really been added as well just to see if drop in unemployment claims happens to have similar increase in disability claims.