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Thoughts on @bengoldacre’s article this morning: I think Ben makes a very good point in pointing out that unemployment statistics are subject to sampling error, and that in many months, the change in unemployment is not statistically distinguishable for this reason.
However, I think Ben somewhat overstates this particular point. It’s not right to say, as he does in his final paragraph, that these statistics “tell us nothing”. We can’t dismiss all data that fails to pass the (entirely arbitrary) test of statistical significance. Non-statistically significant data contribute to our knowledge, but we shouldn’t put too much weight on them. (Ben knows this, of course: he pulled back a bit from this in a tweet to me, saying that what he really wanted was for economics reporters to acknowledge the lack of statistical significance, which would indeed be nice to see.)
But I liked Ben's final point, and he could have made more of it. There’s a lot of economic data out there that is noisy but for which sampling error bars are not appropriate. GDP data, for instance, is initially reported based on partial data (and not a random sample) and we gradually close in on a view of what GDP actually was. Sometimes we revise our views dramatically: Greece’s GDP (actual GDP, not GDP growth rate) jumped suddenly by 25 per cent late in 2006 thanks to a statistical revision, although I’ll admit Greece’s data is hardly the best in the world.
And what of the data that get far more airtime than every other economic variable put together – the movements of the stock markets? There is no sampling error here at all: the reporters really are able to tell us, minute by minute if they wish to, exactly what the stock markets are doing. As a consequence they do exactly that, producing reports that are full of sound and fury, signifying... well not nothing, but not a lot either. Stock market movements are extremely noisy, big money bets on the future of the economy. They can be reported with absolute precision. That doesn’t mean they should be.﻿
Ben Goldacre: Small variations in figures get politicians and commentators excited, but we may be wrong to read patterns into them
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His last paragraph is the most interesting, I think. Why do we always have to use data as ammunition in political debate? There seems to be no getting away from it, the left chucks it at the right, the right chucks it back with interesting additions and then there's the 'third team' of statistically significant scientist types with a global vision who berate both the left and the right for not taking things seriously and doing something to really fix whatever the problem is. But moving away from our team or tribal mentalities seems very difficult; very hard not to belong to some group and defend it. Why do certain topics (environment, immigration, capital) seem to 'belong' to the left or the right? If we really want to improve our societies, we need to look at the relationships between data, discourse, identities and world views.﻿
Cowperthwaite had it right. To much emphasis on statistics as an excuse for central planners to meddle. Worked ok for Hon Kong! Remembering the TED talk on trial and error here...

I love the approach that relies on humility, principals and not on statistics or models.﻿
There's also corroborating information in other labour market statistics - JSA numbers, vacancies, earnings growth - which form part of the conditioning set. Good to get away from idea that 'certainty' about economic data is achievable, though, as indeed about other types of data....﻿
The fact that statistical significance is never reported contributes to people and non-economic journalists thinking that economists are akin to traditional scientists. They think economists should be able to predict GDP growth, inflation, etc to two decimal places, whereas in reality precision is rare.﻿
Precision is rare in some 'traditional' sciences too, though.﻿
All science has uncertainty inherent in the system. The major fault is that we teach our kids that science is certain, which is plainly false. We teach them that the more decimals a number has, the more precise it is. So is it any wonder that when the Unemp numbers come out to the hundredths place, that people think we can actually get that kind of precision? The kids then grow up thinking science can do things that it can't do.﻿
@Diane True, I shouldn't have been so general. I'll avoid science comparisons. My point stands though, I often see (Irish) columnists/presenters say something along the lines of "well the economists said growth would be 2% this year but it turned out to be 1.75%, these guys are obviously useless".

@Justin That's it, there's a perception that economists (and other scientists) can do things that they simply can't. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to correct this. It damages perceptions of the usefulness of economics, etc.﻿
Reporters diligence on reporting sampling error waxes and wanes on whether that sampling error makes the story more interesting or less. Thus, if Candidate A is polling at 47% and Candidate B is 52% with +- of 5% it'll be reported that they're tied. If unemployment is up 0.1% with a sampling error of 0.3% it'll be reported as the end of the world and surely a precursor to breadlines and Hoovervilles.﻿
+Daniel Davis It's a problem in many of the science fields as well. With the current push of science science science (which I think is a good thing) people forget that science doesn't and probably will never have an answer to everything and even then, with science the answers change as new information comes to light. People seem to forget that there are a multitude of things we don't even know we are ignorant about. Think about the Atom. How many times in human history did we think we knew what the smallest stuff was? Oh then we realized we were ignorant of the nucleus, then how long til we realized there were neutrinos, bosons, etc....﻿
+David Oser The problem with Economics is that it is wrapped in a a veil of Mathematics which people use to try and give it scientific plausibility. It's Scientism. F.A. Hayek knew all about it, which is why they don't teach Hayek in most Economics classes.﻿
Absolutely about Hayek/mathematics. Hayek and the Austrian school are clearly making a come back (in part through the increasing popularity of Ron Paul). An over emphasis on statistics doesn't necessarily mesh well with "doing the right thing". For this we need values, moral thinking, and principal.

And the sovereignty of the individual, liberty vs the state does have it's appeals compared to a current corporatocracy which is failing. No wonder Keynes has been more popular in official economic circles, for a long time it has supressed these ideas, maintained a status quo and protected the elites.﻿
BTW Statistics are awesome. But I wouldn't trust "official" statistics when they drive so much policy making, because they are often adjusted according to what policy makers want to do, and what the want to see. Far better to have "open source" stats - if this is even possible. Shadow stats does a good job of highlighting the massaging of stats for political ends;﻿
Of course the whole field of econometrics - a large share of what the economics profession works on all day - is intimately concerned with these issues. So economists do know about it; but that's distinct from whether journalists, or politicians, have any interest in showing the error bars.

On this particular story, I suspect the ONS is being quite literal in reporting the confidence intervals. A bit more imagination can reduce the error substantially - but at a cost.

If you make a straight comparison of the unemployment number now (which was plus or minus 81k) with the equivalent unemployment number last year (assuming this is also plus or minus about 80k) you get a confidence interval of 111k, as the ONS says. However, if you were to include the quarterly data in between - which essentially give you three more observations - you could build a rolling 12-month average unemployment figure which would have smaller error bars. You could then calculate how this average changes from period to period.

This method reduces the resolution of the data - you can't directly compare quarterly figures because each quarter's rolling average shares nine months of data with the previous quarter's - but gives you more accuracy for annual comparisons. So one could calculate the change in unemployment from 2009-10 to 2010-11 with much greater confidence. I haven't worked out the figures, but as a rule of thumb, four times the data cuts the error bars in half - that is, errors of around 50k.

As Tim points out, you could also change the confidence interval and accept (say) 70% certainty instead of 95%.

Combining both these factors, you can be fairly confident that unemployment has crept up over the last year, though not by much. What you can't say is anything much about the specific changes between May and August 2011. It would be lovely to be able to look at policy changes in April 2011 and see the results in the unemployment figures for August, but without a much more expensive data collection exercise, we will never get that kind of insight.

Incidentally, if you look back into 2009 you get annual changes of 600,000 and upwards - far bigger than the error bars - and even some quarterly changes of over 200,000. So there are times when the changes really are clear and significant, even at short timescales.﻿
Even when people reporting stories know there are margins of error involved, the reporting often isn't great; just look at reports of "movements" in the party standings in opinion polls which often greatly overstate the significance of changes within the margin of error. However, I suspect the much bigger issue in the case of economics statistics such as the unemployment ones is that relatively few people realise they involve any survey data at all.﻿
+David Oser : "Use of mathematics per se does not make economics more 'scientific' and can obfuscate poor underlying explanations or theories"

True. But people sometimes don't realise that mathematics is a necessary, even if not sufficient, condition for economics to be scientific. In practice, to test economic propositions to the degree necessary to determine whether they are valid predictive rules, we do need to make them mathematically rigorous.﻿
Indeed, any empirical subject will need to be 'mathematical' at some point in order to confront hypotheses with the statistical evidence in a reasonably rigorous way.﻿
Hi there. As ever, my specific topical examples are chosen as an excuse to explain a piece of science or stats, in this case, sampling error. However I do think that the media routinely overstate the real-world significance of numbers that are in reality the result of random variation and statistical noise, and that my example was very reasonable. A few quick thoughts over lunch..

You say:


I don't want to dismiss data, I want it clearly explained. Here's what I said: "I don’t know what’s happening to the economy: it’s probably not great. But these specific numbers tell us nothing"

I think that's perfectly sensible. I don’t think all imaginable numerical data on unemployment is uninformative, but the specific numbers quoted on unemployment in this BBC story were indeed uninformative. A quarterly change of 38,000 when the 95% confidence interval is ±87,000, running from -49,000 to 125,000, well, that specific number really is telling you very little indeed, it's highly likely to be due to chance, noise. An annual change of 32,000, ±111,000, well, that's even more likely to be chance. If you put these figures in the context of lots of other numbers of course you can start to build a picture (but then we are vulnerable to cherry picking, and seeing faces in the clouds, unless we have pre-specified ways of combining the data from all those numbers: I think this is a major, wider issue).

But the BBC piece that I hooked my explanation onto did not give this context. So I was surprised (and vaguely disappointed) to see Robert Peston's comment defending the BBC piece, in which he was factually incorrect:!/Peston/status/104876582581190656
"BBC story would have said "may not be a trend" which is what reader needs to know".

Robert Peston cannot have read the BBC piece that he is defending before posting this, because it does not include the caveat he says it does, and so I think his comment is unhelpfully dismissive. The BBC piece did not say "may not be a trend": it would have been great if it did, and it would be great if similar BBC pieces did so in future.

You also say, Tim: "We can’t dismiss all data that fails to pass the (entirely arbitrary) test of statistical significance."

p=0.05 is indeed an arbitrary cut-off for statistical significance, but it’s important not to handwave over what that actually means. When people say statistical significane is arbitrary, what they mean is, if something was 0.055 or 0.045 it would be a mistake to draw too much from it being one side or the other of the 0.05 line in the sand. But this absolutely doesn't mean that wanting any kind of statistical significance at all is arbitrary. What do you estimate the p-value of an annual change of 32,000, ±111,000 would be? I don't think it would be very near anyone's very flexible cut off for significance. Maybe it would be, if you want to do the maths and produce the p-value we can take a view!

Lastly, you and (to a greater extent) various others have suggested that full counts (such as the claimant count) are not amenable to statistical testing, or vulnerable to random variation, because they give numbers for the whole country, not a sample, and so are not subject to sampling error. But this is a mistake. A 1% change in a variable that is very noisy over time, and a 1% change in a historically stable variable, are importantly different phenomena and statistically testable.

In terms of what could be improved:

Obviously I don't want people to cease reporting numbers such as the Labour Force Survey figures. I simply think that they should give numerical and statistical context.

David Smith, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times, seems to say on Twitter that journalists must withold from readers the fact that figures are unreliable and prone to statistical error, simply because if readers were told about this reality, it would undermine the stories.!/dsmitheconomics/status/104868450987552769 "@TimHarford @bengoldacre Touching Ben's discovered statistics we use are imprecise. But can't see "not statistically significant" in stories"!/dsmitheconomics/status/104877576065007616 "bengoldacre Not sure it would inform better. You'd have to apply it to most stories using stats and risk saying: "Don't bother reading.""

This is not my view of readers, I think it understates peoples’ intelligence, and what they want from newspapers. Even if I’m wrong about readers, David Smith's comments still raise concerns about the choices journalists make over what information to give to readers, and what drives it.

I don’t think people are stupid, and I think they deserve access to good quality information that is clearly explained!﻿
I think many economic journalists simply mix up the terms "precision" and "accuracy" :)

These terms have very different meanings, imprecise figures are often stated precisely, implying accuracy!﻿
Is it reasonable [or even possible] to put the numbers differently (and I'm making these up): "there's a 50% chance that unemployment went up last month by more than 10,000", or some other formulation. I know that there's pushback on this type of statement in the context of UK weather forecasting, but I've found it helpful in explaining estimation errors for business cases and it seems to work well enough in the US (at least for weather). The key point is to not quote a single number, to put the distribution in an atomic, non-decomposable form.﻿

Now, in a paper that purports to introduce you very informally to the ﬁeld of science, why has no mention been made any of the sciences themselves, if only that you may know what they are about? We have not spoken of heat, sound, electricity, hydraulics, etc., which are branches of physics, nor of zoology, cytology, embryology, etc., branches of biology, nor chemistry and it’s branches. Why not? Simply because there are no sciences. There is only one science. It makes little diﬀerence what you call it. Call it the science of existence, or the science of the world, or just plain science. It is only very elementary phenomena we can identify as belonging exclusively to one or another of the name-labels that a hundred or so years ago were thought to distinguish one science from another. When we reach phenomena of any complexity—and you need not be told most of the world is very, very complex—we ﬁnd the facts of one name-label mixing with those of another to such an extent as it is mere sophistry to think they should be treated separately.

Suppose we bring together two substances, carbon dioxide and water. Nothing much happens, as you know from your experience with charged water. Bring them together on the leaf of a plant in the presence of chlorophyll, and still nothing much happens. But allow sunlight to fall on the leaf, and these two simple substances will be synthesized into additional plant tissue, cellulose. Here we have light, chemistry and botany all in one reaction.

Consider deep ray therapy where advantage is taken of the fact that malignant tumor cells have three to four times the electrical condenser capacity of benign tumor cells. Here we have electricity, short-wave radiation, and human pathology becoming one problem. Diathermy and radio surgery are other examples of the connection between medicine and what were once called extra-human phenomena.

Consider photopheresis, where a particle of gold or selenium or sulphur suspended in a strong stream of light moving towards the source of the light, even though that be directly above the particle. Thus we establish a liaison between light and that elusive thing, gravitation.

Consider the photolytic cell where an electrode of lead and one of copper oxide are immersed in a solution of lead nitrate. No current ﬂows in the dark, but if light is allowed to strike the inner face of the copper oxide electrode a strong although not a steady current is produced. Here we have chemistry, electricity, and light functioning together. The wedding of biology and chemistry is expressed in the word biochemistry. If you undertake the study of chemistry you will reach something called physical chemistry, which might just as well be called chemical physics. The chlorophyll of plants mentioned a moment ago and the hemoglobin of your blood have very similar chemical structures. Your blood contains the same salts as sea water and in virtually the same proportions, not so much the sea of today as that ancient Cambrian sea that existed before ever there were warm-blooded animals. Do you see that there can be no frontiers within science; that there is, indeed, only one science?

-Technocracy Study Course


-The phenomena involved in the functional operation of a social mechanism are measurable.

-Social change is unidirectional and irreversible.

-Technology is today the only major cause of social change.

-All social theories of yesterday must be discarded.

-Any and all social problems are solvable by the technological application of scientific principles on a Continental scale.


-The first postulate states that the external world actually is. In other words, a chair, a pencil, a city, the mountains, rivers, oceans, continents really do exist. We can at once go to work on them without having to establish their existence.

-The second postulate states that nature is uniform. This means we do not have to flounder about in a world wherein a sack of flour suddenly transforms itself into a fish, and that into an automobile, and that into an oil well. The second postulate is our protection against chaos.

-The third postulate states that there are symbols in the `mind' which stand for events and things in the external world. The total sum of all such symbols in all minds, after eliminating duplicates would be the sum total of that kind of knowledge for us; and the sum total of all things and events meant by these symbols, provided the symbols should ever become complete in number, would constitute the entire physical world. This means, in effect, that the mind itself is uniform. Mathematicians will note that the third postulate establishes a one-to-one correspondence between all that is in our minds and all that is in the external world. A corollary of this is that there is nothing in all the world that has the priori quality of being unknowable. In this paragraph the word `mind' has been used in it's conventional sense.


Any social system whatsoever that effects its distribution of goods and services by a system of trade or commerce based on commodity evaluation effected by means of debt tokens, or money, debit cards, et cetera.

The term Price System must not be confused with such terms as profit system, or capitalist system. The factor of ownership does NOT alter the mechanics of operating a Price System, and it may be added in passing, that unless it be in some remote and primitive community, none other than Price Systems exist at the present time.


From the Greek, meaning a student of the theory of values. Axiology, the theory of values, their unique forms and inter-relationships, as the True, the Beautiful, the Good, contrasted with the scientist, whose proper concern is with quantities, their precise measurement, correlation and control in the interests of knowledge and the service of man.


A methodology for the determination of the most probable based upon an analysis of the facts of the matter.


A fact is a close agreement of a series of observations of the same phenomenon.


1. An advanced industrial society of continental extent in which the supporting economy uses energy units for measurement and control, in place of the monetary values (money) of the Price System.

2. A membership society or a movement advocating adoption of this concept.

3. A derived and corrupt meaning of the word, in wide use, indicating management or rule by specialized experts in place of elected representatives or non-specialists.


"We will never defeat and destroy fascism until we first recognize that its roots are grounded deep in the subsoil of private enterprise, private property and the Price System. It is a difficult thing to make up our minds. But until we do so and decide to establish and install a technological control through a total conscription, nobody in the wide world can foretell the future of even the next six months. This is not communism, nor fascism, nor any other 'ism.' If it must be called an 'ism,' then its true name is 'scientism.' If the American people want to continue living under an intolerable uncertainty, then they will have no one to blame but themselves."

— Ralph Janis﻿
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