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Sunny and statistics

Over the last 30 years, twice as many Britons are earning less than the median wage than before 1977.

Facepalm.

And please do note, this is after an earlier error was pointed out to him and this is his correction.

15 thoughts on “Sunny and statistics”

  1. Maybe after his school milk was stolen his mother made a nutritious PbO paint broth to replace it.

  2. Well, as Tim notes over at LC, the actual statistic is garbled, and was originally “earning less than 1/3 below median”.

    The problem I have with this is that if this statistic means what it is supposed to, i.e. that wages at the lower end have been depressed, I really don’t see how the Left can avoid addressing the issue that the most likely cause would be the introduction of increased competition in unskilled labour from mass immigration. A policy of which they are rather fond.

  3. Before anyone gets too smug, has anyone bothered to check whether the total size of the UK labour market has doubled since 1977?

    I doubt that it has, even allowing for population growth and the increasing number of women in the workforce who would previously have been economically inactive, but such a doubling in size would make Sunny’s claim literally true, in terms of raw numbers, if still largely meaningless.

  4. @Blue Eyes. Yes, but Unity is right. As the proportion of UK workers earning less than the median wage will always be 50 percent, the only way Sunny’s statistic could be right is if (a) by number he means absolute number and (b) that number has doubled. If this were true of course the number earning MORE than the median would have doubled, too.

    Obviously, neither is true – Sunny’s just a statistical illiterate. But the pendant in me must support Unity’s identification of the technical possibility, which is indeed related to the definition of ‘median’.

  5. @FlatEric “the pendant in me must . . .”

    Must hang, I suppose. Because, you know, that’s what pendants do.

    Just being a pedant.

    Sorry.

  6. Oh don’t be mean.

    It does indeed hang. It also sways gently from side to side. My big, swinging… pendant.

  7. tory boys never grow up

    He probably spent too much time watching TV rather than doing his maths homework. See the next post.

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