Over the last 30 years, twice as many Britons are earning less than the median wage than before 1977.
And please do note, this is after an earlier error was pointed out to him and this is his correction.
Over the last 30 years, twice as many Britons are earning less than the median wage than before 1977.
And please do note, this is after an earlier error was pointed out to him and this is his correction.
And in other news, IQ has boomed since the abolition of lead in petrol!
Blue Eyes: IQ is normalised to a particular time, so that comparison is actually valid.
Reading Sunny Hundal makes me wonder whether we really did remove the lead from petrol.
Maybe after his school milk was stolen his mother made a nutritious PbO paint broth to replace it.
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.
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.
Unity, this post is about the definition of the word median.
@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’.
This paper shows UK total industries employment was 24.6 million in 1979, 26.7 million in 2010. So the idea that the workforce has doubled (even allowing for unemployment/discouraged etc) is unlikely.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/social-trends-rd/social-trends/social-trends-41/social-trends-41—labour-market.pdf
If it was the proportion of the population that is earningless than 1/3 below median, this would make more sense.
@FlatEric “the pendant in me must . . .”
Must hang, I suppose. Because, you know, that’s what pendants do.
Just being a pedant.
Sorry.
Haha, everyone point and laugh at the new kid above me.
Oh don’t be mean.
It does indeed hang. It also sways gently from side to side. My big, swinging… pendant.
No, you don’t laugh at the newbie, you let them into the in-joke. Do a search for “Polly Tim Pendant”.
Or even point him at the original. About halfway down John. Around here, it’s been “pendant” ever since. It pre-dated my time on this site so it confused me too for a while. Welcome to the club 🙂
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/may/19/post104
He probably spent too much time watching TV rather than doing his maths homework. See the next post.