Tuesday 12 March 2013

Lowest common dominatrices

So there are yet more numbers games being played in the 3-card-monte of economic development. It's funny just how sterile it all becomes when real numbers are eliminated: 20% will hire, 5% will lay-off and 75% will do nothing.

While it looks good on paper that 15% increased jobs are the net balance of this meaningless equation, it is decidedly worthless data because we are not told if 20% of 1900 companies will hire 1 person or 20 people nor if 5% plan to terminate 1 or 20 people. Think about it for a second, if 380 companies are hiring 1 person while 95 companies are terminating 20 employees the total new jobs are -1520, while if those hiring are going to take on 20 new employees while those terminating will do away with only one there are 7505 new jobs... That's a 9025 person gap and I am just making random well-rounded numbers. Even taking things at a 1:1 ratio a whopping 285 jobs are created in a country of 34.5 million people. When stacked against the absurdly false 'reported unemployment rate' of 7% there are 2,415,000 unemployed people in Canada, which none of my imaginary numbers even dent more than 0.31%.

Why are real numbers not used? My best guess is that the real numbers are too scary, since my worst case scenario only increases unemployment by 0.06294% which would not actually change the stated 7%. Not that 7% means much either since I might not actually exist in that numbers game they like to play. Here's how the game works: we can see the employment rate of 2011 was 61.8% while 2011's unemployment rate was 7.5%, this leaves 31.2% unaccounted for, we don't know if they are full-time students, which should remove them from the totals used in counting the actual employment rate, but doesn't, and people who have had to take part-time employment just to survive are not counted as unemployed or underemployed. The fact that it's all boiled down to percentages dehumanizes the issue even further since we are talking about 7 in 100 people instead of 2.4 million people. For perspective Wikipedia claims the population of Toronto in 2011 was 2.6 million people.

And don't even get me started on how impossible this has been for me. Because instead of rising 31.91% since 1999, my salary has dropped by 29.1% (by 2012) for a difference of 61.01%!!! Yes last year I made 38.99% of the salary I was making 14 years ago once inflation is factored in... And those are using the government inflation numbers which often don't include pricing on volatile items like: foods that were grown in the ground or ENERGY/OIL, which in my city, gas was 63.0 cents a liter on average in 1999 compared with 2012 which was somewhere around $1.35, for an increase of 114.28% (or 82.37% higher than inflation).

Why do we spend money to obtain such useless statistics instead of spending it on things that seem far more urgent, or things that should have already been planned for?

-DIrtyKID©

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