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#13
Those in work has increased by 15,500 (to 71.7%)
Unemployment down 0.1% to 7.7% - that is 18,000 fewer
Economic inactivity rate down by 83,000
Youth unemployment down by 7,000 (when those in full time education are rightly stripped out, about level if not)
Long term unemployed down by 15,000.
What does any of this mean, when a job can be 0-hours and an increasing proportion of them are short-term contracts;what is this 'in work' other than a statistic?
Turn-over too is an increasing aspect of employment:when the numbers go down, they are left 'stark', when the numbers go up, all of a sudden we hear, over and over, that life is ever 'cyclical'.
Economic Inactivity Rate, this has an eerie ring to it. Has somebody somewhere found a pound, but no-one has lost one?
Youth unemployment will tend to go down as 'youth' turns to 'adulthood', but these will not become long-term unemployed straight away. Is there anything other than the ageing process at work here?
And likewise with this statistic. What proportion of the population is turning 65 over any three-month period?
Who among those that are cheered by these be-numbers has the least interest in the balancing of the books? This fixation with accounting for the up-side only is a large part of what has brought us to where we are today, but while there are poor people to blame (and they are forever with us?) such irrationality is pushed as rationality. More Toon-Town economics.