英国卫报:你还在相信统计数据吗?(11)（在线收听）

The privileging of the nation as the natural scale of analysis is one of the inbuilt biases of statistics that years of economic change has eaten away at. Another inbuilt bias that is coming under increasing strain is classification. Part of the job of statisticians is to classify people by putting them into a range of boxes that the statistician has created: employed or unemployed, married or unmarried, pro-Europe or anti-Europe. So long as people can be placed into categories in this way, it becomes possible to discern how far a given classification extends across the population.

把国家作为自然而然的分析尺度而给予其特权是统计的内在偏见之一，多年的经济变化已经消除了这种偏见。另一种承受越来越大压力的内在偏见是“分类”。统计学家的部分工作是将人们分类，将他们放入统计学家创建的一系列框中：就业或失业、已婚或未婚、亲欧或反欧。只要人们可以用这种方式进行分类，就有可能分辨出某一特定分类在人群中的延伸程度。

This can involve somewhat reductive choices. To count as unemployed, for example, a person has to report to a survey that they are involuntarily out of work, even if it may be more complicated than that in reality. Many people move in and out of work all the time, for reasons that might have as much to do with health and family needs as labour market conditions. But thanks to this simplification, it becomes possible to identify the rate of unemployment across the population as a whole.

这可能涉及到一些简化的选择。例如，一个人要被算作失业的话，即便实际情况可能要复杂得多，那么他也必须出具一份不是自愿失业的报告。有很多人总是在就业、失业、就业、失业，原因可能和劳动力市场状况有关，也可能和健康、家庭需求有关。但是，多亏了这种简化才有可能确定整个人口的失业率。

Here's a problem, though. What if many of the defining questions of our age are not answerable in terms of the extent of people encompassed, but the intensity with which people are affected? Unemployment is one example. The fact that Britain got through the Great Recession of 2008-13 without unemployment rising substantially is generally viewed as a positive achievement. But the focus on "unemployment" masked the rise of underemployment, that is, people not getting a sufficient amount of work or being employed at a level below that which they are qualified for. This currently accounts for around 6% of the "employed" labour force. Then there is the rise of the self-employed workforce, where the divide between "employed" and "involuntarily unemployed" makes little sense.

但有一个问题。如果我们这个时代的许多定义性问题不是根据所涉及的人的范围来回答，而是根据人们受到影响的程度来回答，那么怎么办？失业就是一个例子。英国在没有失业率大幅上升的情况下度过了2008-13年的大衰退，人们普遍认为这是一项积极的成就。但对“失业”的关注掩盖了不充分就业的上升，意思就是人们没有得到足够量的工作或者说在低于他们所能胜任的工作水平上工作。这部分人目前约占“就业”劳动力的6%。此外，个体经营的劳动力数量也在增加，在这种情况下，“就业”和“非自愿失业”之间的差别几乎没有意义。

This is not a criticism of bodies such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which does now produce data on underemployment. But so long as politicians continue to deflect criticism by pointing to the unemployment rate, the experiences of those struggling to get enough work or to live on their wages go unrepresented in public debate. It wouldn't be all that surprising if these same people became suspicious of policy experts and the use of statistics in political debate, given the mismatch between what politicians say about the labour market and the lived reality.

这并不是对英国国家统计局(ONS)等机构的批评，虽然它目前确实提供了就业不足的数据。但只要政客们继续用失业率来转移批评，那些努力获得足够工作或靠工资生活的人的经历就不会出现在公开辩论中。考虑到政客们对劳动力市场的说法与现实之间的不匹配，如果这些人对政策专家和政治辩论中统计数据的使用产生怀疑就不足为奇了。