oooh, oooooops:
This is kind of an old observation: labor hours go down and average productivity up -- not because we efficiency-rationalized out some work, but because those dropping out of the labor force first tend to be the least productive ones... or, in this case the more productive and vacation-prone ones #1449095
Yeah, it's a little bit of a weird implication: re-estimates show fewer hours worked, which with constant aggregate GDP yields higher productivity... but again: fewer hours worked. Great for individual welfare, not great for aggregate fiscal/demographic/retirement stuff considerations
"This is, basically, good news: Britain might not actually have had the (relative) productivity crisis that has launched a thousand think-pieces"
The answer to the productivity puzzle of the last decade-plus was... "we simply weren't measuring good."
There were three big problems the stats agency’s ‘direct approach’ based on the employment survey was producing:
- “people can find it hard to recall their actual hours worked and may lean on their usual or contracted hours to shape their answer”
- “this can be especially true if the individual responding for the household is answering [for] other household members”
- Missing values aren't random/easily extrapolated:
“the LFS is a survey people reply to in several waves. When people miss out data or don’t reply to a follow-up we often impute a value from their previous responses. However, if the individual went on holiday and didn’t respond to the survey, rather than impute their responses (showing them working the same as usual), we needed to record a lower number to reflect they are away from work.
Thus:
The takeaway seems to be that people, for one reason or another, tend to overstate how much they work. And because productivity is roughly output-divided-by-hours-worked, that makes the productivity figures look worse.
lol, epic conclusion:
The new approach will kick in later this year. We get (hopefully) better data, Britons still get their holidays. Whether output figures ought to be retroactively adjusted for all the time people wasted talking about the UK being an international productivity laggard over the past two decades is unclear.
What if all the uncertainty in economics is just measuring bad?
What if all the uncertainty in science as a whole is just measuring bad?
What if uncertainty is just measuring...
Whatever the case, I have always been pretty skeptical of the data points declared via mass survey. Surveys have got to be incredibly blunt instruments.
You might be interested in aleatoric vs epistemic uncertainty
https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/Real_World/ale_epi.html
Selection probably has the highest ratio of explanatory power to politeness to say in public. Haha
The funny part is that the productivity problem may have just been bad data all along. Turns out the numbers can tell a very different story.