Aah, you'll love this excellent and extremely sassy piece by Louis Ashworth for Alphaville. Extremely on-point meme usage
We talked about the other day Britain's weird productivity stats and the ONS (the poms' statistical agency) reassessment of working hours. #1575536
turns out there were more juicy stuff in there
To create the hours worked denominator for the newfangled productivity statistics, the ONS combines various factors. One of these is annual leave, data for which is derived from the ☢️ Labour Force Survey ☢️
...which is "about as reliable as a breadstick mammal cage." lol, owned.
Seems like Brits take less and less time off, weeeelll below statutory minimum.
but would be huge, if true
this is fascinating! It raises all sorts of questions about how people are working, with potentially significant externalities — is the UK experiencing some kind of long-term shift in working culture that is chaining people to their desks
So the stars geniuses at the ONS get a number they can't make sense of from an obviously unreliable and stupid source, and instead of trying to fix it they just make an adjustment, turning this graph...
, which, admittedly is weird... Brits take less and less paid vacation days (even below the legal minimum...?), into this:
Ah, looks much better.
If that seems fishy to you, it's because it is. They just statistically made the "underreported time off" equal the annual entitlement figure. Sure yeah.
Ashworth's snark again:
The ONS is in effect saying it’s “implausible” that people might not be using their leave, because they’re entitled to it. Without wanting to deploy lazy stereotypes about the public sector… on second thoughts, we can’t finish that sentence without deploying lazy stereotypes about the public sector
"This is a stats agency, right? The basis for these types of views should surely be stats, not vibes."
Amazing 😍
Statistical fuckery” is honestly the perfect title .You can’t just made the numbers look better.
We can sure tryyyyyy!
Depends hugely on how the survey questions are worded.
I can see people saying they "take less time off" because it's easy to work even while on vacation. Not to mention all the gig jobs available.
The title really says it all :)))) The more you dig into the numbers, the stranger the whole productivity story gets.
Questions Around the ONS Adjustment to Working-Hours Data
The recent ONS revision of UK working-hours and productivity data raises an interesting question about how annual leave is being estimated.
The ONS uses Labour Force Survey data when calculating annual leave for its hours-worked estimates. However, the survey data appears to show that workers have been taking less and less time off, at one point implying levels below the statutory holiday entitlement.
That result seems difficult to reconcile with reality, so the ONS has treated the difference as likely under-reporting and adjusted the figures.
The problem is that this adjustment appears to assume that the missing holiday is broadly equivalent to the workers' annual entitlement. In other words, the original survey result is considered unreliable, but the replacement figure is also partly based on an assumption rather than directly observed holiday-taking data.
This matters because annual leave feeds directly into the estimate of hours worked, which in turn affects productivity statistics. A change in the holiday assumption can therefore change the apparent productivity performance of the UK economy.
I'm not saying that the ONS should never adjust survey data. Correcting for known measurement problems is normal in official statistics. The interesting question is whether there is enough independent evidence to justify this particular adjustment.
If the Labour Force Survey is genuinely under-reporting annual leave, it would be useful to see evidence showing the size of that bias and why the chosen correction is appropriate. Otherwise, there is a risk of replacing one questionable measurement with another estimate that simply produces a more plausible-looking series.
The key issue, therefore, isn't that the ONS changed the numbers. It's how confidently we can say that the revised numbers are closer to reality than the original survey results.
Sometimes the spreadsheet creates a better story than reality does.