(单词翻译:单击)
中英文本
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
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
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
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
词语解释
1.labour market 劳动力市场
In a tight labour market, demand by employers exceeds the available supply of workers.
在劳动力走俏的市场上,雇主的需求超过工人的供应
2.underemployment 不充分就业
Unemployment and underemployment remain vexing issues and a major damper on recovery in consumer confidence and spending, so fixing these problems is a top priority.
失业和就业不足仍是让人头疼的问题,它们是阻碍消费者信心和支出回升的主要因素,因此解决就业问题也就成了当务之急
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