IT'S ALL RELATIVE
Tim Blair Blog
Is 5.6 percent a low figure, or a high one? Depends. If only 5.6 percent of hamburgers are discovered to contain meat, that’s way low. But if 5.6 percent of teachers are using their students as drug mules in elaborate Asian heroin importing schemes, that’s sort of high.
We’re comparing apples and oranges here. Or junkies and burgers. What if we compare similar or identical figures on the same subject, and from the same source?
Here’s CNN in July 1996, as the Clinton-Dole election approached:
Economists didn't expect June's unemployment rate to be much different from May's, which was an already-low 5.6 percent. But in fact, it did fall -- to 5.3 percent. The unemployment rate hasn't been that low since June 1990.
So 5.6 percent is “already-low”. Now here’s CNN in December 2001:
The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 5.7 percent in November - the highest in six years - as employers cut hundreds of thousands more jobs in response to the first recession in a decade in the world's largest economy.
Can you “jump” to a figure 0.1 percent above that already defined as “low”? More from CNN, this time in March 2002:
The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 5.5 percent in February and businesses added jobs for the first time since last summer, the government said Friday, as the labor market began to recover from a downturn that led to more than a million job cuts in 2001.
The jobless rate fell from 5.6 percent in January as employers added 66,000 jobs to payrolls ...
That should read “fell from an already-low 5.6 percent in January”, surely. In January, CNN’s Mark Gongloff decided that an unemployment rate of 5.7 percent was bad news for Bush:
Though the unemployment rate posted a surprising decline, and many economists believe the job market will improve in 2004, Friday's report probably will keep Fed policy-makers on hold and may put some political pressure on President Bush.
A weak job market could prove tough for President Bush as the November election approaches.
Gongloff repeated his line about Bush’s election chances earlier this month when a familiar number appeared:
The unemployment rate fell to 5.6 percent, the lowest level since January 2002, from 5.7 percent in December.
A weak job market could prove tough for President Bush as the November election approaches.
Why? It didn’t for Clinton. |
