Chris Giles
speaker
229 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2011
last heard Jan 2015
Chris Giles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
What really matters much more than truth, I think, is fairness.
So for some statistic to be a really good statistic, to tell us something, it has to be both true or nearly true, but more importantly, it has to be fair.
And I think we often care much more about literal truth
than about whether something's fair or not.
We often see politicians, or even newspapers, doing this.
We see them finding things, sort of manipulating things so they are literally true, but give a misleading impression.
And I think that's much worse.
It's a much bigger whopper, actually, than getting something wrong, saying something's not true, because you've been really rather devious if you do that.
You've actually thought, how do I make something true, give an impression of something that is actually not true?
It was hugely misleading because what happened was that the number of full-time jobs from 2008, which was a peak in full-time employment... Just before the recession.
Just before the recession, fell very rapidly.
And then from about 2011, 2012, I actually don't know what the true date is, but I don't think it matters.
From about that sort of time, full-time employment began to rise really quite rapidly, so that in the most recent data, the number of full-time employees is slightly higher than it was yesterday.
Really, to be fair about this, you want to say, yes, the recession hit full time employment very hard.
And for the last three years, it's actually been growing really rather fast.
And we don't know about the number, the proportion of new jobs, which are full time, because we don't have those statistics.
Well, I think this is a really good time to look at other ways that you can make true but unfair claims.
Labour at the moment are saying that the Conservatives are going to cut public spending so hard it's going to take it back to the levels of the 1930s.
A time before there was a National Health Service...
Now, this statistic originally came from the Office for Budget Responsibility, so it has a very fine heritage.
Showing 1–20 of 229 · page 1 of 12
Next →