Statistics

It’s the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice this week, so perhaps it’s the passionate letter from Darcy to Elizabeth that’s inspired such an enthusiastic burst of letter-writing from Conservative MPs complaining about stories in the press today. Earlier, we had Jake Berry complaining to the BBC, and now there are more. Sadly, the latest missives I’ve got hold of from Harriett Baldwin don’t contain declarations of love, or any insults for the recipient’s mother: instead, Baldwin is angry about an article by Ed Miliband in today’s Sun. Plugging his party’s policy for every big firm receiving a government contract to train young people, the Labour leader writes:

David Cameron’s taunt at Ed Miliband yesterday during Prime Minister’s questions that the ‘good news will keep coming’ was taken by some as a hint at today’s GDP figures, which the PM has early access to. Now the chair of the UK Statistics Authority Andrew Dilnot has written to Cameron to rebuke him for the line. The letter, which you can read in full here, says: ‘The Pre-Release Access to Official Statistics Order 2008 states that recipients of pre-release access must not disclose ‘any suggestion of the size or direction of any trend’ indicated by the statistic to which the recipient has been given such access. It is clear from

GDP per head is still 7 per cent below its pre-recession peak. That’s one of the sober reminders of the weakness of our recovery in a new ONS report, released as part of its National Well-being project. In fact, GDP per head fell by 7 per cent from 2008 Q1 to the recession’s trough in 2009 Q2 — and has recovered by 0.0 per cent since. That is, the 2.4 per cent recovery in GDP up to 2012 Q2 (which still leaves us 4.1 per cent below our pre-recession level) has not been enough to outweigh population growth. The GDP index has risen, but only thanks to Britain’s ever-rising headcount.

With apologies to his Royal Highness, the most popular boy’s name isn’t Harry –  in spite of what you will have read in the papers this week. It’s Mohammed, under various spellings. The Guardian hasn’t even worked this out, in spite of its pretty data table. Table 6 on the ONS results shows: some 8,018 baby Mohammeds came kicking and screaming into the world last year, well clear of Harry (7,523) and Oliver (7,007) Harry had his turn, and John was the most popular name for decades. We are now living in the age of Mohammed, a name that has been growing (on average) for 5 per cent a year. Here’s the

‘If you treasure it, measure it.’ So Gus O’Donnell said when addressing the All Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics in November. Well, the government has decided it treasures our well-being, and so is determined to measure it. It’s an incredibly tricky task — as I’ve noted before — but it’s a significant step forward that the Office for National Statistics has at least begun to try, and has finally started collecting a wealth of well-being data. In April, the ONS began asking people four questions to measure their subjective well-being on a scale of one to ten: Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? Overall, to what extent do you feel