America’s April fool: employing people to count the unemployed
United States citizens fill in their census forms on 1 April and it is just as well the ten-yearly statistical exercise is not used to assess employment.
Some 1.2m people are being recruited to conduct this glorified headcount: on the key date, that 1.2m people who would not normally be employed will be working for the US government.
As there are 14m unemployed people in America, recruiting 1.2m people could cut the number of jobless by almost 10 per cent, severely distorting the jobless statistics.
When the UK fills in its census forms in March 2011 people will be asked to say if they are employed, self-employed and whether they employ others. It will ask their job title, demand a job description, the name and address of the employer, what the business does and whether it involves supervising others as well as how we travel to work.
America keeps it simple however. They face just 10 questions (compared with 43 in Britain) including their name, phone number and gender plus (for some reason) both their age and date of birth.
There are also two questions on race and whether they are Hispanic. The only vaguely economic question is whether they own their home, with or without mortgage, rent it or live rent-free.
So a country that could cut its 10 per cent unemployment rate to 9 per cent by recruiting this army of census checkers will know little else about its population other than its total – except that an estimated 3m avoided being counted last time.
The US government will know more about the 1.2m people it recruits than about the 300m or so that it counts. It will know that those 1.2m have driving licences and the use of a vehicle, because that is what it demands in return for “good pay, flexible hours, paid training and expenses”. Many of the recruits will be retired or students as well as the formally unemployed.
Britain will not distort its statistics by taking such large numbers of people off the unemployment register to count how many people have jobs. There will 35,000 census officials. And from March 2010 some 1,300 people to be recruited to work at a dedicated building in Manchester’s Trafford Park for the next two years.
Ironically, this work has been subcontracted to an American company, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin. Whether we’ll be any wiser for asking more questions is a question not asked.
