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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.
把國家作為自然而然的分析尺度而給予其特權是統計的內在偏見之一，多年的經濟變化已經消除了這種偏見。另一種承受越來越大壓力的內在偏見是“分類”。統計學家的部分工作是將人們分類，將他們放入統計學家創建的一系列框中：就業或失業、已婚或未婚、親歐或反歐。只要人們可以用這種方式進行分類，就有可能分辨出某一特定分類在人群中的延伸程度。
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.
這可能涉及到一些簡化的選擇。例如，一個人要被算作失業的話，即便實際情況可能要復雜得多，那么他也必須出具一份不是自愿失業的報告。有很多人總是在就業、失業、就業、失業，原因可能和勞動力市場狀況有關，也可能和健康、家庭需求有關。但是，多虧了這種簡化才有可能確定整個人口的失業率。
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.
但有一個問題。如果我們這個時代的許多定義性問題不是根據所涉及的人的范圍來回答，而是根據人們受到影響的程度來回答，那么怎么辦？失業就是一個例子。英國在沒有失業率大幅上升的情況下度過了2008-13年的大衰退，人們普遍認為這是一項積極的成就。但對“失業”的關注掩蓋了不充分就業的上升，意思就是人們沒有得到足夠量的工作或者說在低于他們所能勝任的工作水平上工作。這部分人目前約占“就業”勞動力的6%。此外，個體經營的勞動力數量也在增加，在這種情況下，“就業”和“非自愿失業”之間的差別幾乎沒有意義。
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.
這并不是對英國國家統計局(ONS)等機構的批評，雖然它目前確實提供了就業不足的數據。但只要政客們繼續用失業率來轉移批評，那些努力獲得足夠工作或靠工資生活的人的經歷就不會出現在公開辯論中。考慮到政客們對勞動力市場的說法與現實之間的不匹配，如果這些人對政策專家和政治辯論中統計數據的使用產生懷疑就不足為奇了。
