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Another statistic that's difficult to compare is homelessness. On first glance, New Zealand (0.94%) and Australia (0.48%) top the OECD for rate of homelessness
by toomanybeersies 6y ago
Another statistic that's difficult to compare is homelessness.
On first glance, New Zealand (0.94%) and Australia (0.48%) top the OECD for rate of homelessness, as they include people living in temporary accomodation (sleeping on a couch, motels, etc.) or cars as homeless. Whereas Japan (with the 0.00%) only counts people sleeping rough). Comparing unemployment rates has similar issues.
Comparing these kinds of rates between countries on an absolute basis is largely useless. However, the change in these rates can give insight on how events (political, economic, etc) have changed the demographics and socioeconomic status of countries.
- lostlogin 6y agoComparing stats is fraught. There was a really good thread here on HN about how the US calculates its unemployment rate, it is vastly different to how I naively imagined it was calculated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836422
- gok 6y agoNote that the current calculation is also what's used almost everywhere else in the developed world; the US figure was changed to be more comparable to other countries in the 2000s.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y agoU-3 is used specifically because we have so much historical data - it lets us compare how we're doing now to the great depression, for example, and up until a few decades ago it was fine because all the various unemployment metrics were strongly correlated. Politicians eventually gamed the metric so hard that it's almost worthless now, so economists today mostly use U-6.