Minimum wage and unemployment

Thanks to Google for Google Public data. I’ve grabbed some video of Irish-related data sets:

Irish minimum wage growth, relative to other EU nations:

Irish unemployment, seasonally adjusted, under 25 males, 1983 to January 2010.

HICP data, EU countries, all categories. Ireland in blue:

5 thoughts on “Minimum wage and unemployment”

  1. These would be more meaningful if more graphs were included, specifically cost of living, taxation etc. By omitting these other graphs The Story are purveying an unbalanced and misleading position.

  2. Nonsense. The datasets are the datasets are the datasets. It is meaningful in and of itself. We are in no way purveying any balanced or unbalanced, leading or misleading position. If you want to visualise relational data go ahead, we will publish it here. To argue the data itself is biased is itself biased. Data is data is data.

  3. Granted the data is the data. I just wish to point out that looking at data in isolation is rarely helpful. For example if I were to count the number of plankton in the sea I may believe there was no danger to fish stocks but if I try and count fish I can’t find any. I’ve looked for, but can’t find, a visualisation on CPI across the eurozone for the same time period. The best I could find was an article on Eurostat website titled “HICP – all items – annual average inflation rate – [tsieb060]”. This clearly shows that Ireland’s rate of inflation during the period in question was well above average.

  4. Your comment is appreciated cymorg, but if I had made a claim *about* the data it would be another matter. The Google datasets are limited thus far – but I will add in HICP data in a third video.

  5. Data may be value neutral, but there has been a strong ideological argument around comparative minimum wage rates in Ireland and elsewhere which deliberately ignores data in, for instance, the area of social housing provision, private sector rent pricing and tenancy rights, public transport provision etc. In other words, the availability of low cost public/social services which can be availed of by those on minimum wages.

    Data are meaningless without context, and the context – when invoking comparative figures – is increasingly complex. The very act of comparing data from different countries implies that one is comparing like with like, but that is not really the case.

Comments are closed.