Tag Archives: statistics

(329) Accouting for reality [CGA report]

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CanadianTire 5 centsWhen it comes to wielding a skill set that defines reality it is usually hard to beat the accountants.  The Certified General Accountants Association of Canada have just shown us ourselves in the form of a new report.  The bacon-and-eggs therein consist of the fact that a third of us merely live from one paycheque to the next.  The cost of living and aspirational consumption is preventing many of us from saving any money at all.

In a word: precarity.

Nothing new really, including the fact this is worrisome and that for most of us this kind of insecurity still seems contrary to the very idea of life here in a prosperous, peaceful, youthful, developed country like this one still is intended to be.

Building nest egg not a high priority for most Canadians cga-canada.org

A third of Canadians living paycheque to paycheque: survey thestar.com

See also: (282) It’s more than poverty

image: Canadian Tire money by Shuki via Wikimedia Commons

(326) What do you know, Joe?

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cibcOne of the top bankruptcy firms in Canada has released its bi-annual customer profile.  Aggregate numbers are blended to create an individual identity, Joe Debtor.  An austere little document that avoids judgement, Who Is Joe Debtor?, provides an interesting snapshot of our public financial health.  J.D. is in his late forties and owes as much as sixty grand when he throws in the towel.  Student loans, illness and divorce helped get him there and so did the credit cards in his wallet.

It is probably safe to attach inadequate wage levels in Canada to an inclination to use credit to prop up Joe’s expectations of life.  The report doesn’t say that explicitly but we can use our common sense on that one when we consider the cost of real estate and maintaining an automobile.  It doesn’t look like Joe simply went hog wild and spent himself into the kind of penury familiar to sailors and gold miners in days of yore.  No, Joe and his fellows in bankruptcy are Canadians with commonplace material aspirations and typical employment lives who have run into financial trouble.  Yes, that means your neighbours, or you, are represented in the report.  The 2013 profile is only a little different from previous editions.  One stand out figure for 2013 is a surge in bankrupt single mothers.  Where that statistic and others will be for 2015 is likely to be in line with previous reports unless there is a shock to the system such as serious upward movement in interest rates, prices or unemployment or a dive in house prices, …or big fat raises for everyone.

Joe Debtor.  Who is he? Who is at risk? 24-page .pdf file via hoyes.com

image: detail of entrance to twentieth-century Toronto bank tower featuring icons of savings and conservation of wealth

(324) National Household Survey

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Ontario_Immigration_PosterCanada’s most recent social survey data became available this week.  There is some concern that government meddling over the last few years will have reduced the general value of the National Household Survey which replaces the long-established long-form census, but the results are, as always, a source of interest to Canadians as a reflection of where the country is at.  In terms of suburban social conditions the major finding of the newest census is the surge of visible minorities and immigrants.  As indicated from anecdotal evidence newcomers to Canada are going directly to suburbs and, often times, suburban poverty.  The roll call of communities hosting ever-growing communities of non-European origins is the roll call of suburban Canada: Burnaby, Surrey, Richmond, Markham, Newmarket, Scarborough, Richmond Hill, Brampton, Mississauga.  Canada has taken on an aggressive policy of recruiting immigrants from all over the world in an effort to boost growth.  How this jibes with wages, job creation and social programs to produce a particular standard of living for newcomers depends very much on one’s personal standpoint.  Virtually all of Canada’s mass media outlets have carried coverage of the growth in numbers of newcomers alongside concerns about the fuzzy science imposed on Statistics Canada’s efforts and methods regarding the data.

National Household Survey In Brief Statistics Canada

Immigrant underclass in GTA fuels simmering frustrations Toronto Star

The Toronto Star also recently mapped the places in Greater Toronto that newcomers go to.  Suburban areas are heavily featured.

Struggling Malton immigrants tell the story of changing Peel Mississauga.com

(322) Oklahoma City, are you OK?

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Map_of_USA_OK_svgWell, it doesn’t seem to take very long until somewhere in North America is the subject of short- to medium-length feature on suburban poverty.  Oklahoma City, OK is the subject of this post of material from KFOR-TV.  Suburban poverty is said to have grown there at rates from over thirty percent to over one hundred percent depending on neighbourhood.  The cost of health care is cited in an anonymous interview as the deciding factor that tipped a once-prosperous couple into foreclosure and deep serious debt.  The problems of the American sun belt economy after a real estate boom see food bank use next to oversized, new-looking houses.  Where did all that oil and gas revenue and all that home equity go?

Suburban poverty on the rise

image: Oklahoma locator map by Wapcaplet via Wikimedia Commons

(320) It’s the austerity, stupid

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scissorsThe blogosphere has been abloom this cruel April with at least one sane, inspiring meme.  The new old new idea is that austerity doesn’t work and, in fact, is an utterly stupid policy for places with low growth, high unemployment, angry demonstrators, declining middle classes, broke governments, aging populations, unpopular wars, shaky currencies and discredited financial systems, which is to say pretty much everywhere.

You need only go to the instruments of the system itself in the United States alone to hear the catchphrase “austerity is stupid” ringing out. No less than the Federal Reserve (cue gurgling sound) or Foreign Affairs online edition (sit up straight when you are reading it, people) have said so with volume and clarity.

While austerity, the bashing of social budgets, defence spending, infrastructure spending, the letting go of civil servants and the privatization of state assets, has been mainly a European story to date, the English-speaking countries are now in the cross hairs.  The political actors and agents looking to knock down the public sector in those countries were in high school during the first great age of neoconservatism under Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney.  Now it looks as if they hope to live up to their ideological parents and go them one better in the administration of noxious budgetary medicines and shock capitalism.  Hopefully the voters and taxpayers will wake up soon and resist austerity, not for ideological reasons, but because there is clear evidence it just doesn’t work, we can’t slash your way out of this mess.

Consider recent work from Canada’s Dennis Rafael at York University or an upcoming effort from Oxford & Stanford University researchers.  A decade of data headed into a new book from the latter is to be called The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills which promises to further unveil the fact that austerity wrecks public health.  Suicide, infectious diseases, depression and tooth decay – you get more of this under austerity.

The path of austerity leads to sickness and death: new research shows government spending cuts have dire health effects. Welcome to malaria outbreaks and a rise in HIV infections.  MSN Money

Almost like cyanide-laced icing on a strychnine-and-bleach birthday cake, austerity was recently identified with arithmetic error and nasty questions of numbers-for-the-sake-of-ideology.  A key positional document of recent modern austerity economics has been found to have missing data and simply be wrong numerically!  A grad student discovered the error.

‘They Said at First That They Hadn’t Made a Spreadsheet Error, When They Had’
Chronicle of Higher Education

Who me? Austerity authors say don’t blame them: the Harvard scholars behind a prominent but error-riddled 2010 paper promoting fiscal discipline aren’t gaining sympathy with their defense.  MSN Money

The suburban poor in North America, and elsewhere, have been living with austere realities already. In these pages we’ve seen how the lack of social services, employment opportunities and transportation aggravates suburban poverty.  How about a counter attack on austerity and suburban poverty with stimulating projects to build better, healthier places and address these specific challenges?

The austerity delusion: why a bad idea won over the west
Mark Blyth at Foreign Affairs

This press release from the Federal Reserve, May 1st 2013 (did someone tell us irony was dead?) says “fiscal policy is restraining economic growth.”  All that Republican rage being poured into budgetary civil war is essentially wrecking recovery.  If the UK and Canada pick up cutback fever they will have the same problem.

Wasting a whole generation of people in Europe is stupid
Russia Times on Spain & Portugal 4:30

image: rusty tailor’s scissors via Wikimedia Commons

(319) UK female unemployment [Study]

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AVROWhen the mortgage bomb blew, the banks began caving in, the governments began bailing out, the Baltic Dry Index nosedived, railway equipment, trucks and airliners were parked all over the place with nothing to carry the Great Recession seemed to hit men hard.  The post-2008 crash was in fact nicknamed a “Mancession” because unemployment in construction and manufacturing was a huge part of it all.  It’s also, apparently, the era of the descent of man.  Now, in the UK at any rate, a study indicates the bad news is catching up with women.  Such as the economy there can be said to be in a recovery, or at least skimming past a so-called triple-dip recession, the new action in job-creation is benefitting women less than it should.

Unemployment among UK women rising to 25-year high, survey finds: almost three times as many women as men have become long-term unemployed since 2010, says Fawcett Society
You can link directly to the report from this guardian.co.uk article

image: woman installing electrical equipment in an aircraft plant in the 1940s via Imperial War Museum - Wikimedia Commons

(315) Honey, was that the phone?

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orange phoneThe Beveridge curve is not something you find at the pub.  Though, when we learned a little about it the other day we found ourselves thinking of that very place.  You see, the Beveridge curve is getting wider, …and that’s bad.  What is the Beveridge curve?  Basically, it’s the gap between the number of jobs being created and the unemployment statistics displayed graphically.  A widening Beveridge curve is a hint at the social disfigurement of worklessness, it speaks volumes about those who have given up bothering to look and suggests a potentially scary skills gap.  The new jobs of the new economy are not getting filled by those most in need of work: people with less education or who have become stigmatized by underemployment and layoffs.  No longer, it would seem, do job openings and reduced unemployment figures move in tandem.

The Beveridge curve is apparently worsening for Canada, Britain and the United States, not behaving as it has in previous years.  In Canada ”skills gap” has become a meme of late with the federal government expressing concern about its impact on future growth, though a BMO report in March seemed to feel the gap is exaggerated.  More evidence that the Great Recession, in case you hadn’t noticed otherwise, really is different.

Columnists and bloggers have picked up a recent field test conducted by a pair of economists probing the depressing nature of the Beveridge curve.  The effort involved sending out some 4800 fake resumes as responses to 600 job postings.  The period of worklessness indicated on the resume determined who would be called back.  The longer that period the less likelihood of a phone call.  Is this the advent of structural unemployment or a cultural mechanism, the stigmatization of the longer term unemployed?  The study provides a living tableau of the Beveridge curve and should have job seekers waiting by their phones reaching for the anti-depressant medication of choice sooner rather than later.

The jobless trap Paul Krugman comments in the New York Times on the Beveridge curve and long term unemployment

The terrifying reality of long-term unemployment: it’s an awful Catch-22, employers won’t hire you if you’ve been out of work more than six months 
The Atlantic

What can we learn by disaggregating the unemployment-vacancy relationship?
13-page .pdf file from Boston Federal Reserve explaining the Beveridge curve with numerous charts and comparing it to the 1970s

Skilled labour gap exaggerated, BMO says: bank disputes federal government claim of yawning skills shortage cbc.ca – see video and link to report

image: HubiB via Wikimedia Commons

(307) Changing numbers in Peel

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Cryptanalytic_BombeThe trend for Peel Region is towards suburban poverty.  Recent numbers collected by an ongoing effort to assess social conditions in Canada at University of Toronto provide the story.  Decline in real incomes, growth in accommodation costs, rising car-related expenses like gas and insurance and a weakened picture for employment have moved many into poverty despite continued population growth and the vast sums invested in the artefacts of sprawl (roads, houses, commercial strips).

Peel seems to be developing a pinched class where once there was a middle class.  Growth in population appears to be stressing social services and draining prosperity.  “In 1980, Peel had just two low-income neighbourhoods. Three decades later, 45 per cent of neighbourhoods were considered low-income or very low-income, nearly the same proportion as in the city of Toronto,” says a recent item on the large, suburban area immediately west of Toronto, linked below.

This must be tough to swallow in a place that prided itself on growth, was a vast construction site for decades, where it seems like the 80s never ended if you were a property speculator, a builder or a municipal bureaucrat.  The elected representatives in the communities making up Peel region tend toward conservatism and have not begun to strategize for the future.  The two large city governments within Peel, Mississauga and Brampton, are at odds with each other regarding the formulas used to determine their share of regional spending.  Mississauga’s mayor, facing a renewed legal approach in regard to conflict of interest with the development industry, is in her nineties now and will leave behind a dysfunctional and underachieving city council when she leaves office shortly.  Brampton presents a very mixed picture as well.

Low crime rates in Peel are appreciated by its residents.  The place is neither Bangladesh nor Detroit.  A big, expensive, impressive plan for light rail transit for Highway 10 is on the books, too.  But…

…a lack of political imagination has helped build the present in Peel Region, as surely as any demographic development.  The faster a relationship is discovered with the former the sooner those demographic developments can be responded to in a meaningful way and bigger problems ameliorated.  The political culture of easy income through rubber stamping development permits won’t be put to rest without pain we suspect.  So, expect more findings like the ones in this article.

Peel changes as poverty moves into middle-class suburbia

photo: Cryptanalysis computer in the 1940s taken by J Brew via Wikimedia Commons

(304) Guns are classy in Toronto

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BulletAcademic and social observer Richard Florida writes in the Star that gun crime in Toronto seems to map to class and cultural environments in a disturbingly close fashion.  If you are in North America’s fourth largest city (the GTA edged out Chicago for that spot in terms of population just recently) try to hang around the green zone, where Florida’s so-called creative class live.  Florida says,  ” …the recent uptick in gun violence in Toronto mirrors the same fault-lines of economic and social disadvantage that exist in U.S. cities.”  In terms of actual numbers of people killed by guns Toronto still remains remarkably safe, having only about a tenth of the firearm homicides of Chicago, according to statistics in the article.  Those in the green part of the map are protected from gun violence because they are educated, economically connected, properly employed people.  Florida points out that because gun violence is something happening to other people somewhere else, many a privileged Torontonian seems quite complacent about it.  Removal of barriers to  “living green,” as it were, is essential to eliminating gun violence and protecting the total quality of life in the city.

…look at all the dots on the map accompanying the piece indicating a gun murder in a suburban location.

Guns and class in Toronto: the vast majority of Toronto’s gun murders since 2000 took place where members of the service and working class live  

image: 1888 photo of a bullet in flight taken by Ernst Mach via Wikimedia Commons

(303) Seventh heaven [UK class survey]

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Mickey D SydneySociologists in the UK have shifted from a three-tier description of society to one with seven levels.  In the garbage can of history now is the basic schema of a working class, middle class and upper class.  Now we have the precariat, emergent service workers, traditional working class persons, new affluent workers, a technical middle class, an established middle class, and the elite.

As expected, the UK media picked this up widely - the same week that cuts were announced to social welfare spending and taxes reduced on the financial sector, of all things!  These new tags are designed to reflect greater diversity of occupation, the decline of manufacturing, the self image, leisure activity and social connections of groups, and the growth in inequality.  The new descriptors were created from data generated by what is said to be the largest social survey in UK history and their like can be discerned in other western countries.  The British Sociological Association presented the data, marshalled via the BBC’s Lab UK effort, Manchester University and the London School of Economics.

The slice to keep your eye on is the precariat.  A label constructed from the words proletariat and precarious which describes those stuck with the low end, low wage, insecure employment available these days.  No longer is the base of the pyramid supported by people engaged in the serious, often oppressive business of making and growing things.  No longer does education guarantee upward mobility and one’s taste in music and recreation don’t indicate wealth accurately.

Precariat is part of the vocabulary of suburban poverty.

The data was published in the journal Sociology:
A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment

British sociologist Guy Standing has analysed and written extensively about the precariat, sounding a warning with his 2011 book Precariat: the New Dangerous Class.  
Who will be a voice for the emerging precariat? Progressives need to find ways to speak to the new global, insecure classes before the far right does

This article from Mr. Standing, on the Policy Network site, sounds a similar alarm as the Guardian item above and calls for a basic income in response to the situation of this group.
The precariat – the new dangerous class

image: by Sardaka via Wikimedia Commons