Saturday, August 20, 2011
Mistakes will happen
The Straight Statistics website led me to an interesting account by specialist commentator Brian Green on how the wrong numbers for construction output came to be published last week.
Somebody slipped up & added the wrong three months to get the quarterly figure – easily done, I know from experience – but the error wasn’t spotted until ‘a couple of minutes’ after the Press Office pressed the Send button to release the figures to a waiting world.
Which leaves unanswered the question of how long that was after the error was made. Have the pressures grown so intense that there is now no gap at all between the figures coming hot off the calculator or spreadsheet?
Brian Green criticises reporters & analysts who (unlike him) commented on the figures as they stood; in other words it is not just the producers of the figures who should always remember that IF A FIGURE LOOKS INTERESTING IT’S PROBABLY WRONG.
He also criticises ONS for making things worse by taking all morning to put out a correction.
We can only wait for the results of the enquiry to find out why that should have been so, but my guess is that panic made everybody want to check & double check every single figure – just in case. We should also remember that politicians & policemen are not the only ones who go on holiday at this time of year so these decisions may have been being taken by relatively inexperienced heads.
