Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

by Charles Wheelan

Together, these two stories—rising manufacturing output and falling employment—tell the complete story. Manufacturing in the United States has grown steadily more productive, meaning that factories are producing more output with fewer workers. This is good from a global competitiveness standpoint, for it makes American products more competitive with manufactured goods from low-wage countries. (One way to compete with a firm that can pay workers $2 an hour is to create a manufacturing process so efficient that one worker earning $40 can do twenty times as much.) But there are a lot fewer manufacturing jobs, which is terrible news for the displaced workers who depended on those wages. Since this is a book about statistics and not manufacturing, let’s go back to the main point, which is that the “health” of U.S. manufacturing—something seemingly easy to quantify—depends on how one chooses to define health: output or employment? In this case (and many others), the most complete story comes from including both figures, as the Economist wisely chose to do in its graph.