Inferring and Explaining

ChaPter eleVen Statistics Making Sense of the Numbers Data do not give up their secrets easily. Tey must be tortured to confess. —Jeff hopper 1 What Numbers Can Tell Us Here is a chart that seems to say quite a lot. Afer the disastrous recession of 2008, the story about jobs in theUnitedStates seems rosy indeed. Te trend from July 2010 until July 2018 shows a dramatic decline in the national unemploy- ment rate. As I write these words in the summer of 2018, “job openings hit record highs and the unemployment rate dipped to the lowest level in decades.” 2 Ordinarily all thiswould have resulted in higher wages for working men and women and an increase in their standard of living. Tis is not, however, how it feels to many working Americans. Perhaps the following chart gives a more accurate account of what is really going on. fIgure 4. Civilian unemployment rate Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/charts/ employment-situation/civilian-unemployment- rate.htm 95