As well as setbacks on the field of battle, one of the main reasons behind Sweden’s retreat from being a great military power in the 17th and 18th centuries was because it was the first country to have a census.
The first Swedish census was held in 1749 and showed the country had a population of 1,764,724. The military high command was shocked, not by how many Swedes there were, but how few.
Back in those days, before real statistics, population sizes were largely guesswork. The Swedes, who in the previous 50 years had gone to war with Russia, Poland, Estonia and Denmark, were regarded as a great military power along the lines of France or Britain.
They fully expected to have a huge population commensurate with their political clout.
When they realised that their population was a modest 1.76 million, the first thing they did after the initial shock subsided was to keep it secret. They knew that the likes of Russia and France had huge populations, but those countries had no idea theirs was so small. They knew straight away that they hadn’t enough people to fight prolonged wars, so better to make peace now before their enemies found out how few Swedes there actually were.
This began the great period of Swedish peace and neutrality which has lasted right up until today.
The Swedes were the first country to embark on what could be called evidence-based policy rather than operating on the feeling or instinct of experts.
Statistics may sometimes be regarded as boring and humdrum, but in fact are a sign of enormous sophistication.
Sophisticated societies measure things accurately, and normally when you base your policies on measured evidence, outcomes are likely to be better.
With this in mind, let’s look at an important piece of statistical evidence presented last week by our own Central Statistics Office on the mindset of the average consumer. Every three months the CSO surveys 18,000 households. The statisticians collate the results and they give us a good snapshot of the types of financial conversations that are being conducted around kitchen tables all over the country.
The latest CSO survey data paints a grim picture of a stalled domestic economy.
Eight out of ten households in Ireland have cut back expenditure in the past year. Some 65 per cent of people are going out less often, two-thirds have cut back on clothes and shoes, and just over one in every two households is spending less this year on groceries than they were last year.
Of course, never far away is the massive mortgage timebomb which is primed to go off all around the country. An estimated 15 per cent of owner-occupied households with a mortgage were unable to make mortgage repayments on time at least once in the previous 12 months due to financial difficulties.
Interestingly, the fact that 19 per cent of all renting households failed to pay rent on time at least once suggests that, despite significant falls since 2006, rents are still too high. This could reflect unrealistic expectations from buy-to-let investors who may be keeping rents high simply to stave off missing their own mortgage payments. If this is the case, it reveals how the debt mountain jaundices all prices in Ireland, even those that might not be directly related.
Two fifths of individuals were concerned about their level of personal debt. Over half of these said that they were currently more concerned than they had been 12 months previously. Only one home in 20 indicated that their level of concern had decreased.
The survey also gives an insight into just how precarious the position of the average person is at the end of the month and the fragility of people’s financial balances.
For example, out of households which had experienced difficulty in managing bills and debts, 47 per cent stated that this financial insecurity was due to falling income, largely due to someone in the home losing their job, their hours being cut or taxes reducing take-home pay.
However, a higher proportion – almost three quarters of all those in difficulty – cited a higher than expected bill or something out of the blue that they hadn’t seen coming.
When you drill a bit deeper into the survey, you see that 90 per cent of those in difficulty mention that a higher utility bill was enough to tip them over. One in three mention a higher school bill or university cost. Here we can see the middle class suffering. These are households that on the outside might appear to be doing fine, but inside they are one small financial shock away from economic chaos.
Now we are into the marrow, because almost a quarter of all adults reported that they had spent some or all of their savings on basic goods and services during the 12 months prior to the survey period. For thousands, the rainy day has arrived.
But things are not the same across the board because, while 30 per cent had reduced the amount being added to their savings, 11 per cent either increased the amount being added to savings, or had kept their stock of savings at the same level, or had actually started to save.
But you know what happens when people start to save and banks aren’t lending? Demand dries up if too many are saving because too few are spending, and without spending there can only be falling income. And, of course, when income is falling, debts as a percentage of this falling income go up. This means we all have to run to stand still. But we can only run for so long.
This survey – the quarterly national household survey – is the type of evidence that our politicians should be looking at rather than listening to the debt service agency that is the troika.
Like the Swedish census of 1749, surveys like this show what is actually happening in the country. This is the power of evidence. The Swedes had a choice; they could have ignored the evidence and listened to the king’s council of experts at the royal court which claimed that Sweden was still a great military power with imperial ambitions. Instead the Swedes listened to the statisticians and considered the actual evidence.
Today in Ireland, the equivalent of the Swedish royal court are the civil servants who obsess about what their counterparts in Brussels or in Frankfurt are thinking. Their concerns are buttressed by the small number of people who are making money out of turning Ireland into a large debt service agency. They high-five each other with a form of manufactured consent, suggesting things are going well, considering.
All the while, the actual statistical evidence screams the opposite.
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I find this quote interesting:
“But things are not the same across the board because, while 30 per cent had reduced the amount being added to their savings, 11 per cent either increased the amount being added to savings, or had kept their stock of savings at the same level, or had actually started to save.”
Two questions:
1) here, you account for 41% of those surveyed (30% and 11%)….what about the other 59%?
2)Within that 11%, what % of them are civil servants or former/retired civil servants? That would be very interesting to know.
Civil Servants, mostly policed and managed by the “old school” bluffer, the department secretaries with nothing more than a brown tongue and an honours degree in Irish. My dealings with “Enterprise” Ireland are revealing a lot about their business acumen. The offer: €150,000 matched funding. The conditions: 10 full time employees by Year 3. Matched funding secured before they invest 50% of the funding, the remaining 50% paid in “traunch’s”. Minimum 10% equity. Vague exit strategy. Another startling fact is that they are VERY reluctant to put anything in writing, and that ultimately the funding must be approved by the… Read more »
about EI – isn’t that just the usual incompetence/cluelessness often found in government? Or is it really something more sinister?
Well now we are in the beginning of the end phase of things.Once a individual,corporation or Govt starts ignoring unwelcome statistics or information that doesnt fit the agenda things start going very quickly downhill.One of the main reasons the Soviet empire fell apart,back when Andropov came into power,the party knew the game was up and they were broke.It simply became a get yours comrades before the ship sinks,but keep the politariat dumb on these matters. Wonder how many Irish civil servants and govt figure heads are trousering everything and anything at the moment as they know this whole EUSSR project… Read more »
These statistics are damning and yet from next month the the banks are intending to go on the rampage with reposessions and all the evidence says their mantra about strategic default is a sham The Government are planning another austerity budget and the only thing that is predictable is that things in this country are going to get much worse It’s worth remembering that the banks bankrupted the country through greed and stupidity and now we own them. They are state owned yet determined to suck the lifeblood from this country aided and abetted by a government without a backbone… Read more »
Watch ‘Surviving Progress’. This film features the opinions of people we all respect: Chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, and J. Craig Venter, the scientist and researcher who made history by sequencing the human genome and producing a living cell with a computer-generated genome. This 80-minute film, which I found on Netflix, melds together the environmental crises, the 2008 financial crash, poverty in developing countries, and the decline and fall of ancient Rome and Babylonia. The ancient empires examples are appropriate because they collapsed due to problems that afflict societies today: over-concentration of wealth at the top, and reckless… Read more »
Very Good article David, now we’re talking!
http://awakenlongford.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/lessons-to-be-learned/
[…] http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2013/08/05/dont-listen-to-the-troika-just-look-at-the-statistics […]
Interesting comments from all.
World view comments from Hugo Salinas Price.
http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2013/8/4_Hugo_Salinas_Price.html
A census is one thing. Asking a naturally coy race about their “circumstances” is completely different. You will get “woe is me” answer by default. The fact that a government agency is doing it does nothing to inspire confidence. Consuming less? Saving more? For a country like Ireland we do not have the domestic market size to make any significant impact on “real” employment. Exports are up up up. that is what pays for economists and other professionals. Like it or not they drive the economy. The new repossession laws are now going to have the effect of forcing bankruptcy.… Read more »
http://www.arabianmoney.net/gold-silver/2013/08/05/what-are-the-unexpected-side-effects-of-qe-now-and-to-come/
The well connected rich get richer and the rest poorer under te inflationary policies of QE to infinity.
Only in a debt based fiat money system where the corruption seeps into and oozes out of every seam and crack in the economy.
when are you going to opt for a solid sound monetary system. Specie beats paper every time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specie
Sweden in the 1600s was a country that generated a large quantity of iron ore, and paper in an economic environment when these were key ingredients to prosperity and power. The Swedes also had a navy, and a sea to protect them from attack. And Sweden was agriculturally self-sufficient. They had military advantages with respect to defence. The Swedes had far more in relation to natural resources, than the Swiss. Yet, the Swedes found out two centuries after the Swiss that is was more intelligent to stay out of the imperial trajectory to exhaustion and hubris. Imagine how prosperous the… Read more »
Hi all,
Back to the knitting of the piece written by the owner of the site: A well written piece David. Trouble is that no one in oficaldom is listening. Frustrating and terrifying isn’t it?
The Swedes in 1750 realised that the policy framework was a disaster. The Irish in 2013 are telling themselves that the policy framework is not a disaster. The state is now morphed into a structure of perpetual gombeenism. It hoovers up oincreasing quantities of the people’s toil, for purposes of controlling the people. Obedience to the madness of the age, Euro-centralization, is the standard by which every policy is to be measured. You only have to look at the BS from Pravda/RTE to see this. The state has gone “gombeen”. And it is running out of control. Most people are… Read more »
The 18th Century was a disaster for a lot of Europe. The Tabellverket (stats office) set up to do the census had the support of a now strong Lutheran clergy (Calvanism is a Northern colder climate effect) to tidy up and unify a country as a Lutheran stronghold. The agenda was control – ALWAYS. As it so happens, less European war (a characteristic of the early 19th Century meant higher population as more males survived. The thing about statistics is that it is about gather information for better control. The famous British nurse Florence Nightingale and her work in statistics… Read more »
“Don’t listen to the Tripe… I recently read that the US has officially introduced a new formula for calculating GDP, this new method overnight increases their official GDP by 3%. Snigger. A good read is “Stagnant Economies, Stunted Lives” “Health and economic data are highly political as they reflect the success or failure of government policies and have real economic consequences to foreign investment and therefore the data is routinely ‘positively’ falsified. Official data serve the administration’s goals and is packaged as public relations propaganda for the receipt of good press internationally. This propaganda is perpetuated by the government and… Read more »
Has any one seen the straw? the camel is been run around in circles been forced to avoid the elusive straw.
7 cent in Brazil was close straw? it might be the buses that will a straw here?
Has any one seen the straw? the camel is been run around in circles been forced to avoid the elusive straw.
7 cent in Brazil was close straw? it might be the buses that will be a straw here?
I can’t help but think when I read the above article it reads like a scathing review of a rent-seeking economy gone bezerk – which is exactly what the economy is now.
Free enterprise system has been destroyed by a parasitical element which if we do not wake-up on will keep going and force feed us all test-tube burgers and poison us to death.
Power…..a little bit at a time!
“9/11 has allowed the government to use fear to get unlimited power. But when you get power, it doesn’t mean you can quickly spring it on everybody, because that shocks and startles them. So you use the power a little bit at a time, and let the people get used to it, and in that way you never meet any opposition.” … Paul Craig Roberts~
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1608852-the-smart-money-is-telling-us-that-housing-is-going-down?source=google_news
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/08.13/wind.html
The Dreadful Summer Wind
James Howard Kunstler
The world is swiftly moving to the dangerous place where nations won’t be able to do business with each other because they don’t trust the institutions that control wealth, which includes central banks, commercial banks, and governments
“To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection – a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end.”
Friedrich Hayek, 1933
——————————————————————–
QE to infinity will only lead to disaster.
The train seats are still very comfortable until the point that the train goes off the rails.
Another essay demonstrating that government stats are not to be trusted
http://news.goldseek.com/GoldSeek/1375456200.php
I find it interesting that the very same people who were cheer leading the banking bail out are the very same people cribbing that they have yet to see an austerity budget. The choice we had in 2008 was simple tackle government overspend through cuts in public spending OR allow the state to take on private banking debt and fund this through cuts in public spending. The money was not there to do both. Take government spending out the economy (childrens allowance, rent allowance, government contracts, FIS, social welfare, mortgage interest relief, etc etc etc )and everything will grind to… Read more »
Kenny tipped for plum job as head of the EU
[…] before our eyes and as a people we are tipping over the brink into the developing national slum. Don’t listen to the troika, just look at the statistics | David McWilliams When you drill a bit deeper into the survey, you see that 90 per cent of those in difficulty […]
After The Battle of Clontalf the O’Brien Clan realising how diminished their clan numbers were retired from fighting so to replenish their herd numbers again.
Have you ever heard of the Murphys fighting ? They were too smart and thus reason why so many proliferate the World.
Has anyone noticed how Quite the collapse of the Irish economy was?
Did you hear that? No!-I did not hear anything ‘that’s what I mean something must be wrong’
A man that tried to walk in to a high street shop is suing Dublin council. The man suffered severe concussive injures and was in intensive care for weeks. The man claims the council set up a booby-trap to entice him to walk into a solid wall. The man claims he had tried to enter his local shop which is now bricked up and that the council had painted it to look like as a busy open shop. The man also claims he now has a fear of shops. A council spokesman quipped that most men have fear of shops… Read more »
Again David, “Demand dries up if too many are saving because too few are spending, and without spending there can only be falling income.” implies that you’re not aware that a loan repayment destroys money.
Have a read of http://sensiblemoney.ie/data/documents/How-Money-Is-Created-And-Destroyed.pdf for more info on how money is destroyed.
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