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The lastest stories and analysis on the Economist job market

I am not a role model

“I am not a role model. I am not paid to be a role model… Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids,” said Charles Barkley in 1993 when advertising a brand of sportswear. Unfortunately, Barkley could do nothing to stop the legion of kiddywinkles who wanted emulate his particular basketball-dunking, moustache-wearing brand of cool. No one chooses to be a role model. It comes with certain positions, such as professional...

The backlash against big data

Once a year, every Googler makes a pilgrimage to MountainView to pay homage to the algorithm. The algorithm has brought joy and happiness to many who have found love or laughed at videos of people falling over or sighed at the cuteness of cats these days. Instagramographers seem to believe that posting a photograph of their lunch is the best way to solve world hunger. Facebookers give a big thumbs-up to sharing every half-formed thought because o...

The Leadership Debate

''It’s not my job to tell people what to do,” said the deputy leader of a political party, illustrating a distinct approach to leadership. In interviews for senior positions, and even entry-level positions if you’re upwardly mobile, you might well be asked to describe your leadership style. You could give a STAR answer (please read on if you’ve never heard of such a thing), but that could be difficult when your experience extends only as far as l...

Computer says you like Roquefort quiche

There was a fun-for-all-the-family mid-1990s sit-com called 2point4 children. It was supposed to be about the average family, which had at the time 2.4 children, but the joke is that there’s no such thing as the average family, or 0.4 of a child – geddit?!? Statisticians are so funny, and so detached from reality! No one actually wants to be average and we all believe that there’s more to us than any single dimension that can be described in numb...

When independence and ideology try to pass in the corridor

What happens when my independent analysis indicates that your independence creates a sub-optimal state of affairs? Depending on how your research is commissioned, results and recommendations could be suppressed if they fail to match a particular doctrine. This is the next chapter in that story: One side proclaims your results are fundamental truth because they happen to match what that side has been saying and doing all along; the other side atta...

The Perils of Economic Forecasting

Imagine the most delicious meal you could ever eat. For starters, it’s Kalamata olive tapenade on garlic ciabatta or mussels roasted in lemon juice and coriander. Then it’s rack of lamb on a bed of puréed sweet potatoes or pan-fried Aberdeen Angus steak or saffron rice with marinated lobster and a fizzy cola-bottle garnish. Yes, sweets are delicious but they’re totally out of place on a dinner plate. This is not an ad for a grocery shop. This is ...

The magical realism of mixed methods

The Big-Endians would have everyone break their boiled egg at the larger end. The Little-Endians would have everyone break their boiled egg at the smaller end. Tweedledum said Tweedledee had spoiled his nice new rattle. There are people whose identity is closely entwined with whether they are a Quant Person or a Qual Person. They will argue long into the night, and long past coherence, that Quant (or Qual) is the one true method and that the othe...

In the madding crowd at a careers fair

Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak would feel right at home visiting a careers fair. They spend their time tending their sheep then bring them to market and seek a buyer. They’ll be hoping to get a good price but rumour has it that there are lots of people in sheep at the moment. If only they’d picked goats. Everyone’s buying goats these days, so some people are even shaving their sheep, putting on horned hairbands and attaching little fake beard...

How opinion polls create the future

Imagine Hugh Grant and Seán Connery are in the same class at school. They have a maths exam in six weeks and whoever gets the higher mark wins a gold star. At the end of the first week, they have a wee class test on which Hugh scores 50 and Seán 28; Hugh spends the next couple of weeks wearing a smug, self-satisfied grin and wondering whom he’ll invite to the Hunt Ball while Seán kicks stones up and down the lane swearing under his breath. In wee...

Why there’s nothing like a good theory: Blonde penalty-takers and controlling the controllables

Stephen Hawking applied his considerable intellect and mastery of theoretical physics to devise a logistic regression model that reveals: bald penalty-takers and blonde penalty-takers are more likely to score, and penalties aimed at either top corner have a better return than anywhere else in the goal. He didn’t include nationality in the model, though, so the hair colour results could be a Northern European effect, and there were no data on whet...

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