In the old days, shamans smoked or ate herbs to put their own gloss on the depressing realities of their times. In today’s more materialistic age, the statistician – who uses his felicity for numbers to weave his own magic to interpret his own reality at the call of the government of the day – is the modern world’s answer to that ancient profession. Just as dinosaurs became birds. Let us take one example. The high priests of Statistics Mauritius (a department of the Finance Ministry) tell us that we are close to full employment (a 6% unemployment rate) with only 6.7 per cent of Mauritians officially unemployed. How do they come about this revelation?

With a very generous definition, of course: if you have been paid for just one hour of work in a week, as far as they are concerned, you are counted in the gilded ranks of the employed. No one believes this mumbo-jumbo of course: the apparently fully-employed populace still clamours for jobs. Political parties keep promising more jobs (in a nearly fully-employed nation, a bit like promising more water for Venice!). In a nearly-fully employed society, labour shortages should mean skyrocketing wages but, instead, we see businesses loathe to raising salaries and the government stepping in to set a minimum wage to try to halt plummeting real wages. Without adequate job creation, people turn to other sources of income such as crime and drug peddling. Apparently, the only people falling under the spell are the magicians themselves, as Statistics Mauritius continues to dutifully churn out the rubbish every few months. The truth is, no one really knows what the job situation is really like and, by all indications, it is not good.

But the magic does not stop there. To measure job creation within a sector too, our modern shamans employ some clever tricks. Take the ICT sector as an example: the number of people counted as employed in the sector is based on firms that hire 10 or more staff. Now let’s do a mental exercise: suppose an ICT company has nine employees in 2017. It does not show up in the numbers.

But in 2018, it simply hires one more guy to bring its total staff number to 10. Suddenly, the firm is counted by Statistics Mauritius as are all its employees. A mere mortal reading Statistics Mauritius will be told by Statistics Mauritius that between 2017 and 2018, 10 new jobs were created in the ICT sector whereas, in reality, only one more job was added that year. These subtleties of fact will be glossed over by the statisticians at the Finance Ministry and ignored by government who will never let anything as exotic as facts get in the way of a good job-creation story. So why doesn’t the opposition call out this trickery? Simple: in their own turn as chiefs, they did, and will, themselves need the service of the shamans.

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