a day ago
Caller ID is Destroying Our Understanding of the Jobs Market
The UK's Office for National Statistics used to knock on doors and ask people if they were employed, as a traditional way of compiling the country's labor market data.
But when Covid-19 forced social distancing in 2020, door-knocking was out. At one point during the pandemic, the survey was reliant on how many phone numbers it could find for a representative sample — and also on people actually answering their mobile phones when an unknown number called. Only a quarter of Britons say they answer such calls, with most wary of scams. Fewer that half of UK households have a landline, and those numbers can be difficult to find.
