By far the easiest way to make a political point stick seems to be to use numbers, how much money or how many people being the most effective. What gets lost in these numbers is the vast amount of background and process that determines how these numbers relate to the reality they are meant to describe. The point of all statistics and figures is that they summarise, that is they take a lot of information and make it smaller. How one summarises is the important thing.
This is pretty much where I began my journey into being a researcher. I loved to see stories about my generation (X, supposedly) saying we were all doing really well, making money, having fun. The class system was dead, opportunities were everywhere etc. etc. And not only that, everyone was making money out of a rocketing house market. However, it didn’t add up… How could everyone be getting well paid jobs? Surely some people had to have the bad jobs, not everyone could be making money. I started digging, thinking and writing.
