pumpkinstrokemarrow

Challenged, was moved to inspect the blue book at shorter range. To be precise, table 2.3. I am pleased to find that GDP is still of the order of £1.4 thousand billion a year. So far so good. But then I find that manufacturing is a paltry £150 billion of that. Financial intermediation - which I think includes all those financial services which are commonly supposed to be the economic engine room of the country - does £117 billion. Real estate services do a lot more at £303 billion. Services as a whole maybe four fifths of the total.

But then, developed economies generally do lots of services. We can all afford to be quite keen on shopping, holidays and health. So how does our manufacturing compare with the rest of the world? At this point I sail into very troubled waters. Various people offer international statistics - the US Bureau of the Census, the OECD and various agencies of the UN. There are an awful lot of statistics out there, a lot of them downloadable for free. But what I did not find in the fifteen minutes or so that I gave it, was something on one side of a piece of paper saying how manufacturing in the UK did compared with the rest of the world. Probably not helped in this by the Chinese being a special case from a statistical point of view but a special case which does a great deal of manufacturing. Nor by the fondness of statisticians for publishing indices or rates of growth rather than the levels that I am interested in.

Perhaps I have stumbled on the value that all these chaps working in financial intermediation are adding. They are digging away in all this stuff, producing material that the rest of us stand some chance of understanding. Which they can pass on to the DT or put out as high grade market information under plain cover to their valued customers. For their eyes only.

Or perhaps I have just stubbed my toe on the old truth that it is often very hard to answer what sound like very simple statistical questions. An example from a different place being 'how many people live in the UK'. And with the art being to provide a simple answer which is not too economical with the truth.