The truth behind those high employment figures
Experts at the National Establishment for Researching Knowledge’s Economic Division in Dudley have conducted a thorough analysis of the recent, much-vaunted rise in employment to its highest level since 1971. In a press release yesterday NERK statisticians reported that the main underlying driver of the increase appears to be among the self-employed in the fields of cyberspace and IT, accounting for almost all new ‘jobs’.
“There has been an absolute boom in the numbers of ‘professional’ digital photographers over the last five years,” a spokesman confirmed, “Once people realised that adding the word “photography” to your name on Facebook turned you into Annie Leibovitz there’s been an exponential rise in whacky watermarks and ‘candid-totally-unposed-caught-mid-tog-action’ profile pictures.” NERK research confirms this has had a knock-on benefit to the economy as sales of Adobe Lightroom, replacement Canon lens caps and brass-rubbing crayons have skyrocketed.
That’s not the only factor behind the statistics though, NERK have also revealed a connected if slower uptick in the numbers of ‘journalists’. “While it’s not really possible to just bung ‘writer’ after your name (although it has been tried) we are slowly seeing the burgeoning of a concomitant sector of computer owners who have recently discovered what the lettery button thingy bit next to the mouse mat is. As numbers increase we predict that more such users will decide ‘Well if he can do it…’ and join in until music reviews overtake porn as the most common internet item. As they say, if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of keyboards then you probably won’t notice any difference.”
This trend has yet to feed into the GDP figures as sales of dictionaries, thesauri and grammar primers have seen little impact, although schoolboy war-comic The Victor recently announced higher circulation figures for the fifth year running.
