Back in 2011, I commented on the failure to predict the demand for teachers in this country - see reference 1. So I was not impressed this morning, three years later, to read that we are just as bad at predicting & managing the demand for nurses, which one might have thought was rather easier, with so much of the demand arising from us seniors who have been here for ages. The demand side is steady, even if the supply side is a bit wobbly.
According to the Guardian, it is not all down to the statisticians this time, rather that some part of the present acute shortage of home grown nurses is down to the closing down or damping down of a whole lot of nurse training capability a few years ago, presumably as part of driving down government expenditure. When we will ever learn that short term gain is not always long term gain?
Perhaps time to remind those who believe that market forces are the panacea for all our woes of the pig cycle, the phenomenon well known to students of economics whereby the price of pig moves on a stately sine wave, year after year. All to do with lags in the system. One can only suppose that all those economists had forgotten this part of their lesson by the time they made it to Tory Central Office, where the market has the authority that used to be accorded to the Bible.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=limitations+of+statistics.
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