The protesters planning on gathering outside the London Stock Exchange on Saturday may feel that the statisticians are on their side, after a week where the social impacts of the economic downturn were starkly in evidence.
Business confidence and economic indicators have pointed towards at best a stagnation of the UK economy, with a growing chance of recession. At the Economist Intelligence Unit, Neil Prothero puts the likelihood at “50-50”. Retail sales, released on Tuesday, were also weakened by good weather and price inflation in staples.
However, more compelling are new insights into how the state of the economy - both before and after the 2009 recession - has affected households. It looks as though while economists and investors obsess over the distinction between 0.2 and 0.1 per cent gross domestic product (GDP) growth, the real people that live inside the macro models are suffering.
The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed on Wednesday that UK unemployment climbed to nearly 2.6 million people, close to a million of whom are 18-24 years old. Many analysts believe that the total is likely to grow, as businesses trim workforces and hold back on hiring graduates and apprentices.
The experience of previous recessions show that cohorts of long-term unemployed young people often spend their entire careers struggling to fully integrate with the workforce. Some degree of “scarring” now seems an inevitability, given the persistent inability of the public or private sector to find solutions to an issue that was growing even before the recession.
The coalition government’s austerity measures have led to cancelled youth and employment programmes, such as the Education Maintenance Allowance and Future Jobs Fund, which experts say could have helped to mitigate those scarring effects.
Adding to this is a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, released on Tuesday, showing that spending cuts and the sharpest fall in incomes since the 1980s could contribute to a 40 per cent increase in the number of adults living in poverty in the UK.
High inflation - currently at around 4.5 per cent and expected to rise to almost 5 per cent - and anaemic growth in earnings will see real median household income to fall below its 2009/10 level and remain there for at least the next four or five years.
Wholesale energy prices have risen by 40 per cent in the past year, and rents are increasingly out of the price range of families - Shelter reported on Thursday that average families were being priced out in 55 per cent of local authorities. Last week’s Tesco figures showed that households were cutting spend on even basic groceries.
In isolation these figures look bad, but combined they could show that the UK economy is approaching a feedback loop, where pre-existing trends towards youth unemployment overlap with investment and hiring freezes in the corporate sector, and combine with a spiralling cost of accommodation, food and energy. In that environment, spending slows, causing yet another drag on the economy, further damaging growth and potentially pushing the country into a depression.
A lot can be attributed to external factors - analysts are saying that the eurozone debt crisis is rumbling towards an endgame - but the fact that several of these trends were in place before 2008-9 demonstrate that concerted domestic action is going to be needed.
Blaming domestic crises on Europe is a tried-and-tested defence, and confidence in the survival of the euro zone is alarmingly fragile. However, with think tanks and the media now routinely linking the real-world woes to the UK’s austerity package, “Brussels did it” is looking like a weaker excuse.