[LINK] This makes me angry.

TKoltai tomk at unwired.com.au
Tue Apr 3 04:39:02 AEST 2012



> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Karl Auer
> Sent: Monday, 2 April 2012 4:20 PM
> To: link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] This makes me angry.
> 
> 
> On Mon, 2012-04-02 at 16:04 +1000, Frank O'Connor wrote:
> > > Each of those persons is likely to have or belong to a 
> family unit. 
> > > If each person is a parent or future parent, that 
> represents (@2.3 
> > > children per family unit) a total of 924,000 persons that are 
> > > directly benefiting from the salaries.
> > 
> > Inaccurate ...
> 
> What I thought was very clever was the inclusion of "future 
> parents", which I suppose means that those future parents' 
> children are included in the number 924,000. And presumably 
> some of their supported partners and spouses coming in from 
> the cold. But why stop there? Surely some of those future 
> parents' children are themselves future parents - and so on 
> to infinity. My God, the mining industry supports billions! Trillions!
> 
> Regards, K.

It wasn't particularly clever, it was based on a known algorithm of
demographic population wave dispersion.
(Which is why statisticians like to count ages in groups of five years -
to capture new trends.)

Our fertility rate over the last year resulted in 335489 babies.
Assuming constant flow, that means about 335K persons enter the work
force, get married have kids, get divorced etc. (across all appropriate
age groups). 
Further as it stands to reason that young men with money in their
pockets on their weekend jaunts to civilisation are much more likely to
get lucky than unemployed  bums; the chances of mining employees being
parents is actually accelerated quite a bit higher than for the rest of
the population. (I came across a formula somewhere, but don't remember
it's credibility, so shan't go looking. I think it was one of those,
"I'm a bored economist, let me see if I can figure out how much
Purchasing Power fathers had at the time of conception." I do remember
thinking at the time.. Damn, it is about the money and not the non
decimal point digit. (errr, small items are often measured in small
numbers.)

The other item you might be interested in is that during times of mining
booms, our population rises almost mirroring GDP PPP % net growth. This
is note worthy because it didnt happen during the dotcom bubble
(Although it did happen during the industrial revolution. Can we deduce
then that blue collar workers generate more pheromones and make the
ladies, "faint"?.

To assist in your statistical cogitations, the Census (2006) concluded
that one person in six (in mining towns) were directly employed in
mining.
Therefore theoretically, the actual number of miners can now be counted
by totalling all mining towns and dividing by six. 

In closing, I do regret to suggest that the mining industry in Australia
could only support millions. I think you got that one slightly wrong.

TomK




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