evidence · twenty years without convergence

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Open data, followed all the way down to one person inside it.

Every piece here starts with a public dataset and ends with a story. The numbers can be checked: any figure set in mono opens its own evidence in a column to the right, so you never have to leave the sentence you are reading to find out whether it is true.

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evidence · twenty years without convergence

Theil’s T on the 34 provincial minimum wages, year by year. It is an entropy measure and scale-free, which is what allows 2002 and 2022 to be compared without deflating anything. 2021 is omitted.

year	n	Theil T	CV	highest ÷ lowest
2002	30	0.01982	0.2096	2.41×
2003	30	0.01646	0.1888	2.31×
2004	30	0.01537	0.1811	2.17×
2005	31	0.01452	0.1743	2.09×
2006	33	0.01747	0.1907	2.11×
2007	33	0.01675	0.1878	2.20×
2008	33	0.01740	0.1919	2.21×
2009	33	0.01741	0.1918	2.13×
2010	33	0.01599	0.1837	2.09×
2011	33	0.01756	0.1922	2.09×
2012	33	0.01845	0.1967	2.13×
2013	33	0.02484	0.2301	2.65×
2014	33	0.02345	0.2205	2.68×
2015	34	0.02605	0.2276	2.97×
2016	34	0.02681	0.2292	3.41×
2017	34	0.02114	0.2092	2.51×
2018	34	0.02078	0.2073	2.51×
2019	34	0.02078	0.2073	2.51×
2020	34	0.02063	0.2062	2.51×
2022	34	0.02086	0.2100	2.56×

0.01982 to 0.02086 across 20 years. Provincial minimum wages have not converged, and have not diverged either.

and the order of provinces barely changes

ρ(people per wage in 2015, in 2022): +0.9199
r, the same pair: +0.9375
provinces compared: 34

province	2015	2022	change
JAWA TENGAH	3.06	4.13	+1.08
MALUKU UTARA	4.58	5.56	+0.98
JAWA TIMUR	3.28	4.10	+0.83
BANTEN	4.75	4.38	−0.37
KALIMANTAN UTARA	4.26	3.90	−0.36
KEP. BANGKA BELITUNG	4.30	4.07	−0.22

The three biggest gains and the three biggest losses over 7 years. Even the movers move by about one person.

evidence · twenty years without convergence — kodata