Government statisticians also revised data for the previous year and found that at year-end there were 266,000 more jobs than had previously been thought.
A new generation of statisticians and designers—often the same person— are working on computer technologies and visual techniques that will depict data at scales and in forms previously unimaginable.
Every month, the government's bean counters, 280 of them, set out to the shops in around 140 places across Britain to collect 180,000 prices of hundreds of goods and services.