Notes

What the figures cannot say

The metric pages answer one question each. These are the pieces that do not fit on them: where a dataset breaks, where a definition does not match its own title, and what that changes about the answer.

One piece so far

25 October 2026

Why you cannot compare Eurostat figures across 2021

The European Labour Force Survey was rebuilt in 2021, and almost every series breaks there. Eurostat flags it, but a flag does not stop anyone drawing a line straight through it. What that does to a chart, and why a footnote was not enough.

The rule

When something gets written here

A piece appears here when a dataset does something that its own page cannot fully carry. The metric pages have room for a method section, not for an argument. When the argument is the interesting part, it moves here.

Of the 7 datasets behind this site, 5 carry a series break that the code refuses to measure across. That is the kind of thing worth a piece: it is invisible on the chart, it reverses a conclusion, and almost nobody checks for it.

What does not appear here: anything the data cannot carry. No round-ups of other people's reporting, no predictions, and no sentence with a number in it that was typed by hand. Every figure in every piece is computed from the same files the metric pages use, at build time, so a piece cannot quietly go stale when a source publishes again. The method page lists those files per dataset.