March 16, 2012

Blink, and you’ll miss it

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It’s not often that you see a special interest group make a claim about the economic impact of their chosen problem and think “I never imagined it could be so small”.

Today is, apparently, World Sleep Day, and we have a problem

A quarter of New Zealanders have a chronic sleep problem, according to the World Association of Sleep Medicine.

 That’s 15% with insomnia and `up to’ 9% with sleep apnea.  The  sleep docs go on to say

Studies by the World Association of Sleep Medicine show sleep disorders cost New Zealand at least 40 million dollars a year in lost productivity

A quarter of (working-age) New Zealanders is a bit under a million people, so that’s an average of about a buck a week, or about five minutes per sufferer per week at minimum wage.   Can lack of sleep really be that unimportant economically, or has someone dropped a decimal place somewhere?

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Luis Apiolaza

    Can lack of sleep really be that unimportant economically, or has someone dropped a decimal place somewhere?
    Do not encourage them, please.

    Better discourage them using copyright math, so one song is worth USD 150,000, roughly NZD 182,000 today. So sleep disorders for the whole country are worth ~220 mp3 songs. Meh.

    12 years ago