Reading the following from Monday's New Zealand Herald one could be forgiven for thinking that we have come a long way.

Numbers on the unemployment benefit declined from a postwar peak of 177,000 in 1993 to 17,710 in June last year, but rose almost four-fold since then as the world plunged into recession.

Unemployment is only a tenth of what it had been. Marvellous.

But wait. In 1993 there were 63,700 people on sickness and invalid benefits. Add that to numbers on the unemployment benefit to get 240,700.

Today, add the 140,800 on sickness and invalid benefits to the 60,660 on unemployment benefits to get 201,460.

The number of people who cannot work, for whatever reason, are now looking much closer.

On the plus side one could argue that the picture is still considerably better because the population has risen by 25 percent since 1993. True.
One could also argue that the higher numbers on benefits other than unemployment mean total dependency is worse. How's that?

If we measured dependency in weeks (Sweden manages to) rather than at a point in time, today's statistics are almost certainly worse. That is because people spend much longer on invalid and sickness benefits. That explains, in part, why the social security bill (now nearing $20 billion) continued to rise while numbers on the unemployment benefit plummeted.

The following figures show percentages of total case-load according to the periods spent continuously on that benefit;

Invalid
Less than one year 10.3
Between one and four years 31.0
Between four and ten years 29.9
10 years or more 28.8

Sickness
Less than one year 52.5
Between one and four years 33.5
Between four and ten years 12.4
10 years or more 1.6

Unemployment
Less than one year 88.9
Between one and four years 8.8
Between four and ten years 2.0
10 years or more 0.4

Stays on unemployment benefit are much, much shorter, as would be expected. In the early 1990s stays were comparable, with 79 per cent of recipients reliant for less than one year and 94 per cent reliant for less than two years.

There are people on invalid benefits with medical conditions that make it impossible for them to work. But there is growing international acknowledgement that sickness and invalid benefits (called disability support pension in Australia and incapacity benefit in the UK) are de facto dole payments. Many people gravitated to these benefits over the past 10 to 15 years because of the physical and mental impacts of being long-term unemployed. The fastest growing and major reasons people rely on them are psychological and psychiatric. Hence the OECD estimates that across western countries, only one third of people relying on incapacity benefits are suffering the sorts of 'severe disabilities' that make paid work difficult or impossible. The organisation describes the blow-out in incapacity benefits as the 'medicalisation' of labour market problems.

So make your own mind up. Have we come a long way since 1993? I would argue the negative. And the almost exclusive focus on numbers on the unemployment benefit misses the more serious and enduring problem; the constant growth in number of New Zealanders who rely on a sickness or invalid's benefit.