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Matching entries from Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Women are less happy
Greg Mankiw reports on an article by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers that finds: By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective...
"The Effect of Prayer on God's Attitude Toward Mankind": Unpacking Heckman's joke
James Heckman recently posted this article, which is based on a paper from 1980. (This sort of thing happens; for example, I just published an article based on work from 1986.) Heckman's tongue-in-cheek article begins: This paper uses data available...
"Love by numbers: maths professor's formula for romantic success"
Alex Frankel sent in this: A professor at Oxford University and his team have perfected a model whereby they can calculate whether the relationship will succeed. In a study of 700 couples, Professor James Murray, a maths expert, predicted the...
Comments on comments on "Voting as a rational decision"
After reading our article, "Voting as a rational decision," Mark Thoma asked, If helping other people makes me happy, why would caring about other people be contrary to my own self-interest? This is essentially a question about the meaning of...
Book review: Predictably Irrational
I recently read Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational and wrote down my comments as I read. After the jump, you can read these thoughts....
Happy conservatives and gloomy liberals
This post by Tyler Cowen recounts a debate in which he and another conservative argued that Americans are happy, versus two liberals who argued that Americans are not so happy, which makes me wonder how this happened. It reminds me...
"A typical individual’s well-being reaches its minimum in middle age"
Andrew Oswald sends along this updated version of his paper with Blanchflower on happiness over the life course:...
Happiness over the life course
Grazia passed on this link to a report by Joel Waldfogel: People with higher incomes today report higher levels of happiness than their poorer contemporaries. At the same time, people today are far richer than earlier generations, but they're not...
Politics and economic perspectives, or, Were people better off in the middle ages than they are now?
G. K. Chesterton writes, at the end of his celebrated book on George Bernard Shaw: I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look...
Happiness, children, and the difficulties of trying to answer Why-type questions
Wil Wilkinson points to an interesting article by Nicholas Eberstadt (and adds some comments of his own) on the topic of the high birth rates in the United States compared to Europe. Wilkinson attributes the difference to Americans' higher average...
Happiness and the Human Development Index: The Paradox of Australia
This paper by David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald (from the Australian Economic Review in 2005) looks interesting. I'm interested in happiness (who isn't?) but this paper particularly interests me because it addresses a special case of the general statistical problem...
Diversity in learning
Once I figure out how to do it, I'll be reorganizing the list of links and adding Seth's blog, but, in the meantime, here's a fascinating article on diversity in learning, where Seth describes a class assignment where he let...
More data on happiness in different countries
Maybe people in India aren't so happy as we thought. The British Psychological Society Research Digest points to this press release: Adrian White . . . analysed data published by UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the...
"Happiness" from economic and psychological perspectives
In a comment on this entry, Thom writes, I'm not convinced that what we call happiness is a single thing. We could probably divide it into (at least) two concepts - local happiness "this instant" and general happiness. I think...
Immigration and relative happiness
Steven Levitt points to a report by Kate Holton comparing self-reported happiness levels in different countries. Holton wrote: Young people in developing nations are at least twice as likely to feel happy about their lives than their richer counterparts, a...
Sweden is not Finland
I came across this: While some Scandinavian countries are known to have high levels of suicide, many of them – including Sweden, Finland and Iceland – ranked in the top 10 for happiness. White believes that the suicide rates have...
Money and happiness, or, a little bit of mental accounting would be good for me
In a comment to this entry on Gardner and Oswald's finding that people who won between £1000 and £120,000 in the lottery were happier than people in two control groups, Tony Vallencourt writes, Daniel Kahneman, Alan Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert...
Questions about Futarchy
One of the people I met in my visit to George Mason University was Robin Hanson. At lunch we had a lively conversation about democracy--Hanson thinks it's overrated! When I (innocently) told him that representative democracy seemed better than the...
Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Bill Gates
In the 1990s, three popular topics of conversation went along the lines of, "Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever," "Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer ever," and "Bill Gates is the richest guy ever." I recall a sort...
Learning from self-experimentation
Seth Roberts is a professor of psychology at Berkeley who has used self-experimentation to generate and study hypotheses about sleep, mood, and nutrition. He wrote an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences describing ten of his self-experiments. Some of his...
Thoughts on Eric Johnson's talk
Eric Johnson (a psychologist at the Columbia Business School) spoke today at the Decision Sciences seminar. A fascinating talk His topic was "decisions as memory" (maybe i'm getting the exact words wrong here), and the key idea was that, in...
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