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Matching entries from Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Christakis-Fowler update
After I posted on Russ Lyons's criticisms of the work of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler's work on social networks, several people emailed in with links to related articles. (Nobody wants to comment on the blog anymore; all I get...
Why your Klout score is meaningless
Alex Braunstein writes about Klout, a company which measures Twitter/Facebook influence: As a Ph D statistician and search quality engineer, I [Braunstein] know a lot about how to properly measure things. In the past few months I've become an active...
The happiness gene: My bottom line (for now)
I had a couple of email exchanges with Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and James Fowler, two of the authors of the article on the gene that is associated with life satisfaction which we blogged the other day. (Bruno Frey, the third...
"Discovered: the genetic secret of a happy life"
I took the above headline from a news article in the (London) Independent by Jeremy Laurance reporting a study by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, James Fowler, and Bruno Frey that reportedly just appeared in the Journal of Human Genetics. One of...
Different attitudes about parenting, possibly deriving from different attitudes about self
Tyler Cowen discusses his and Bryan Caplan's reaction to that notorious book by Amy Chua, the Yale law professor who boasts of screaming at her children, calling them "garbage," not letting them go to the bathroom when they were studying...
"Threshold earners" and economic inequality
Reihan Salam discusses a theory of Tyler Cowen regarding "threshold earners," a sort of upscale version of a slacker. Here's Cowen: A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages...
Age and happiness: The pattern isn't as clear as you might think
A couple people pointed me to this recent news article which discusses "why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older." Here's the story: When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things...
Is parenting a form of addiction?
The last time we encountered Slate columnist Shankar Vedantam was when he puzzled over why slightly more than half of voters planned to vote for Republican candidates, given that polls show that Americans dislike the Republican Party even more than...
The mystery of the U-shaped relationship between happiness and age
For awhile I've been curious (see also here) about the U-shaped relation between happiness and age (with people least happy, on average, in their forties, and happier before and after). But when I tried to demonstrate it to me intro...
Further thoughts on happiness and life satisfaction research
As part of my continuing research project with Grazia and Roberto, I've been reading papers on happiness and life satisfaction research. I'll share with you my thoughts on some of the published work in this area....
Economic Disparities and Life Satisfaction in European Regions
Grazia Pittau, Roberto Zelli, and I came out with a paper investigating the role of economic variables in predicting regional disparities in reported life satisfaction of European Union citizens. We use multilevel modeling to explicitly account for the hierarchical nature...
Of psychiatrists and statisticians
Sanjay Srivastava writes: Below are the names of some psychological disorders. For each one, choose one of the following: A. This is under formal consideration to be included as a new disorder in the DSM-5. B. Somebody out there has...
The dentist and the statistician
Kaiser reports his conversation with his dentist: Dentist: You need a deep cleaning. Statistician: I don't believe in deep cleaning. Dentist: I only manage to clean the exposed part of the teeth. In your X-ray, we can see tartar buildup...
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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