3 ms·

Tons of interpretation applied to mere ounces of data. She glosses over the fact that all of the five happiest states are in the sunny south and four of the fiv

Tons of interpretation applied to mere ounces of data. She glosses over the fact that all of the five happiest states are in the sunny south and four of the five least happy states are in the North and, not surprisingly for the Wall Street Journal, concludes that the problem is taxation. In contrast, the New York Times version of this story has the following quote "Americans who described themselves as satisfied tended to live in places where the quality of life was good by most standards — where the sun shone a lot, the air was reasonably clear, housing didn’t leave you busted, traffic wasn’t too fierce and so on."

CWuestefeld 17y ago
If I understood the article right, they controlled for this. I think they used salary differentials to account for the myriad ways that one locale might be better than another. So imagine that person X and person Y both live in state Z. They offer to Y $Q more dollars to move to New York. Because Y was willing to take the deal, we can assume that $Q is enough to make up for the cold weather, etc., in New York. Afterwards if we ask X and Y about their happiness, and X is happier, how can we explain that? The OP offers some theories as to why that might be, and develops some arguments as to why higher taxes are one likely explanation.
- ajross 17y ago
  It's an editorial in a well known anti-tax paper. It's not "correcting" for anything, because it's not doing any science. It's combining some research (without links, so without any way for me to easily tell if it's in-context or not) from disparate sources to make a pretty typical point about "taxes are bad". It only looks like "science" to you because it starts out talking about someone else's paper (and one that says nothing about tax at all, AFAICT).
- jrockway 17y ago
  Because Y was willing to take the deal, we can assume that $Q is enough to make up for the cold weather, etc., in New York. People are not this rational. $Q was enough to make the person say, "hey, maybe I should quit this job I don't really like. I guess I won't really like winter, but I do like this number." Then they get to New York and realize that $Q - $old_salary barely covers the difference in rent. At this point, they are already invested, so they stay. In the end, the relative difference in salary has very little to do with relative differences in happiness.

CWuestefeld 17y ago

If I understood the article right, they controlled for this. I think they used salary differentials to account for the myriad ways that one locale might be better than another. So imagine that person X and person Y both live in state Z. They offer to Y $Q more dollars to move to New York. Because Y was willing to take the deal, we can assume that $Q is enough to make up for the cold weather, etc., in New York. Afterwards if we ask X and Y about their happiness, and X is happier, how can we explain that? The OP offers some theories as to why that might be, and develops some arguments as to why higher taxes are one likely explanation.

ajross 17y ago
It's an editorial in a well known anti-tax paper. It's not "correcting" for anything, because it's not doing any science. It's combining some research (without links, so without any way for me to easily tell if it's in-context or not) from disparate sources to make a pretty typical point about "taxes are bad". It only looks like "science" to you because it starts out talking about someone else's paper (and one that says nothing about tax at all, AFAICT).
jrockway 17y ago
Because Y was willing to take the deal, we can assume that $Q is enough to make up for the cold weather, etc., in New York. People are not this rational. $Q was enough to make the person say, "hey, maybe I should quit this job I don't really like. I guess I won't really like winter, but I do like this number." Then they get to New York and realize that $Q - $old_salary barely covers the difference in rent. At this point, they are already invested, so they stay. In the end, the relative difference in salary has very little to do with relative differences in happiness.