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Incorrect title. Correct title would have been: workers with a better education tend to works jobs with shorter hours. But even that is possibly misleading. B

by swombat 17y ago

Incorrect title. Correct title would have been: workers with a better education tend to works jobs with shorter hours. But even that is possibly misleading. Best title: Workers in states with a higher average level of education tend to work jobs with shorter hours. (which says nothing about the workers themselves. We'd have to look at the data to know)

gojomo 17y ago
Indeed. For example, if you just looked at the fact that higher-income states tend to lean Democratic politically, you might conclude that higher-income individuals lean Democratic. But nationwide, and in each state alone, higher-income individuals lean Republican. These potentially-counterintuitive results are examples of Simpson's Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox It's possible the same effect is present in hours worked: that even though high-income/high-education states work fewer hours on average, in each state individually higher-incomes/more-education is correlated with more hours worked. More detailed data would be required to know for sure.
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bokonist 17y ago
If having an education causes women to enter the workforce more (either in order to pay off college loans or because they feel like they'd be wasting their degree if they stayed at home), then that could cause the correlation. Total hours per person would be more in the educated states, but hours per worker would be less. But we'd need more data to figure out if this is actually the case. His result: Education seems to play a big role in how long a state’s average resident works, and for what wage. This sentence is false based on the data given. The data in the article was a survey of employers. Thus it only measures how long employed workers work, not residents as a whole. UPDATE: The full study is behind a paywall, but the abstract states a contradictory result from that of Florida's: "ws us to construct a longer time series. We find several interesting patterns. The married women with the largest increase in market hours are those with high-skilled husbands. When we compare households with different skill mixes, we also find dramatic differences in the time paths, with higher skill households having the largest increase in average hours over time." Source: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jsessionid=24652EBB23490D204ABCB31B1CD8839B?contentType=Book&hdAction=lnkpdf&contentId=1797176 http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jse...

by swombat 17y ago

gojomo 17y ago

Indeed. For example, if you just looked at the fact that higher-income states tend to lean Democratic politically, you might conclude that higher-income individuals lean Democratic. But nationwide, and in each state alone, higher-income individuals lean Republican. These potentially-counterintuitive results are examples of Simpson's Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox It's possible the same effect is present in hours worked: that even though high-income/high-education states work fewer hours on average, in each state individually higher-incomes/more-education is correlated with more hours worked. More detailed data would be required to know for sure.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

bokonist 17y ago

If having an education causes women to enter the workforce more (either in order to pay off college loans or because they feel like they'd be wasting their degree if they stayed at home), then that could cause the correlation. Total hours per person would be more in the educated states, but hours per worker would be less. But we'd need more data to figure out if this is actually the case. His result: Education seems to play a big role in how long a state’s average resident works, and for what wage. This sentence is false based on the data given. The data in the article was a survey of employers. Thus it only measures how long employed workers work, not residents as a whole. UPDATE: The full study is behind a paywall, but the abstract states a contradictory result from that of Florida's: "ws us to construct a longer time series. We find several interesting patterns. The married women with the largest increase in market hours are those with high-skilled husbands. When we compare households with different skill mixes, we also find dramatic differences in the time paths, with higher skill households having the largest increase in average hours over time." Source: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jsessionid=24652EBB23490D204ABCB31B1CD8839B?contentType=Book&hdAction=lnkpdf&contentId=1797176 http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jse...