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It's a hackneyed cliche, but the plural of anecdote is not data. I'm saying that the baseline assumption should be one based on a known baseline, which this pa
by regularfry 9y ago
It's a hackneyed cliche, but the plural of anecdote is not data. I'm saying that the baseline assumption should be one based on a known baseline, which this paper gives. If there's data to support a decision in a more specific case than the broad grab-bag this paper represents, that would be interesting. Otherwise what you're saying amounts to "one should bet on being an outlier" - and if that's the bet, the payoff has to beat the alternative. Everything you've mentioned will be represented in that average.
- AnthonyMouse 9y agoThe average only matters to you if you're average. For each person, you have to measure the value of the wages they could earn against the value of the domestic labor they could perform. It's quite plausible that the average value of wages is higher than the average value of domestic labor, but that does not lead to the result that 100.000% of people are better off working for money. It most plausibly leads to the result that most of the people who do work for wages are better off to do so and most of the people who don't are better off not, because members of the second group are below average at wage labor or above average at domestic labor or have economic circumstances that cause money to be less valuable than time. Which is why they choose the way they do. This is well in accord with the fact that the majority of working-age women do work for wages. But a large plurality do not, and averages provide no evidence that they are behaving irrationally. Half of everyone will be below average at one thing and a different half of everyone will be above average at the other thing.