4 ms·

The Self-Employed Are the Happiest

48 points by nreece 17y ago

DanielStraight 17y ago
I usually really like the New York Times, but this is just raw data. There's no exposition.
- nopassrecover 17y ago
  Better than an exposition with no raw data at least.
  - DanielStraight 17y ago
    True, but the other comments here expose why exposition is needed. There's a lot of ways this data could just be discarded. If it's truly meaningful, the author needs to explain why.
freejoe76 17y ago
Alternate headline: It's good to be king.
bk 17y ago
This post triggers one of my major statistics peeves: A rank order list without variance is meaningless. The differences between the categories are very small. They are most likely not statistically significant.
- stevoski 17y ago
  Not only is there no variance. If we assume that the data is statistically significant (a bad assumption!), the difference between business owner (72.5%) and professional (71.5%) is very small. An alternative reading is that professionals are almost as likely to be happy as business owners.
- a-priori 17y ago
  It also suffers from survivor bias.
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    As someone whose business did not survive, I can't agree more. :)
- stingraycharles 17y ago
  Furthermore, it seems to imply that being a business owner makes you happy. It could just as well be that people who often take control of their lives and actively pursue what makes them happy, which perhaps has a huge influence on their natural happiness, are more likely to become business owners.
  - GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
    My experience is that business owners (of necessity when dealing with lenders, customers and their own doubts and fears) have trained themselves to tell white lies. They'll say to everyone "Yeah things are going great, business is booming, I couldn't be happier!" when actually they are totally stressed out.
antirez 17y ago
For me to get rich is not an important aspect of life: All I need is to be able to get decent food, have a simple but comfortable house, be able to travel two or three times every year. This is why the reason I start companies is exactly to free myself from a condition where I'm required to go to work at 8 a.m. with a boss that tells me what to do (possibly not right or interesting for me), and with at max 30 days of holidays in the year, without the ability to do, for instance, much more today, and get a free day tomorrow. This is in my opinion the highest value of creating a startup. It's worth to note that if you are like me high risk startups with VCs in the middle may not be the best idea, but something that is able to be supported by a decent business model ASAP is better.
brown9-2 17y ago
I want to cheer the headline, but how useful is this data when so many wildly different professions are lumped into the #2 occupation? Professional worker--lawyer, doctor, scientist, teacher, engineer, nurse, accountant, computer programmer, architect, investment banker, stock brokerage, marketing, musician, artist Is it really of any value to anyone to lump the "Overall well-being" of an artist, computer programmer, and investment banker into the same category?
marcofloriano 17y ago
It´s just a survey, but one thing we can conclude by the data: those who earn more, "think" they are more happy. And those who earn less, "think" they are less happy. The point is, what is happiness ? By these numbers, happiness comes from money and by my personal experience (could be wrong), happiness don´t have anything with money. Maybe joy, satisfaction and fun have, but not true happiness. So the article could be entitled as: The Self-Employed Are The Most Satisfied ... and not the happiest. Maybe the most happiest are priests, nuns and people who dedicate their lives to others. Guess the survey was ok, but the journalist behind the article was not happy in the way that he interpreted the research.
- jerf 17y ago
  At the point where you're reduced to saying "They think they're happy, but they're not!", you should probably just pack it in. If you're going to second guess people's own reporting like that about their own happiness, you can just as well conclude that they're even happier than they are reporting, as long as you're just making stuff up to support your preconceived biases. Maybe their self-report isn't accurate, but you have no basis to decide that, or determine in what way it is inaccurate.
- roc 17y ago
  I'm confused by your quotation marks around 'think'. Are you suggesting that, in the case of a personal emotional state, people don't know whether they themselves are happy or not? It reminds me of a joke in L.A. STORY (paraphrased): "Which is to say: I was deeply unhappy but didn't know it, because I was so happy all the time". Generally, studies involving happiness sidestep the minefield of trying to quantify or even qualify happiness. They simply ask people whether they are happy and then search for statistical correlations between those who report being 'happy' vs those who report being 'sad'. I can only imagine that this study was conducted similarly.
  - marcofloriano 17y ago

48 points by nreece 17y ago

DanielStraight 17y ago

I usually really like the New York Times, but this is just raw data. There's no exposition.

nopassrecover 17y ago
Better than an exposition with no raw data at least.
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  True, but the other comments here expose why exposition is needed. There's a lot of ways this data could just be discarded. If it's truly meaningful, the author needs to explain why.

freejoe76 17y ago

Alternate headline: It's good to be king.

bk 17y ago

This post triggers one of my major statistics peeves: A rank order list without variance is meaningless. The differences between the categories are very small. They are most likely not statistically significant.

stevoski 17y ago
Not only is there no variance. If we assume that the data is statistically significant (a bad assumption!), the difference between business owner (72.5%) and professional (71.5%) is very small. An alternative reading is that professionals are almost as likely to be happy as business owners.
a-priori 17y ago
It also suffers from survivor bias.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  As someone whose business did not survive, I can't agree more. :)
stingraycharles 17y ago
Furthermore, it seems to imply that being a business owner makes you happy. It could just as well be that people who often take control of their lives and actively pursue what makes them happy, which perhaps has a huge influence on their natural happiness, are more likely to become business owners.
- GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
  My experience is that business owners (of necessity when dealing with lenders, customers and their own doubts and fears) have trained themselves to tell white lies. They'll say to everyone "Yeah things are going great, business is booming, I couldn't be happier!" when actually they are totally stressed out.

antirez 17y ago

For me to get rich is not an important aspect of life: All I need is to be able to get decent food, have a simple but comfortable house, be able to travel two or three times every year. This is why the reason I start companies is exactly to free myself from a condition where I'm required to go to work at 8 a.m. with a boss that tells me what to do (possibly not right or interesting for me), and with at max 30 days of holidays in the year, without the ability to do, for instance, much more today, and get a free day tomorrow. This is in my opinion the highest value of creating a startup. It's worth to note that if you are like me high risk startups with VCs in the middle may not be the best idea, but something that is able to be supported by a decent business model ASAP is better.

brown9-2 17y ago

I want to cheer the headline, but how useful is this data when so many wildly different professions are lumped into the #2 occupation? Professional worker--lawyer, doctor, scientist, teacher, engineer, nurse, accountant, computer programmer, architect, investment banker, stock brokerage, marketing, musician, artist Is it really of any value to anyone to lump the "Overall well-being" of an artist, computer programmer, and investment banker into the same category?

marcofloriano 17y ago

It´s just a survey, but one thing we can conclude by the data: those who earn more, "think" they are more happy. And those who earn less, "think" they are less happy. The point is, what is happiness ? By these numbers, happiness comes from money and by my personal experience (could be wrong), happiness don´t have anything with money. Maybe joy, satisfaction and fun have, but not true happiness. So the article could be entitled as: The Self-Employed Are The Most Satisfied ... and not the happiest. Maybe the most happiest are priests, nuns and people who dedicate their lives to others. Guess the survey was ok, but the journalist behind the article was not happy in the way that he interpreted the research.

jerf 17y ago
At the point where you're reduced to saying "They think they're happy, but they're not!", you should probably just pack it in. If you're going to second guess people's own reporting like that about their own happiness, you can just as well conclude that they're even happier than they are reporting, as long as you're just making stuff up to support your preconceived biases. Maybe their self-report isn't accurate, but you have no basis to decide that, or determine in what way it is inaccurate.
roc 17y ago
I'm confused by your quotation marks around 'think'. Are you suggesting that, in the case of a personal emotional state, people don't know whether they themselves are happy or not? It reminds me of a joke in L.A. STORY (paraphrased): "Which is to say: I was deeply unhappy but didn't know it, because I was so happy all the time". Generally, studies involving happiness sidestep the minefield of trying to quantify or even qualify happiness. They simply ask people whether they are happy and then search for statistical correlations between those who report being 'happy' vs those who report being 'sad'. I can only imagine that this study was conducted similarly.
- marcofloriano 17y ago