andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-437 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: 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 statistics course, using the General Social Survey, I couldn’t find the famed U, or anything like it. Using pooled GSS data mixes age, period, and cohort, so I tried throwing in some cohort effects (indicators for decades) and a couple other variables, but still couldn’t find that U. So I was intrigued when I came across this paper by Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton , who write: Whilst the majority of psychologists have concluded there is not much of a relationship at all, the economic literature has unearthed a possible U-shape relationship. In this paper we [Frijters and Beatton] replicate the U-shape for the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP), and we investigate several possible explanations for it. They write: What is the relationship
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1 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). [sent-1, score-0.744]
2 But when I tried to demonstrate it to me intro statistics course, using the General Social Survey, I couldn’t find the famed U, or anything like it. [sent-2, score-0.181]
3 Using pooled GSS data mixes age, period, and cohort, so I tried throwing in some cohort effects (indicators for decades) and a couple other variables, but still couldn’t find that U. [sent-3, score-0.411]
4 So I was intrigued when I came across this paper by Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton , who write: Whilst the majority of psychologists have concluded there is not much of a relationship at all, the economic literature has unearthed a possible U-shape relationship. [sent-4, score-0.51]
5 In this paper we [Frijters and Beatton] replicate the U-shape for the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP), and we investigate several possible explanations for it. [sent-5, score-0.125]
6 They write: What is the relationship between happiness and age? [sent-6, score-0.493]
7 The answer to this question in the recent economic literature on the subject is that the age-happiness relationship is U-shaped. [sent-8, score-0.326]
8 This finding holds for the US, Germany, Britain, Australia, Europe, and apparently even South Africa. [sent-9, score-0.094]
9 The stylised finding is that individuals gradually get unhappier after their 18th birthday, with a dip around 50 followed by a gradual upturn in old age. [sent-10, score-0.488]
10 The predicted effect of age can be quite large, i. [sent-11, score-0.282]
11 the difference in average happiness between an 18 year old and a 50 year old can be as much as 1. [sent-13, score-0.56]
12 Their conclusion: The inclusion of the usual socio-economic variables in a cross-section leads to a U-shape in age that results from indirectly-age-related reverse causality. [sent-15, score-0.442]
13 Putting it simply: good things, like getting a job and getting married, appear to happen to middle aged individuals who were already happy. [sent-16, score-0.189]
14 The found effect of age in fixed-effect regressions is simply too large and too out of line with everything else we know to be believable. [sent-20, score-0.282]
15 The difference between first-time respondents and stayers and between the number of years someone stays in the panel doesn’t allow for explanations based on fixed traits or observables. [sent-21, score-0.423]
16 There has to be either a problem on the left-hand side (i. [sent-22, score-0.086]
17 the measurement of happiness over the life of a panel) or on the right-hand side (selection on time-varying unobservables). [sent-24, score-0.491]
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Introduction: 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 statistics course, using the General Social Survey, I couldn’t find the famed U, or anything like it. Using pooled GSS data mixes age, period, and cohort, so I tried throwing in some cohort effects (indicators for decades) and a couple other variables, but still couldn’t find that U. So I was intrigued when I came across this paper by Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton , who write: Whilst the majority of psychologists have concluded there is not much of a relationship at all, the economic literature has unearthed a possible U-shape relationship. In this paper we [Frijters and Beatton] replicate the U-shape for the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP), and we investigate several possible explanations for it. They write: What is the relationship
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