andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-486 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A couple people pointed me to this recent news article which discusses “why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older.” Here’s the story: When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure–vitality, mental sharpness and looks–they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness. This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility–the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness i
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1 Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. [sent-3, score-0.391]
2 Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure–vitality, mental sharpness and looks–they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness. [sent-6, score-0.444]
3 This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. [sent-7, score-0.219]
4 But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself. [sent-9, score-0.647]
5 After reading a bunch of articles on the U-shaped relation between age and happiness–including some research that used the General Social Survey–I downloaded the GSS data (you can do it yourself ! [sent-21, score-0.334]
6 The idea was to start with the fascinating U-shaped pattern and then discuss what could be learned further using some basic statistical techniques of subsetting and regression. [sent-24, score-0.271]
7 Here was my first graph, a quick summary of average happiness level (on a 0, 1, 2 scale; in total, 12% of respondents rated their happiness at 0 (the lowest level), 56% gave themselves a 1, and 32% described themselves as having the highest level on this three-point scale). [sent-26, score-1.147]
8 In my original posted graph, I plotted the percentage of respondents of each age who had happiness levels of 1 or 2; this corrected graph plots average happiness levels. [sent-30, score-1.528]
9 I did this by single years of age so it’s noisy–even when using decades of GSS, the sample’s not infinite–but there’s nothing like the famous U-shaped pattern! [sent-32, score-0.334]
10 There’s a big difference between the publishedl graph, which has maxima at 20 and 85, and the my graph from GSS, which has minima at 20 and 85. [sent-34, score-0.275]
11 Sometimes I could get happiness to go up with age, but then it was just a gradual rise from age 18, without the dip around age 45 or 50. [sent-39, score-1.126]
12 ) with whom I’d collaborated on some earlier happiness research (in which I contributed multilevel modeling and some ideas about graphs but not much of substance regarding psychology or economics). [sent-45, score-0.61]
13 Grazia confirmed to me that the U-shaped pattern is indeed fragile, that you have to work hard to find it, and often it shows up when people fit linear and quadratic terms, in which case everything looks like a parabola. [sent-46, score-0.328]
14 (I’d tried regressions with age & age-squared, but it took a lot of finagling to get the coefficient for age-squared to have the “correct” sign. [sent-47, score-0.398]
15 In summary: I agree that happiness and life satisfaction are worth studying– of course they’re worth studying–but, in the midst of looking for explanations for that U-shaped pattern, it might be worth looking more carefully to see what exactly is happening. [sent-53, score-0.966]
16 ) All those explanations have to be contingent on the pattern actually existing in the population. [sent-56, score-0.259]
17 There appear to be many different age patterns and it’s not clear to me that the U should be considered the paradigm. [sent-63, score-0.334]
18 No big deal–it’s just a matter of terminology–but I think journalists and other outsiders can be misread if they hear about this sort of thing and start searching in the economics literature rather than in the psychology literature. [sent-67, score-0.216]
19 In general, I think economists will have more to say than psychologists about prices, and psychologists will have more insights about emotions and happiness. [sent-68, score-0.418]
20 I’m sure that economists can make important contributions to the study of happiness, just as psychologists can make important contributions to the study of prices, but even a magazine called “The Economist” should know the difference. [sent-69, score-0.351]
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Introduction: A couple people pointed me to this recent news article which discusses “why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older.” Here’s the story: When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure–vitality, mental sharpness and looks–they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness. This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility–the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness i
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