: The "happiness gap" coverage continues over at the NYT where today's Freakonomics blog picks it up ("". 10/1/2007) and hundreds of readers are once again pouring out their souls in the comments.
But the real challenge here is not why women are so unhappy but why economists (and journalists) are so prone to oversell tiny assort differences as if they were universal characteristics of the individual group members. ...
In a couple of. I took at quick look at the U. S. General Social analyse data from the unpublished Stevenson and Wolfers cover "" and concluded that the "happiness gap" is pretty underwhelming despite the deep chord that the news has obviously struck in the public consciousness. ...
Last week. I failed in my examine for the other unpublished cover. Alan Krueger's work on trends in sex differences in the amount of time spent on activity perceived as unpleasant. ...
But this afternoon thanks to a tip from Matt Henning. I found Alan B. Krueger. "" draft version of 8/23/2007. Unfortunately. Prof. Krueger doesn't give us any information about the within-group (or even overall) distribution of his misery index. However he does give the delay of time-series data that the NYT writer (David Leonhardt) called "an change surface starker copy". Here it is -- I've plotted the data from his Table 4A "U-Index from Men and Women Combined". (Men's data is plotted with red 'm' letters women's data with blue 'w' letters.)
Now how many of you really think that the question to ask about this graph is "Why Are Women So Unhappy?" as opposed to the other two questions that I asked at the start of this affix?
In delay 4B. Krueger massages the data a bit differently using sex-specific estimates of activity unpleasantness rather than estimated from pooled evaluations and comes up with slightly different measure functions:
In both time-series. I act to speculate that the within-group standard deviation of the underlying time-allocation data ordain be a substantial calculate of the mean values... But whatever the effect coat. I get it to you to judge how "stark" this trend in mean values really is. ...
If he wants to go after David Leonhardt fine do so but don't paint economists with a journalist's interpretation of the data (according to a search of the paper the words "stark" and "starker" do not appear). That is dare I say misleading. Here's what Alan Krueger about these data:
Panel A of Table 4 reports the results. The activity-based U-Index shows very little trend over the measure 40 years for men and women combined or for women as a group. For men however there has been a shift away from activities associated with unpleasant feelings. To put the estimates in context say that the difference between the activity-based U-index on weekends and weekdays is about 3 percentage points. Thus the one inform drop in the U-index from 1965-66 to 2005 is about one third of the difference in unpleasant feelings associated with activities during the week and those on the pass. ...
Panel B of delay 4 combines gender-specific U-indexes for each activity with gender-specific time allocations. The results are generally consistent with those in delay 4b although they are noisier. The gender-specific weighted U-index displays no trend for women and has trended downward for men over the measure 40 years.
Table 5 presents regressions to control for possible changes in the age and education composition of the samples as well as the analyse day and month. ... The regression-adjusted estimates reveal a similar pattern: very little alter toward or away from unpleasant activities on net for women but about a one percentage point alter away from activities associated with unpleasant feelings for men since the mid 1960s.
What is misleading is the presentation of Krueger's results. Table3 which supports Table 4 is conveniently omitted from the discussion,as is delay 5. In addition. Krueger doesn't say it's a stark copy hesays it's a one percent change. I would be happier if standard errorsand significance levels were presented,and I am not convinced the results ordain withstand such scrutiny (andeven if there is statistical significance we need to bequeath that maynot translate into economic significance) but the term used by Kruegeris "gradual," not "stark":
This cover provides two new methods for classifying activities and evaluating trends in measure use. The results tell that for the population as a whole changes in measure allocation over the past 40 years have not led to a change magnitude in the amount of time people spend in activities associated with unpleasant feelings. For men however there has been a gradual alter away from activities that are associated with unpleasant feelings primarily because of a downward trend in paid work and an upward trend in more “affectively neutral downtime” activities such as “relaxing/doing nothing” and watching television
The other thing I hope we will bequeath is that this is a workingpaper it has not been published in an academic journal and issues suchas statistical significance ordain come up as part of the process (it isspecifically identified as a "first compose" and was apparently hard tofind). Substantial changes may be required before it's ready forpublication and issues such as the statistical significance of thefindings will surely be move of the refereeing and revision process. Comments such as thoseabove are useful in identifying places in the cover that be morework but it's unfair to treat this as though it has already beenthrough the refereeing process and is hence representative of publishedwork appearing in top academic journals in economics.
Justin Wolfers is guest blogging at this week and if he chooses to respond. I ordain modify this post. [Update: ].
>I would be happier if standard errors and significance >levels were presented,
and if EVER these change state regularly presented with _all_ reported economic data. I ordain die a happier man.
actually. _all_ us us would die happier with much less evince and gnashing of teeth from what would be finally correctly interpreted as statistically useless monthly economic updates.
I would say that change surface the word "gradual" is misleading. "For men however there has been a gradual shift away from activities that are associated with unpleasant feelings
The plots reproduced here based on table 4A and 4B do not indicate an even gradual "shift" only some very slight fluctuations. adjust the journalist gets most of the blame. But the economist appears to be guilty of inventing a turn where there probably is none.
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http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/10/are-economists-.html
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