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If you don't adjust the results for the fact that most Lousiana residents are dumb as mud, it changes the outcome.
How high does your IQ have to be to be happy ? Because their education level is less than yours does that mean they can't find happiness with their family, children, lifestyle and surroundings as much or more than you ? Besides, isn't it true that those with very high IQs often border on insanity or mental instability in some form ? Sorry....but you just lost those two notches on my Respect-O-Meter with that statement.
Why is it that when a study shows a "Best Place to Live" in NJ, everyone jumps up and down applauding the study, but when a study puts NJ at the bottom of a ranking, there must be inherent flaws in the data or the conclusions???
I'm not sure how they even saw the study with their heads stuck in the sand so deeply.
Take a look at the study methodology. The way they end up with the NE on the bottom is by "controlling" for education levels. Louisiana would not be #1 if they didn't do this.
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Rather, Oswald and Stephen Wu, an economist at Hamilton College in New York, statistically created a representative American. That way they could take, for example, a 38-year-old woman with a high-school diploma and making medium-wage who is living anywhere and transplant her to another state and get a rough estimate of her happiness level.
Plenty of problems with this. The obvious one is that the statistically representative American is not a "statistically representative" NY/NJ/C resident.
So...what your saying is that those down south are too "dumb" to realize they aren't happy....they are not educationally competent enough to realize they are actually unhappy...they're confused and just think they are happy because they don'y know any better ????
So...what your saying is that those down south are too "dumb" to realize they aren't happy....they are not educationally competent enough to realize they are actually unhappy...they're confused and just think they are happy because they don'y know any better ????
No. I'm not saying that at all (did you read the article ??? Read the article ! RTA ! RTFA !!!!! ).
In studies where you just use self-reported happiness as the measure, NJ comes out on top.
So if your gold standard is to just ask people "are you happy" and take the average person's answer at face value, then the north east is at the top, not the bottom.
What they did is "corrected" for differences in education and other variables by using some kind of "matching". But to do this, they might need to (for example) need to "count" each high school graduate in NJ as if they were two people.
By doing this, they disproportionately weight the bottom of the socioeconomic heap in NJ and the top of the same in Southern States.
I'm NOT arguing that self-reporting is unreliable (one could make a good argument on those lines, but that's not my argument here).
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I'm not sure how they even saw the study with their heads stuck in the sand so deeply.
How ironic ...
Last edited by elflord1973; 12-18-2009 at 08:17 PM..
What they did is "corrected" for differences in education and other variables by using some kind of "matching" -- e.g. they compared how happy someone with a high school diploma is in NJ to how happy someone with a high school diploma is in Lousiana.
I believe the scientific term for that is called "fudge factoring" ?
I saw a list where New Jersey came in 53rd.....it was lower than two other states that hadn't even been formed yet !!!
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