States with the highest taxes also rank as the unhappiest? | Hacker News Reader

States with the highest taxes also rank as the unhappiest?

online.wsj.com

7 pointscwan17 comments

Tons of interpretation applied to mere ounces of data. She glosses over the fact that all of the five happiest states are in the sunny south and four of the five least happy states are in the North and, not surprisingly for the Wall Street Journal, concludes that the problem is taxation. In contrast, the New York Times version of this story has the following quote "Americans who described themselves as satisfied tended to live in places where the quality of life was good by most standards — where the sun shone a lot, the air was reasonably clear, housing didn’t leave you busted, traffic wasn’t too fierce and so on."

If I understood the article right, they controlled for this. I think they used salary differentials to account for the myriad ways that one locale might be better than another.

So imagine that person X and person Y both live in state Z. They offer to Y $Q more dollars to move to New York. Because Y was willing to take the deal, we can assume that $Q is enough to make up for the cold weather, etc., in New York.

Afterwards if we ask X and Y about their happiness, and X is happier, how can we explain that? The OP offers some theories as to why that might be, and develops some arguments as to why higher taxes are one likely explanation.

It's an editorial in a well known anti-tax paper. It's not "correcting" for anything, because it's not doing any science. It's combining some research (without links, so without any way for me to easily tell if it's in-context or not) from disparate sources to make a pretty typical point about "taxes are bad".

It only looks like "science" to you because it starts out talking about someone else's paper (and one that says nothing about tax at all, AFAICT).

Because Y was willing to take the deal, we can assume that $Q is enough to make up for the cold weather, etc., in New York.

People are not this rational. $Q was enough to make the person say, "hey, maybe I should quit this job I don't really like. I guess I won't really like winter, but I do like this number." Then they get to New York and realize that $Q - $old_salary barely covers the difference in rent. At this point, they are already invested, so they stay.

In the end, the relative difference in salary has very little to do with relative differences in happiness.

This suggests an alternative good explanation: "Using data from the 2005-2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and a 2003 economics paper examining quality-of-life indicators"

This time period is when the Republicans were in peak power in the White House and Congress. I suggest that this political environment makes blue-state dwellers unhappy.

The substantive political environment is identical now. The study already indicates that people in areas with winning sports franchises are less happy, so there goes the "in power party makes me happy" explanation.

This is ridiculous and bogus. So many things wrong with it:

1. Self reported happiness varies greatly by culture; a society which reports low happiness may merely be less enthused. So the basic data is completely untrustworthy.

2. Taking the top 5 and bottom 5 states is a ridiculous way to do a correlation. If there was a strong correlation, you could graph it all the way across all 50 states. And even if you found that correlation, it still wouldn't mean much, because...

3. Any correlation which treats Alaska (population: less than a million) and California (population: 54 million) as the same type of entity is ridiculous. Comparing cities might make slightly more sense, but comparing states is absurd. And even if you used cities, it would be silly because...

4. Controlling a study like this is nearly impossible. There's no reason to suspect taxation above any of the other thousands of alternative explanations, all of which make at least as much sense as taxation does. Which of course is what really happened here: someone who dislikes taxation is looking for evidence which might confirm that thought.

To make a general statement like that based on a study purely on USA, seems wrong.

I used to live in Denmark where they (according studies I won't bother digging up now) have both the happiest people on the planet AND pay the highest percentage in tax.

States in this case is referring to US states, so I wouldn't say the statement is general.

To make a general statement like that based on a study purely on USA, seems wrong.

On the contrary. The author seems to be trying only to apply her conclusions to America, so it would be appropriate.

Also, bringing other variables into the regression (societal factors, etc.) would just muddy the waters. If we've got a sample that excludes some variables altogether, it would make sense to use it (with the caveat that we can't know what effect those other dimensions might have).

Uh, what? Ignoring evidence is never correct. The burden goes the other way around -- you need to prove the absence of uncorrected correlations if you want to do a good science. You can't just limit your study to a cherry-picked set and announce that "you're only trying to apply your conclusions to the studied subjects".

Sounds bogus to me. The article has a strong bias.

My guess is that big city stress is the cause for the "unhappiness" measured. It just so happens that big cities tend lean more democratic, and the countryside is more republican.

You basically just restated the article without contradicting it.

The whole point is that striving harder to afford a comfortable standard of living in a higher tax, higher cost environment reduces happiness.

Yes, and Denmark has one of the highest tax rates in the world, and also happens to harbour the happiest people on earth. Maybe a bit more data would be a good thing.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=happiest+people+on+...

Could be the reverse is true: instead of taxes leading happiness, happiness might lead taxation.

Or put another way: happy Europeans are probably much easier to tax than happy Americans. :)

Could be. Or it could be that a large public sector leads to both high taxation and happiness. My point was just that there doesn't seem to be enough data in the article to assert the conclusions that it does.

I wonder if it's the "Rich Financial Lives of Poor People" article. Hard to tell behind the paywall, but nothing else seems to make sense.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol326/issue5960/sindex.dt...

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