The Self-Employed Are the Happiest | Hacker News Reader

The Self-Employed Are the Happiest

economix.blogs.nytimes.com

48 pointsnreece16 comments

For me to get rich is not an important aspect of life: All I need is to be able to get decent food, have a simple but comfortable house, be able to travel two or three times every year. This is why the reason I start companies is exactly to free myself from a condition where I'm required to go to work at 8 a.m. with a boss that tells me what to do (possibly not right or interesting for me), and with at max 30 days of holidays in the year, without the ability to do, for instance, much more today, and get a free day tomorrow. This is in my opinion the highest value of creating a startup.

It's worth to note that if you are like me high risk startups with VCs in the middle may not be the best idea, but something that is able to be supported by a decent business model ASAP is better.

This post triggers one of my major statistics peeves:

A rank order list without variance is meaningless. The differences between the categories are very small. They are most likely not statistically significant.

Furthermore, it seems to imply that being a business owner makes you happy. It could just as well be that people who often take control of their lives and actively pursue what makes them happy, which perhaps has a huge influence on their natural happiness, are more likely to become business owners.

My experience is that business owners (of necessity when dealing with lenders, customers and their own doubts and fears) have trained themselves to tell white lies. They'll say to everyone "Yeah things are going great, business is booming, I couldn't be happier!" when actually they are totally stressed out.

Not only is there no variance. If we assume that the data is statistically significant (a bad assumption!), the difference between business owner (72.5%) and professional (71.5%) is very small. An alternative reading is that professionals are almost as likely to be happy as business owners.

It also suffers from survivor bias.

As someone whose business did not survive, I can't agree more. :)

I want to cheer the headline, but how useful is this data when so many wildly different professions are lumped into the #2 occupation?

Professional worker--lawyer, doctor, scientist, teacher, engineer, nurse, accountant, computer programmer, architect, investment banker, stock brokerage, marketing, musician, artist

Is it really of any value to anyone to lump the "Overall well-being" of an artist, computer programmer, and investment banker into the same category?

Alternate headline: It's good to be king.

It´s just a survey, but one thing we can conclude by the data: those who earn more, "think" they are more happy. And those who earn less, "think" they are less happy.

The point is, what is happiness ? By these numbers, happiness comes from money and by my personal experience (could be wrong), happiness don´t have anything with money. Maybe joy, satisfaction and fun have, but not true happiness. So the article could be entitled as: The Self-Employed Are The Most Satisfied ... and not the happiest. Maybe the most happiest are priests, nuns and people who dedicate their lives to others. Guess the survey was ok, but the journalist behind the article was not happy in the way that he interpreted the research.

I'm confused by your quotation marks around 'think'. Are you suggesting that, in the case of a personal emotional state, people don't know whether they themselves are happy or not? It reminds me of a joke in L.A. STORY (paraphrased): "Which is to say: I was deeply unhappy but didn't know it, because I was so happy all the time".

Generally, studies involving happiness sidestep the minefield of trying to quantify or even qualify happiness. They simply ask people whether they are happy and then search for statistical correlations between those who report being 'happy' vs those who report being 'sad'.

I can only imagine that this study was conducted similarly.

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At the point where you're reduced to saying "They think they're happy, but they're not!", you should probably just pack it in. If you're going to second guess people's own reporting like that about their own happiness, you can just as well conclude that they're even happier than they are reporting, as long as you're just making stuff up to support your preconceived biases. Maybe their self-report isn't accurate, but you have no basis to decide that, or determine in what way it is inaccurate.

I usually really like the New York Times, but this is just raw data. There's no exposition.

Better than an exposition with no raw data at least.

True, but the other comments here expose why exposition is needed. There's a lot of ways this data could just be discarded. If it's truly meaningful, the author needs to explain why.

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