

States with the highest taxes also rank as the unhappiest? - cwan
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703278604574624743612652998.html

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GiraffeNecktie
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."

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CWuestefeld
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.

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ajross
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).

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pierrefar
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.

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kingkongreveng_
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.

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emmett
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.

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Gorm-Casper
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.

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CWuestefeld
_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).

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ajross
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".

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alain94040
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.

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kingkongreveng_
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.

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mixmax
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+...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=happiest+people+on+earth)

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DanielBMarkham
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. :)

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mixmax
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.

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jfoutz
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...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol326/issue5960/sindex.dtl)

