
The Self-Employed Are the Happiest - nreece
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/the-self-employed-are-the-happiest/
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antirez
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.

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bk
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.

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stingraycharles
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.

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GiraffeNecktie
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.

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brown9-2
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?

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freejoe76
Alternate headline: It's good to be king.

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marcofloriano
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.

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roc
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.

~~~
marcofloriano


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

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nopassrecover
Better than an exposition with no raw data at least.

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DanielStraight
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.

