
Do Smarter Workers Work Less? - rglullis
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/do-smarter-workers-work-less/
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swombat
Incorrect title.

Correct title would have been: workers with a better education tend to works
jobs with shorter hours.

But even that is possibly misleading. Best title:

Workers in states with a higher average level of education tend to work jobs
with shorter hours.

(which says nothing about the workers themselves. We'd have to look at the
data to know)

~~~
gojomo
Indeed.

For example, if you just looked at the fact that higher-income states tend to
lean Democratic politically, you might conclude that higher-income individuals
lean Democratic. But nationwide, and in each state alone, higher-income
individuals lean Republican.

These potentially-counterintuitive results are examples of Simpson's Paradox:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox>

It's possible the same effect is present in hours worked: that even though
high-income/high-education states work fewer hours _on average_ , in each
state individually higher-incomes/more-education is correlated with more hours
worked. More detailed data would be required to know for sure.

------
tokenadult
I like the plot of the immigration data. Immigrants are people with
initiative, and they bring up the level of the people they live among.

It's good by they way to see these data presented as a scatterplot rather than
just seeing the correlation number, which is much less informative.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence>

~~~
byrneseyeview
I'm dubious. There are a couple other factors:

1\. Coastal cities have high costs of living; the top-right of the graph is
dominated by coastal states with big cities; the bottom-left is dominated by
landlocked, low cost-of-living places. 2\. Wouldn't immigrants go places with
high hourly wages? If you move in with your folks in New York or SF, why would
you go to North Dakota?

It sounds like the cause and effect relationship goes both ways: immigrants
move to high-wage places, and the presence of all those ambitious, extra-hard-
working folks causes economic growth and higher wages. But it's conceivable
that one of those relationships could reduce wages, instead; one could easily
read this as a graph demonstrating that every time you get high wages, you
have this almost Malthusian influx of immigrants.

Immigration has definitely raised my standard of living, though; the company I
work for was founded by an immigrant.

------
zzleeper
This result is pretty much well known for ANY economist, even people with only
econ 101. For instance, check the first graph of this link:
<http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Labour-market>

The logic is the following:

1) More educated people earn higher wages (if not, then why spend so much time
and money on education?).

2) Higher wages gives you more money for consumption

3) As people fill their consumption needs, they now want more leisure. For
that, they work less hours.

------
tjic
> His result: Education seems to play a big role in how long a state’s average
> resident works, and for what wage.

There's nothing here that suggests the causality arrow runs in that direction.
Here's another take "all workers prefer to work less; workers who have
foresight and long time horizons get education so as to avoid working second
hobs".

> This scatterplot suggests that state hourly earnings are positively
> associated with the percentage of immigrants (correlation of 0.64).

Sigh.

This could mean anything, from "having lots of cheap yard workers around makes
it easier to put in weekend hours" to "high hourly rates draw in migrants", to
just about anything else.

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samratjp
The states where workers work less seem to be on the colder climate zones; it
could be that workers in the north just have less time to get things done
climatically speaking; after all, if you work on the road, you have to take in
account of day light and frosty conditions into effect.

As about the indoor ones, they probably want to get home early thanks to the
shorter daylight?

~~~
lief79
Technically, the length of the days will average out. Longer in the spring and
summer (when the weather is nicer for outdoor work), shorter in the winter.

However, the number of snow days won't average out, but I doubt that is being
factored into the data.

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nhebb
Can someone with a stats background explain why the article claims there's a
correlation? Those charts had R^2 values of .428, .344, and .403. I thought
low R^2 values indicated no correlation.

~~~
golwengaud
I think of "correlation" as a measure of _how much_ of the variation in one
variable affects that in another. This explains why acceptable correlation
levels vary between disciplines: one variable explaining 40% of the variation
in another is pretty good in social sciences, where you expect all sorts of
confounding variables, but quite bad in, say, (well designed) physics
experiments.

Disclaimer: my statistics background consists entirely of one class (AP
Statistics).

~~~
dunstad
>one variable explaining 40% of the variation in another is pretty good in
social sciences, where you expect all sorts of confounding variables, but
quite bad in, say, (well designed) physics experiments.

I think this is part of the answer to your question, nhebb, but also I think
we might have some confusion about r. In my understanding, (which is also
limited to only AP Statistics) r is the value representing how well correlated
the two categories are, and r squared represents how much of the correlation
the categories you're using at that time accounts for. Does that sound right?

~~~
nhebb
That makes sense, but I still have trouble believing the article's conclusion.

In my experience, people with advanced education work more hours. Doctors,
lawyers, engineers, programmers, accountants,... the list of professions that
require a lot of 40+ hour work week goes on. Most lower wage jobs, by
contrast, work straight 40 hour work weeks

Also, is the data adjusted for cost of living? Why are they using average
wages instead of median wages?

Overall, it just looks like a crappy study that doesn't lead to tangible
insights.

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mrcharles
How does hours per week top out at 37? 37? Thirty seven? Three-Seven? I can't
really figure out how the average is that low except as an assumption that
almost no one who works puts in overtime.

Now I feel like a chump for putting in so much overtime.

~~~
barrkel
I don't see how it's very productive to work more than that, particularly in a
creative discipline. Actually, I think I'm at my most effective when I "work"
less than that - but I also spend idle time thinking things over in the
background. That thinking builds up a head of steam for the next period of
work, but after six or so hours of that at most, I'd have to be doing some
kind of mindless grunt work to continue being effective.

