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executor
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posted June 08, 2008 12:59 AM |
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Thanks for spotting the errors, Executor. I guess that means at least one person read all that. 
You're welcome .
As a yet-to-be economist, I should be of use in such cases  .
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Binabik
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posted June 08, 2008 07:50 AM |
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Nice work Corribus. I've always been interested in statistics and probability, but never gotten around to studying it. So I don't know more than the most basic terminology.
I have a few random comments. (i.e. don't expect something cohesive)
The first thing is that I think the QLI is terrible. I don't know how I WOULD measure quality of life, but it wouldn't be that way. But since that's what we are working with I'll move on.
Just a note about something that came to mind when reading the comments on correlation and causation. A good real life example is insurance premiums. I've always been mildly interested in how auto insurance is priced. They claim it's based on risk, which I'm sure it is. They look at the statistical probability of a person with traits X, Y & Z getting in an accident. They have always looked at factors such as age, gender, driving record, urban vs non-urban setting, etc.
Something they've added to the mix much more recently is a credit check. They claim someone with a poor credit score is more likely to get in an accident. I found this a little odd. Why would a poor person drive worse than a rich person? With some imagination I can think of a few reasons why this might be - all of which would brand me as not being politically correct if I expressed them. After all if the police did what the insurance companies do it would be called profiling.
It doesn't take much thought to realize there is probably a big flaw in their pricing. Where do the poor people live? They live in urban areas, that's where. All the poor people living in urban areas are being charged TWICE for the same thing - with urban driving being the logical "cause" of accidents. Being poor is correlated to urban living, which means it's also correlated to accidents, but not the cause.
Anyway, that was far more verbose than I intended.
A couple of the outliers in the first chart struck me, Estonia and Venezuela.
Estonia is an ex-Soviet country, so why is the IEF so high? The QLI is fairly low, but the IEF is high. I think what we are seeing here is time lag. It would be interesting to do a time adjusted chart to see if some of the outliers converge. A delta IEF with a time adjusted delta QLI would be a much stronger correlation than IEF and QLI alone.
With Venezuela, the obvious variable is oil, and possibly other natural resources or "inherent wealth" such as high priced hardwoods. A country with low economic freedom but high natural resources would fall below the line. And I suppose you could say that the opposite is true: a country with high economic freedom but low natural resources would be above the line.
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JoonasTo
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What if Elvin was female?
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posted June 08, 2008 10:29 AM |
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Just a note about something that came to mind when reading the comments on correlation and causation. A good real life example is insurance premiums. I've always been mildly interested in how auto insurance is priced. They claim it's based on risk, which I'm sure it is. They look at the statistical probability of a person with traits X, Y & Z getting in an accident. They have always looked at factors such as age, gender, driving record, urban vs non-urban setting, etc.
Something they've added to the mix much more recently is a credit check. They claim someone with a poor credit score is more likely to get in an accident. I found this a little odd. Why would a poor person drive worse than a rich person? With some imagination I can think of a few reasons why this might be - all of which would brand me as not being politically correct if I expressed them. After all if the police did what the insurance companies do it would be called profiling.
Poor people are more likely to do an insurance fraud. Maybe they have street races more often too.
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A couple of the outliers in the first chart struck me, Estonia and Venezuela.
Estonia is an ex-Soviet country, so why is the IEF so high? The QLI is fairly low, but the IEF is high. I think what we are seeing here is time lag. It would be interesting to do a time adjusted chart to see if some of the outliers converge. A delta IEF with a time adjusted delta QLI would be a much stronger correlation than IEF and QLI alone.
With Venezuela, the obvious variable is oil, and possibly other natural resources or "inherent wealth" such as high priced hardwoods. A country with low economic freedom but high natural resources would fall below the line. And I suppose you could say that the opposite is true: a country with high economic freedom but low natural resources would be above the line.
Estonia decided to take the irish model for climbing up from their post-soviet depression but obviously it didn't work. Probably because their infrastructure and goverment was too disorganised.
QLI index isn't a good way, in that we agree. Climate shouldn't be there because people who grow up in hot or cold climate get used to it. Oh and would someone explain this to me:
"# Community life: Dummy variable taking value 1 if country has either high rate of church attendance or trade-union membership; zero otherwise. Source: World Values Survey"
If people go to church they have better life? Or if they are in the EU? I couldn't have understood it correctly. This doesn't make any sense.
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executor
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posted June 08, 2008 11:52 AM |
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Well the major reservation regarding QLI is that it does not take into account how people perceive their well-being themselves.
Telling people when they are happy reminds me of 'tales from communism' by my perents, and has an inclination towards totalitarian ideas, at least to my taste.
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TheDeath
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posted June 08, 2008 12:21 PM |
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If people go to church they have better life?
Depends on what you call 'better life'. most people do have a 'better' life that go to church. Unless of course you mean 'richness' but remember not everyone is interested ONLY in material wealth.
But then you probably haven't done that so I can understand if it does not make sense to you.
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JoonasTo
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posted June 08, 2008 01:18 PM |
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Quote:
If people go to church they have better life?
Depends on what you call 'better life'. most people do have a 'better' life that go to church. Unless of course you mean 'richness' but remember not everyone is interested ONLY in material wealth.
But then you probably haven't done that so I can understand if it does not make sense to you.
What I mean is that there is no need for a person to go to church to find spiritual meaning or wealth. You can find it in books, cults, philosphy, different religions, personal ethics, etc.
I can point out a lot of people from my town and acquintances of mine that would have had a better life if they would never have stepped in from those big wooden doors but for obvious reasons I won't do so now.
Yes I have been to church on numerous occasions, christamsses, weddings, confirmations (also mine), easterns, funerals (3 this spring) and so on. I have also been to church at some sundays for no greater reason. My parents even used church as a punishment for severely bad behavior.
PS. I'm probably the last person you want to start preaching about "money does not equal happiness".
Not all people are greedy in HC. 
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TheDeath
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posted June 08, 2008 03:05 PM |
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Yes I have been to church on numerous occasions, christamsses, weddings, confirmations (also mine), easterns, funerals (3 this spring) and so on. I have also been to church at some sundays for no greater reason. My parents even used church as a punishment for severely bad behavior.
There's a difference between citing (skimming) a book and understanding it (I suppose a 'punishment' isn't really appealing, is it?). But I was not talking about people having an 'obligation' to go to church (i.e not referring to those that go each Sunday).. rather those that go when they feel like it
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PS. I'm probably the last person you want to start preaching about "money does not equal happiness".
Not all people are greedy in HC.
I was talking about the statistics, not you
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mvassilev
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posted June 08, 2008 03:10 PM |
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You don't have to go to church or belong in a trade union to be positively involved in the community, and many who do aren't. And you don't have to be involved in the community to be happy.
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JoonasTo
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posted June 08, 2008 03:40 PM |
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You don't have to go to church or belong in a trade union to be positively involved in the community, and many who do aren't. And you don't have to be involved in the community to be happy.
Exactly.
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Corribus
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posted June 08, 2008 05:50 PM |
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Edited by Corribus at 18:05, 08 Jun 2008.
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@Binabik
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Nice work Corribus. I've always been interested in statistics and probability, but never gotten around to studying it. So I don't know more than the most basic terminology.
Thanks. I'm not a statistician, of course, but I do use statistics a lot in my work. Frankly, I usually find it dreadfully complicated and tedious, but this was an interesting question to look at.
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The first thing is that I think the QLI is terrible. I don't know how I WOULD measure quality of life, but it wouldn't be that way. But since that's what we are working with I'll move on.
Agreed. Of course, quality of life is a subjective idea anyway, so how do you measure it objectively? Any sort of analysis like this is predicated on accepting the way it is formulated. Still, the wiki article is not really that specific about the details. To really make a value judgement, I'd have to have more information about how the various factors were evaluated.
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Just a note about something that came to mind when reading the comments on correlation and causation. A good real life example is insurance premiums... Something they've added to the mix much more recently is a credit check. They claim someone with a poor credit score is more likely to get in an accident. I found this a little odd. Why would a poor person drive worse than a rich person? With some imagination I can think of a few reasons why this might be - all of which would brand me as not being politically correct if I expressed them. After all if the police did what the insurance companies do it would be called profiling.
Yeah, I agree. I'm not an expert in risk analysis, but it seems to me that risk analysis is more interested in correlation than causation. I.e., they don't care what causes a risk factor so much as what the risk factors are. It doesn't matter to them whether there's a causal relationship between poverty and poor driving. The fact that there seems to be a correlation between poverty and poor driving is enough of a reason to factor income level into insurance premiums. I'm not sure if I made that clear or not.
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Estonia is an ex-Soviet country, so why is the IEF so high? The QLI is fairly low, but the IEF is high. I think what we are seeing here is time lag. It would be interesting to do a time adjusted chart to see if some of the outliers converge. A delta IEF with a time adjusted delta QLI would be a much stronger correlation than IEF and QLI alone.
If you go to the main IEF page, you can click on the country of choice and get an in depth analysis of that country's calculation. For example, for null, they have this to say:
Quote:
Background:
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Estonia, the smallest Baltic state, has been one of the most radical economic reformers among the former Soviet nations and has transformed itself into one of the world's most dynamic and modern economies. High GDP growth upwards of 9 percent per annum over the past two decades has helped to repair the country's economy. Estonia has strong trade ties to Finland, Sweden, and Germany, and its services and manufacturing sectors are thriving. The country aims to join the European Economic and Monetary Union in January 2010.
I agree it would be interesting to factor time into the analysis. The problem is finding the data. Most of that data I used was from wikipedia, but it's from all different years. It would be a lot of work to track down all the data and then analyze it. I'd also have to think about what would the best way to plot it out, seeing as 3D plots are hard to present on 2D paper.
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mvassilev
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posted June 27, 2008 12:45 AM |
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So we see that generally free markets correlate with a better quality of life.
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TheDeath
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posted June 27, 2008 02:00 PM |
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If you follow the stats
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mvassilev
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posted July 23, 2008 03:45 PM |
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Moonlith
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posted July 24, 2008 01:14 AM |
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Edited by Moonlith at 01:15, 24 Jul 2008.
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So we see that generally free markets correlate with a better quality of life.
What I see is that the further a government is distanced from its civilians (village level, region level, province level, state level, union level, world level), it affect two things:
- It is better for the "economy"; the rich elites and business.
- It gets worse for general Wellbeing.
The further distanced a government is from its civilians, the more people are regarded as numbers and statistics rather than living beings.
And yet, what you see happening is that people in general "approve" of such steps just because it happens to be "better for the economy".
Personally I find it disgusting, but then, I find stupid people disgusting as well, so I'm not sure which side I should be on.
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mvassilev
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posted July 24, 2008 01:16 AM |
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- It is better for the "economy"; the rich elites and business.
- It gets worse for general Wellbeing.
Oh, that's why living in caves was so wonderful. That explains everything.
In other words, the graphs contradict your statements.
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Moonlith
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posted July 24, 2008 01:22 AM |
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Edited by Moonlith at 01:22, 24 Jul 2008.
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You are comparing different ages. Try and compare on same levels of technology.
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mvassilev
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posted July 24, 2008 01:34 AM |
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Hmm... that may be true. It's certainly true that local governments are more responsive to the desires of citizens than the federal government is, which, at best, does nothing, and at its worst invades countries at the request of the military-industrial complex, all while printing money on a massive scale and sending out ridiculous "housing crisis aid" schemes, which are a combination of a power grab and terminal idiocy. On the other hand, I don't see why this is all better for the economy. It's worse.
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Moonlith
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posted July 24, 2008 01:42 AM |
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Companies apparently are better capable of competing with other companies on a bigger scale, or something, or so I was told. You see the same trend in companies for that matter: The more products and more efficiently a company produces on a mass scale, the further the owner is distanced from its employees and the more said employees become numbers rather than human beings.
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mvassilev
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posted July 24, 2008 02:00 AM |
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That's true. I don't see what that has to do with the government, though. And it may not be a bad thing, when it comes to companies. I'd rather be highly paid at a company who treated me like a number than be paid minimum wage at a company that thought of me as a person.
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TheDeath
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posted July 24, 2008 02:22 PM |
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I'd rather be highly paid at a company who treated me like a number than be paid minimum wage at a company that thought of me as a person.
That's because you only think about money 
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