thehallmarkcard t1_jbxswra wrote on March 12, 2023 at 3:36 PM

Reply to comment by ketzu in [OC] Well-being Distribution based on Income Bracket in the US by ketzu

So I think those takeaways are a bit difficult to see in this plot. I can see a very modest increase in wellbeing but it’s hard to know if that increase is even statistically significant. The wide distribution across all incomes is interesting but unsurprising of course in every income bracket there are happy and unhappy people. It’s also hard to accurately compare the income brackets because it looks as though the scale for the violin is the same. Ie we would expect the highest income to be “thin” because it’s the smallest population. Standardizing this would let us better see the distributions in a comparable way. I’m not sure if you even have that information available just a comment generally on the plot because the story is hard to pull out from even a moderate viewing.

ketzu OP t1_jbxtyaj wrote on March 12, 2023 at 3:44 PM

I generally agree, but I think it is a difficult topiy for reddit. I was originally motivated by seeing an article about this study on nottheonion. So I wanted to present an overview of the data as a whole that is hard to construct as "picking data for my agenda" or something along those lines. Reading the (popular) comments in the linked thread (and many similar threads around well-being and poverty) always leave me with the impression that many seem to think that they'd be happy if they just made more money, implying the "reverse" I mentioned before. Unfortunately the paper didn't have a nice overview of the data, just the graph discussing the point they were making - which makes sense for a paper! (Note: For individuals it might be true, not implying that those redditors are wrong per se.)

It also seems that I kinda lost the interpretability because I had some time to play around with the visualization and getting used to what I was looking at... :/ It's hard to notice this when you already know what you are looking at.