Self-Care

Dating coach James Bauer writes:

Psychologists call it “self-care.” I have seven super-easy suggestions[3] for injecting some self-care into your daily routine.

1. Know your no’s.

Make a literal list of things you don’t like to do. It might include optional activities you don’t enjoy (like seeing horror movies), or limiting when you do some things (like not checking work email at night). Then don’t do those things.

2. Don’t skimp on sleep.

Sleep can help keep your appetite in check, boost cognitive ability, lift your mood, help your body heal, and even lower your blood pressure.[4]

3. Workouts help you work stuff out.

Besides burning calories and toning muscle, exercise improves your mood, super-charges your energy levels, and helps you get better sleep.[5]

4. Give meditation a try.

Mediation keeps your brain young, works as a natural antidepressant, helps you concentrate, and reduces anxiety.[6]

5. Do the family thing.

Time with family can be very rewarding. Who doesn’t like to feel loved? And if you’re not on the best of terms with your biological family, consider adjusting your definition of “family” to include what I call “chosen family” – your friends that are like family.

6. Be completely chill at least once a day.

Every day, spend at least a few minutes doing something completely relaxing. Take a bath, go for a short walk, or just veg on the couch without trying to accomplish anything.

7. Be completely selfish at least once a day.

Every day, do something purely for your own pleasure. Hang out with a friend, read fiction for fun, or treat yourself to a really good meal.

Term Paper

Due by 11 PM Friday, May 5, 2023.

Your term paper should incorporate a revised version of what you wrote for your Analysis Task and be 4-6 pages longer than that revision of what you wrote for your Analysis Task. That is, the rest of your paper beyond what you wrote for the Analysis Task should be 4-6 pages.

Here are some of the main things I’ll look for in your term paper:

  1. Write well: have a thesis statement and a theme that you follow through

  2. Critique a paper in the academic literature on topics related to things we have discussed in class. Don’t choose one of my papers. But the references lists in my papers on happiness and of the other papers listed below are good places to find a paper.

  3. (Drilling down on point 2.) Assume that the paper has flawed statistical interpretation. (In particular, results are typically overinterpreted to make them sound more exciting.) Do better on the statistical interpretation front. Use all of the things you learned about statistical interpretation in class that are relevant. (I’ll subtract points if a statistical interpretation principle was clearly relevant to what you are critiquing or to your own analysis and you don’t discuss it and add points if you do a great job discussing an issue.) The goal is not to solve everything but to show your awareness of the issues and do what can readily be done to think about what the issue implies. (For example, it is great if you can say which direction a bias is.)

  4. Weave in a revision of your analysis task. The integration of this with your critique of a paper in the literature doesn’t have to be perfect, but it is a plus if you can make the critique of a paper in the literature and your own statistical analysis fit together with a theme.

  5. Be timely: because of the exigencies of making grades for this and my other course, it is especially important that I get these term papers by the due date. However, I will still accept them, but with some points off, up to two days late.

The main idea for the term paper is to discuss an academic journal article on well-being skeptically. (I’ll add suggestions for academic journal articles to write about to this post when I get a chance.)

Here are some ways you might want to be skeptical:

  1. Scale-use differences might be creating an illusion. (How?)

  2. There is likely to be statistical bias relative to what the author or authors seem to be claiming or implying. (Make sure to explain which direction you think any story of possible statistical bias would bias things. Is the estimate in the paper likely to be higher than the truth or lower than the truth? What does that say about the truth?)

  3. A result that has a nominal p-value of 5% (t-statistic of 2 or so) really has about a 50% chance of being spurious, as indicated by replication studies. (By contrast, a result with a nominal p-value of 1/2 % (t-statistic of 3 or more) has only about a 5% chance of being spurious, and so is relatively trustworthy. Here though, “trustworthy” had to be taken in a narrow sense. Something is probably going on with that coefficient, but what is going on may be very different from what the authors claim. (See for example the rest of this list of reasons to be skeptical!)

  4. Happiness is not the same as utility. As my coauthored papers “Utility and Happiness,” “What Do You Think Would Make You Happier? What Do You Think You Would Choose?” “Can Marginal Rates of Substitution Be Inferred from Happiness Data? Evidence from Residency Choices” and “Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference” suggest, there are many distinct meaning of happiness. Among them are:

    • utility

    • feeling happy

    • what people report on a survey about their happiness, life satisfaction or position on the ladder of life (all of which have a lot of data available)

    • Aristotelian noble happiness, often called “eudaimonia” or “eudaemonic well-being” in the literature

  5. Other theoretical issues

Papers with References Lists in which You Can Find a Paper to Critique (Note: Don’t Critique a Paper with Miles as a Coauthor—those papers are only included because they have highly relevant references lists):

Quiz #2 (Wednesday, April 26, 2023)

Blog Posts and Articles to Read to Prepare for the Quiz

Statistical Interpretation Principles to be Tested on the Quiz

Steps for Applying the Benjamini-Hochberg "False-Discovery-Rate" (FDR) Procedure for Multiple-Hypothesis-Test Correction

  1. Identify a group of hypotheses among which you would shift emphasis according to how good the results look. Note: anything that you would want to talk about if it had strong statistical results counts!

  2. How do you identify groupings of hypotheses? Groups of hypotheses can be handled separately if you will keep the same level of emphasis between groups. For example, you will focus in on Group A and focus in on Group B and discuss them equally regardless of what the results are.

  3. Now, focusing in on one particular group, call the number of hypotheses in this set n. Multiply all reported p-values by n. Let’s call these “adjusted p-values.”

  4. Order all the hypotheses from the smallest adjusted p-value at the top to the largest adjusted p-value at the bottom. (Note that having the numbers in Excel makes this easy to do and then later restore your original order.) Call the hypothesis with the smallest adjusted p-value #1, the one with the second-smallest adjusted p-value #2, etc. And call the m with the smallest adjusted p-values the “top m hypotheses.”

  5. The conventional significant level for a False Discovery Rate is .1 (=10%). Let’s go with that, although it is easy to use other values.

  6. If the #m hypothesis has an adjusted p-value less than .1 m, then the top m hypotheses are all significant at a false discovery rate (FDR) threshold of 10%.

  7. Find the largest m for which the #m hypothesis had an adjusted p-value less than .1 m. This gives you the set of hypotheses within this group that are significant at the FDR 10% level.

Reflections on Your Meditation App Experience (11 PM Tuesday, April 18)

Due 11 PM Tuesday, April 18

Refer to the earlier post for the assignment itself.

For this report, write less than a page about what your experience was like in using the meditation app. What did you notice about what was going on in your head (in your consciousness)?

(I’ll set this up on Canvas well before the time. Don’t worry if it isn’t there yet.)

Reflections on What You Learned from JP's Big 5 Assessment (11 PM Tuesday April 11)

Report Due 11 PM Tuesday, April 11

Take the Big 5 assessment you will find at this link (https://www.understandmyself.com/)

(Let me know if you have trouble paying the $10. We can work something out.)

Note that there may be a little delay in getting your report back, so don’t wait until the last minute.

Write less than a page about the most interesting things you learned from the report.

(I’ll set this up on Canvas well before the time. Don’t worry if it isn’t there yet.)

Your essay on what you learned from this Big 5 assessment can be much shorter, but you can think of this post of mine as me doing this assignment:

Miles's Personality in 10 Facets of the Big Five

Paper on "Positive Intelligence" by Shirzad Chamine

Due: 11 PM Tuesday April 4, 2023

3-5 Pages

In addition to reading the book, this assignment asks you to do the saboteur assessment at this link and read the report you are sent about your own saboteurs. DO THIS RIGHT AWAY: IT MIGHT TAKE A DAY TO GET YOUR REPORT BACK.

As usual, provide evidence in your paper that you have read the whole book, and if you use ChatGPT, follow the clear citation rules for ChatGPT that I set out early on in the class. (See “Ideas for Using ChatGPT.” Using ChatGPT is optional, but it is an interesting thing to try.)

For your paper, think about the following questions:

  1. What did you learn from reading the report on your Saboteur assessment? Focus only on the things that resonated with you; ignore things you thought were off-track for you personally.

  2. What Sage strengths do you have that are associated with the Saboteurs you have? Here are examples of Sage strengths associated with each Saboteur. (There are more sage strengths associated with Saboteurs than these.) Below I have it notated as (bad: good). Saboteurs are often a strength going overboard, and going bad as a result:

    • Judge: blameless discernment

    • Pleaser: empathy

    • Avoider: peacefulness, peacemaking, flexibility

    • Stickler: meticulousness

    • Victim: self-knowledge, especially knowledge of what you want

    • Controller: leadership, making things happen

    • Restless: fun, creativity

    • Hyper-Achiever: achievement

    • Hyper-Rational: rationality

    • Hyper-Vigilant: vigilance

  3. In your own religious or non-religious background, how was what Shirzad calls “The Sage Perspective” taught or expressed? Reading my post “'Everything Happens for a Reason' for Nonsupernaturalists” will help clarify what I mean by this. This post is my personal answer to this question.

  4. What do you want to do in the area of developing the five Sage Powers to a greater extent?

  5. What role do you think Shirzad’s bag of psychological tricks and techniques could have in society in general?

Positive Intelligence Training

I do free positive intelligence training for economists. I am extending that invitation all those who have completed my Economics 4060 class, once you have a bachelor’s degree. Take a look at the description in these two posts:

If you are interested, just send me an email after you graduate.

In the meanwhile, I highly recommend the book Positive Intelligence, by Shirzad Chamine. And I think you will find taking this “saboteur assessment” interesting, you’ll get a report describing what your results mean.

2023 Quiz #1 (Wednesday, March 15)

Rules for Parsing Unsigned Arrow Diagrams

For OLS to be unbiased, you need Cov(X,epsilon) = 0 (exclusion restriction for OLS)

For IV to be unbiased, you need

  • Cov(Z,epsilon) = 0  (exclusion restriction for IV)

AND 

  • Cov(Z,X) is not zero    (relevance of the instrument)

How do you tell if a covariance is zero or not zero?

It works the same way for all 3 cases. Let me call the two things you want to know if the covariance between is zero or not A and B. (A and B come from the set {X,epsilon,Z). 

The covariance is NOT zero if EITHER

  1. There is a path following the one-way signs from A to B

  2. There is a path following the one-way signs from B to A

  3. There is a path following the one-way signs from something else to A, and a path following the one-way signs from that same thing to B. 

To show a covariance is zero, you have to check a lot of things. You need:

  1. There is no path following the one-way signs from A to B

  2. There is no path following the one-way signs from B to A

  3. There is no other thing from which there is a path following the one-way signs to A, and from which there is a path following the one-way signs from that same thing to B. 

The Analysis Task

The Analysis Task is now posted on Canvas.

Understanding the data:

This link takes you to the public Dropbox folder with the data files. Start by looking at the README file. Our Well-Being Measurement Initiative Research Assistant Jeffrey Ohl can answer your questions: johl@umich.edu Make sure to include Jeffrey's email address on any question about the data. He'll do most of the answering about the data himself. You can do almost anything for the analysis task; it just needs to be interesting.

  1. This is a link to take the Baseline survey so you can understand what data is available and what questions the data are based on: https://wiagl.gitlab.io/survey-baseline/?workerId=[enter your name, or your number plus same random numbers]

  2. This is a link to the Life & Psyche survey so you can understand what data is available and what questions the data are based on: https://ucla.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8kK2HMh6YrGSEF8. This is the survey that has most of the psychological indexes. (Baseline only has a few.) It has some other miscellaneous questions, too. Only some of the people who did Baseline went on to do this survey.

  3. This is a link to take the Bottomless HIT survey so you can understand what data is available and what questions the data are based on: https://wiagl.gitlab.io/survey-bottomlessa/. Only some of the people who did Baseline went on to do this survey (an overlapping, but different subset than those who went on to do the Life & Psyche survey.) You don't have to do all of this—just keep going until you have an idea for what analysis you want to do. The very first Block is a repeat of what is on Baseline, but it gets different after that.

Relevant Powerpoint File:

The analysis task is due by 11 PM Saturday, March 18. It needs to report the analysis with tables or figures and also have text that clearly explains the analysis. The idea is that this is like one section of a paper.

If you have an idea of what to do for the analysis task, just send me and Jeffrey an email and I'll give a reaction of how interesting I think it is, and maybe a suggestion for a tweak.

Seeing the analysis and its explanation as one section of your term paper. (Your term paper is due later, at 11 PM on Wednesday, May 3—the evening after the last class.) The idea is to make this analysis part of a larger discussion.

Including figures and tables, the analysis task should be at least 5 pages. I'll take a risk and not put an upper limit on the length of the analysis task. (The term paper beyond the analysis task should be between 5 and 10 pages, with closer to 5 being preferred.)

How to structure your writeup of the Analysis Task:

You can design a different structure, but a typical writeup could look like this:

  1. Here is an interesting question or questions. The answers matter (people care or should care) because: …

  2. Here is a statistical analysis that seems to have some bearing on this question or questions:

  3. On the surface the statistical results seem to say: …

  4. However, the following confounding factors could be giving rise to an illusion, making it seem like something is there that isn’t or that something is bigger or different than it really is.

Don’t forget to talk about the confounding factors! (4.)

Here is a Q&A about the analysis task:

Q:

What is the level of analysis you are expecting for this assignment? I’ve taken some stats classes, so I’m familiar with hypothesis testing and regression, but since this class doesn’t have a stats prerequisite I’m not sure how in depth I should go for this assignment.

Since most aspects of wellbeing are correlated with each other, it seems to difficult to use regression to analyze relationships between these aspects without running into reverse causality, cousin causality, or both. My knowledge of stats isn’t sufficient to avoid these problems in cases where instrumental variable regression isn’t a viable alternative. I’m wondering what you would suggest that I do to avoid this issue.

A:

At the low end, it could be simply some scatter plots or bar charts or other interesting graphs.

I don't expect you to have consistent estimates of anything, rather to be able to discuss any biases there might be in the estimates you do get, relative to something interesting. Please make the attempt to figure out the sign (+ or -) of any bias you discuss, and say what that would mean for the truth of the interesting thing one might care about. If there are multiple biases, try to figure out the sign of each one, even if all the biases put together can't be signed because some biases are likely to be + and others are likely to be -. Also, discuss whether you think a bias is likely to be large or small.

Advice for the Analysis Task:

  1. Use lots of graphs. I love scatterplots, but other types of graphs and figures can be good, too.

  2. It’s fine to do some statistics on individual variables, but make sure you do something that relates pairs of variables to each other.

  3. Do some formal statistical tests.

  4. When you test more than one hypothesis, set it up so you can do the multiple hypothesis test correction using the False Discovery Rate procedure!

  5. Make a distinction between being significant at the 5% level and being significant at the 1/2 % level.

  6. If something isn’t statistically significant, you say “I can’t reject the null hypothesis that …” NOT “I reject the alternative hypothesis.” If you want to reject a hypothesis, you have to set it up as a null hypothesis.

  7. Recognize reverse causality and cousin causality, including the consumer-theory-esque model I gave in class of how resources broadly construed help all good things, leading to the general principle (with only a few exceptions) that “All good things are positively correlated.” (This is a statement about the cross section.

  8. Define variables in full. You need to act like your reader doesn’t know what the abbreviations mean. So write out the full text of the aspects, and describe fully all other variables. (You will see that we do this in our papers.)

  9. Don’t order response categories alphabetically! They need to be ordered logically. For example, political leanings should be ordered from Left to Right and levels of education should be ordered from less to more.

  10. When you have interesting results for several variables that are along the same lines, think of creating a simple index to get more statistical power. That is, take simple averages of similar variables and treat that simple average as an index.

  11. Think about how nearly statistically exogenous your right-hand-side variables are. Other things equal, regressions with more nearly statistically exogenous right-hand-side variables are more interesting. That doesn’t mean you can’t do other things. Just think about this dimension.

  12. Think seriously about scale use. Any statistical analysis you do with aspect-of-well-being data you can probably do both with the raw aspect ratings and with (aspect rating - average of calibration questions). Doing both of those analyses will be much more interesting than just the one analysis.

Paper on "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos"

This assignment is now posted on Canvas. If you are way ahead of the game, you could even submit it now!

3-5 pages

Due Tuesday, February 28, 2023 at 11 PM

Choose one of the 12 rules that you think, if more fully implemented, would make a big positive difference in either your life or in American society (or in your home country’s society). Lay out how it could help you get more of what you want (or reduce your suffering) or help people in our society more generally get what they want (or reduce the suffering of people in our society). Go into depth. Also, answer: “Are there ways you would modify the rule to make it even better?”

If you disagree with all 12 rules, choose one and write about how it is bad.

Meditation App Assignment

Get a meditation app for your phone and use it. Late in the semester, I’ll ask you to write half to one page about your experience doing that.

Some Meditation Apps (some free, some that charge for a subscription)

I personally use Waking Up and 10% Happier. One of my Economics colleagues likes Headspace. I don’t know anything about Calm and Balance, they just came up when I put “meditation” in the app search box on my phone. Also, take a look at this article:

Documents for Review of Statistics Drawn from My “Monetary and Financial Theory” Class at the University of Michigan

Paper on "Happiness: A New Science," by Richard Layard

3-5 pages

Please put your name inside the document! I print them out to read them, and it is then hard to match up the pieces of paper with names. I will subtract points if you don’t put your name in there.

Documents can be Word documents or pdf.

Make sure to provide evidence in your paper that you have read the whole book. (For example, you might choose appropriate quotations from the book sprinkled from beginning to end, or simply address issues in the book that are raised near the end as well as issues that are raised near the beginning.

Due 11 PM Monday, February 13, 2023.

Themes/Questions to Answer:

What is the “conventional wisdom” about happiness that Layard presents?

Where is that conventional wisdom right and where is it wrong?

Where the conventional wisdom is right, what are the implications for your own life?

Note: Make sure that you don’t sound too much like ChatGPT. A hint about that is to be personal about “what are the implications for your own life.”