Jake called my attention to a recent public interest story in the NYTimes, about using the results of an on-going telephone survey on predict the demographic profile of happiest man in America. It seems like they’re making fun of simple models, a pursuit which I approve of:
The New York Times asked Gallup to come up with a statistical composite for the happiest person in America, based on the characteristics that most closely correlated with happiness in 2010. Men, for example, tend to be happier than women, older people are happier than middle-aged people, and so on.
Gallup’s answer: he’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year.
But the joke is that they made a few phone calls and found the guy… he looks pretty happy.
Healthy Algorithms 