Study: Left-Handed Males Earn 15% More Than Right-Handed Males (All College Educated) | Hacker News Reader

Study: Left-Handed Males Earn 15% More Than Right-Handed Males (All College Educated)

econ.jhu.edu

8 pointsvlad14 comments

"Our findings are quite contrary to expectations. We do not find any evidence that left-handed individuals earn less, as might be suggested by the literature referred to above which generally finds that left-handed people tend to suffer more from factors that would reduce labor productivity. On the contrary, we find that left-handed individuals with higher levels of education have higher earnings than right-handed-individuals. More specifically, among the college-educated men in our sample, those who report being left- handed earn 15 percent more than those who report being right-handed. The size of this effect is economically and statistically significant."

"...Left-handers have a 3.5 percent greater return to a year of education than right-handers, whose return to a year of education is 4.6 percent; hence left-handers have a return of education of 8.1 percent (= 3.5 + 4.6). We therefore pursue this education difference in detail."

"We still estimate a 15.9 percentage point larger increase in wages for left- than right-handed men for completing some college, and a 26 percentage point larger increase for completing college (in both cases compared to completing no college)."

"The difference occurs only in the group with 16 or more years of education: of men entering college, those that are left-handed have a return to completing a college education that is 16.4 percentage points higher than the 23.4 percent return received by those that are right-handed."

Left-handed males are also supposed to die a significant amount of years earlier than right-handed males. :P

Maybe I'll be able to salvage those years if I slice off my hand.

Just invest your extra 15% wisely, and remake your local world in a left-handed friendly fashion. I've heard that part of the reason for the lower lifespan is increased accidents among lefties due to the clear favoritism for right-handers in the world (one might say reality has a clear right-handed bias).

But, I'm left-handed and not too worried about it. If it were a dramatic difference in lifespan, I guess we'd be even fewer in number than we are.

>If it were a dramatic difference in lifespan...

Maybe. But lefties could easily die, say, 10 years earlier on average, in theory, and still have plenty of time to pass on their genes.

Sweet I will count this as a plus, since being short means statistically I get paid less. Put them together and I probably earn what I deserve... Being in a start up I currently each 0.

Another instance of statistical randomness taken at its face value.

As breck describes above, it's not random when you discard the data you don't want :)

It is random if you randomly select which data you don't want and keep repeating till you get a significant result!

Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Why am I being downmodded?

I'm left-handed with a degree, currently earning 0% of right-handed males...

lol. You would be dropped from their study then. If you read the report, they drop a lot of outlier data points. Which is something to watch out for in general, as it means the researchers may have been biasing their results(most likely unintentionally) to find something they could report as significant.

Someone should make a T-shirt that says "I'm an outlier data point."

I need to give myself a raise.

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