Amusing yet insightful comment, projekt.

To add to your wondering, I would be curious to see if the study included an assessment of what income percentage lower-wage workers spend on drink, and if it still evens out to an 'income boost.'

However, their hypothesis does have some grounds... I would be interested to see their stats in the journal.

This wouldn't be valid unless they assigned a group of people to drink and a group of people not to drink. That is to say, are social, successful people more inclined to drink, or does every person who has a few drinks turn into a social and successful person? The only way to be sure is to randomly assign people to a drinking group and a non-drinking group and measure their future incomes. However, that would be unethical. Therefore we will never know for sure if drinking actually causes people to have higher paying jobs.

If you're drinking for any reason other than to get completely fucked up; you're wasting perfectly good moonshine.-wolfer

If you're drinking for any reason other than to get completely fucked up; you're wasting perfectly good moonshine.-wolfer

NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER. -AcidBurn

Nocal, I am not sure about the ethics around the the control group. Is it unethical to denty them drink or unethical to grant them potential future income if indeed there exists a positive correlation between drink and profits?

The study's sponsor is called the 'Reason Foundation' seems like a libertarian policy research institute. Here is a blurb:

Reason Foundation’s mission is to advance a free society by developing,
applying, and promoting libertarian principles, including individual
liberty, free markets, and the rule of law. We use journalism and
public policy research to influence the frameworks and actions of policymakers,
journalists, and opinion leaders.

The foundation's Policy Brief #44 about the study, avialable here in PDF, states that they believe drinking enhances social capital and that social drinkers earn more money than people like Wolfer. In particular they address your concerns about methodology with some fancy statistical voodoo maths:

However, reverse causation is a potential problem in cross-sectional analysis. Auld (forthcoming) dealt with this by presenting a structural model that incorporates smoking and drinking decisions, and he also found a wage penalty for abstinence. In single-equation models, Auld estimated that
abstinence resulted in a 10 percent decrease in earnings. In his structural model, the earnings penalty for abstention increased to 25 percent. When controlling for smoking status, Auld found no drinking penalty, even for heavy drinkers.3 Thus, several studies have shown that drinking positively affects earnings, a finding robust to different data sets and methodologies.4

I hope that helps. and cheers!

Actually scratch that, I guess in smaller amounts it wouldn't be unethical. However this study was clearly correlational, as well as poorly done and uncontrolled in every way, and therefore can't ascribe causation. That is, they don't actually know whether it's drinking or another variable altogether. What a bunch of bullshit.

I admire your devotion to empiricism

Quite true, nocal. Correlation does not necessarily denote causation.

You sound like you have some psych training to you; am I right?

You sound like you have some psych training to you; am I right?

There are times when other people here might describe me as 'unable to shut the fuck up about it.'

But yeah, I hate that this stuff gets misrepresented as it does. fl_projeckt's logic is just as sound as that of the experimenters.

Don't forget mr. psycho, that this study was done for political reasons, the researchers had their results before they began.

I am an alcoholic - and rich. (Yahoo)