Job Satisfaction, Education, and the Hedonic Treadmill
I won’t deny that there’s a lot of interesting material in “Priceless: The Nonpecuniary Benefits of Schooling” (Oreopoulos and Salvanes 2011, Journal of Economics Perspectives). The theme, of course, is that the benefits of schooling go far beyond mere extra income. I was struck, though, by the tiny effect of education on job satisfaction. Take a look at the fraction of people who are fairly, very, or completely satisfied with their jobs as a function of education:
[The black bar shows the raw result; the white bar holds income constant.]
Dropouts are just 7 percentage-points less satisfied than college grads? Hmm.
But what happens if you treat the GSS’s original 1-7 scale (1=”complete satisfied”, 7=”completely dissatisfied”) as a continuous variable? I expected to see a bigger effect of education, but I was wrong. The correlation isn’t just statistically insignificant; it reverses sign, with every year of education predicting a score .006 higher (=less satisfied). Controlling for log income, education actually predicts noticeably lower job satisfaction:
I haven’t spent a lot of time with this data, so perhaps I’ve made a mistake somewhere. But the simplest interpretation is that people with more education expect more from their jobs – financially and otherwise – so they’re harder to please. Net expected effect of education on job satisfaction: roughly zero. The hedonic treadmill strikes again?
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