Tall fat men earn more money than short skinny men

[jeffrey]

Australian researchers have found that tall workers earn more than their shorter colleagues, especially among men. A man who is six foot can expect to take home a "wage premium" of almost $1000 a year.

The boffins paint a bleak picture for the vertically-challenged, but there's good news for chubby workers: overweight people actually earn more than their skinny workmates....

Tall men earn $1000 more than short ones | Health & Lifestyle | News.com.au

[Broken Arrow]

Jeffrey, where do you come up with all these crazy articles?

[kork13]

Jeffrey, where do you come up with all these crazy articles?

I'll be honest, I kind of scoff at all of the random "studies" that are published. Most of them have one (or many) of a few significant problems in my eyes:

1) They're meaningless -- the "knowledge" gained by them are not beneficial to society.
2) They're too narrow -- if you read into the details, many studies only include a couple hundred people (if that), which (generally) is not statistically significant enough to extrapolate to the greater population. Or, the correlation being used as evidence is not significant enough to be trustworthy. Standard deviations, anyone?
3) They ignore significant factors -- age, race, gender, social class, location/society/nationality, and so forth are the simplest to see, yet often unaddressed.
4) They make faulty assumptions, and frequently do not even state what assumptions they make.
5) Correlation does not equal causation!!! This principle is fundamental to scientific research, and yet it's so frequently ignored.
6) ....I could go on, but I've probably made my point. It's seldom that I find a truly well-conducted, well-controlled study in which I actually put any credence.

Let's be honest with ourselves here....most of the "studies" out there are only conducted in order to a) earn some random numbskull a doctorate/grant money; or b) sell a product. You can massage statistics 8 ways from Sunday and "prove" a different conclusion every time.

(Is it too obvious that I'm very much the left-brained, hyper-logical, scientific thinker? )

[ezme]

It would be interesting to find out why this occured, but i must agree with Kork13 and say that these kind of studies are rubbish!

[jeffrey]

Jeffrey, where do you come up with all these crazy articles?

Let's just say that I spend far too much time on the Internet than is healthy

[SnoopyCool]

Duh... the higher wage earners can afford more food.