Posts
The Pew Research Center just released results from its latest survey of happiness in the United States. The full 42-page report is posted here (pdf document). Here’s the big picture:
Just a third (34%) of adults in this country say they're very happy, according to the latest Pew Research Center survey. Another half say they are pretty happy and 15% consider themselves not too happy. These numbers have remained very stable for a very long time.
When you dig down into the details, interesting differences become evident. Some factors work out as one would expect. For example, Americans in good health are more likely to be happy than those with poor health; both higher income and higher educational attainment are associated with greater happiness; those who attend religious worship services weekly are happier than those who attend infrequently or never; married people are happier than those who are not. The latter finding holds true for both men and women. The findings that have been generating the most attention in the press are two: that political conservatives tend to be happier than liberals, and that Republicans are significantly happier than Democrats or Independents. (I’ll return to both shortly.)
Some other factors that reveal no relationship with personal happiness are also of interest. After taking marital status into account, people with children are no happier than those without. Men and women tend to be about equally happy. Retired persons are no happier than workers. Pet owners are no happier than those who do not own pets. Nor are cat owners any happier than dog owners.
When we try to combine all the correlates of happiness to get an overall picture, it gets complicated because many of the factors are correlated among themselves. Americans with higher incomes also tend to have good health, be married, and identify as Republican. (Obviously, these are statistical generalisations; they are not true for every individual.) Negative correlations also exist among the factors: frequent church-goers have, on average, lower incomes than infrequent church-goers.
The Pew report does not address the issue of causation. Do these factors cause people to be happy, or is the case that happy people tend to cultivate the characteristics? Does good health make people happier, or does happiness encourage better health? One could make a plausible prima facie case that causation runs both ways in this instance. For other factors, such as race or age, however, causation can only run one way: happiness cannot influence one’s age or ethnic background.
The really interesting factors, as mentioned before, are political. In terms of causation, how does the positive correlation between happiness and identifying with the Republican Party come about? What’s causing what here? Do happy people tend to be Republican, or does being Republican make people happy? It seems clear to me that it’s the former: happy people, on average, tend to affiliate with the Republican Party. The latter theory of causation implies that Democrats can become happier by identifying with a party whose policies they do not support. That can’t be right.
So, why do happier people tend to identify themselves as Republicans? The first thing to note is that this has been a consistent finding of the Pew Center survey of happiness since it began in 1972. The current gap of 16 percentage points (45 percent of Republicans are very happy, compared with only 30 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of Independents) is the second-largest on record, however. So, it seems to be unrelated to current political success. It also seems to be unrelated to income: poor Republicans are significantly happier than poor Democrats. In fact, Republicans earning between $30,000 and $50,000 are happier than Democrats who earn over $75,000.
Just to complicate matters, the Pew Center survey asked about political ideology as well as party identification. It turns out that party affiliation is stronger than political ideology. Conservative Republicans are happier than conservative/moderate Democrats, and moderate/liberal Republicans are happier than liberal Democrats.
Pew Research fudges the moderates in both parties: On the Republican side, the moderate group is combined with liberal, while on the Democrat side, moderate is combined with conservative. I surmise that’s because liberals comprise the smallest group in the Republican Party and conservatives the smallest in the Democrat Party, so, to bolster the sample sizes, moderates were combined with the smaller grouping. In practice, I would suspect that shifting the moderates like that makes little difference.
(I found it surprising that political affiliation is a stronger factor than political ideology, but I’m a Canadian and I don’t belong to any political party, so perhaps I’m missing something about the culture of American party politics.)
George Will has some ideas as to why conservatives/Republicans are happier than liberals/Democrats. His piece is astute and thought-provoking, but I think he could have been clearer on some aspects.
While 34 percent of all Americans call themselves very happy, only 28 percent of liberal Democrats (and 31 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats) do, compared with 47 percent of conservative Republicans. This finding is niftily self-reinforcing: It depresses liberals.
Mr Will left out this other tidbit found on the same chart (the previous one in this post): 45 percent of moderate/liberal Republicans are very happy. As Pew points out, party affiliation is a stronger correlate of happiness than is political ideology. 
The difference in very happy people is 13 percentage points between conservatives and liberals; between Republicans and Democrats it’s 15 points; between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats it’s 19 points. When it comes to happiness, there’s something about the Republican Party as such that goes beyond political ideology.
Even taking into account the high happiness rating of moderate/liberal Republicans, I would think that Mr Will’s point still holds true.
The right to pursue happiness is the essential right that government exists to protect. Liberals, taking their bearings, whether they know it or not, from President Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 State of the Union address, think the attainment of happiness itself, understood in terms of security and material well-being, is an entitlement that government has created and can deliver.
On Jan. 3, 1936, FDR announced that in 34 months his administration had established a new relationship between government and people. Amity Shlaes, a keen student of FDR's departure from prior political premises, says, The New Deal had a purpose beyond curing the Depression. It was to make people look to Washington for help at all times.
Anyone who consistently looks to the government for help is in for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness.
