The Happiness Gap
Bubba
10 Oct
Drill down into the data on mental well-being in the U.S. and you’ll find some startling trends. (The Genius Life)
Harvard Kennedy School’s Arthur Brooks during a recent appearance on “The Genius Life” podcast:
White liberal women under 30 have almost a six in 10 chance of having been diagnosed with a mental illness in America today. It's a really big problem … I don't think that being a political conservative is a panacea for being a happy person, but we see disproportionately these happiness and unhappiness effects in different parts of the population for sure.
Big picture: Studies consistently show a happiness gap between left and right, and, as the sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi has observed, “Conservatives do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives.”
Zoom in: Negative mental health outcomes and unhappiness appear to disproportionately affect both younger and older white women.
According to Pew Research Center data, 56% of liberal white women aged 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition.
Per the National Health and Nutrition Examination survey, white women aged 45 and older account for nearly 60% of all long-term antidepressant use.
What does make people happy? Research has shown marriage and family life are strongly linked to higher life satisfaction and mental health, especially among conservative women.
American Enterprise Institute fellow Brad Wilcox:
[Liberals] have embraced the false narrative that the path to happiness runs counter to marriage and family life, not towards it. They think independence, freedom and work will make them happy, which is why significant portions of the popular media are filled these days with stories celebrating divorce and singleness. A recent story by Molly Smith in Bloomberg, for instance, falsely claimed that “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer” (in reality, married mothers are richest) and spotlighted childless, single women who claim personal happiness: in the words of one, “I love my life and feel very fulfilled.”
The challenge for progressives is to understand and appreciate that these women are outliers. The secret to happiness, for most men and women, involves marriage and a life based around the family. The challenge for conservatives, of course, is to find new cultural platforms to communicate the value of marriage and family life to a young adult audience fleeing from the very way of life most likely to increase their odds of happiness.