Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals. Discuss.
By Arthur C. Brooks
Turns more religiosity is part of the reason. Conservatives are more optimistic than liberals too.
Seems to me holding liberal secular ideas is a formula for making yourself unhappy.
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What the actual data on self-assessed happiness show, however, is that conservatives have a substantial happiness edge, at least by the time they grow up.
For three decades, the General Social Survey has asked a nationwide sample of adults, “Taken all together, how happy would you say you are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Here is a representative sample of the results:
• In 2004, 44 percent of respondents who said they were “conservative” or “very conservative” said they were “very happy,” versus just 25 percent of people who called themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” (Note that this comparison uses unweighted data — when the data are weighted, the gap is 46 percent to 28 percent.)
• Adults on the political right are only half as likely as those on the left to say, “At times, I think I am no good at all.” They are also less likely to say they are dissatisfied with themselves, that they are inclined to feel like a failure, or to be pessimistic about their futures.
• It doesn’t matter who holds political power. The happiness gap between conservatives and liberals has persisted for at least 30 years. Indeed, the difference was greater some years under Bill Clinton than it was under George W. Bush. Democrats may very well win the presidency in 2008, and no doubt many liberals will enjoy seeing conservatives grieving out about that — but the data say that conservatives will still be happier people than liberals.
Lots of other data sources tell the same story as the G.S.S. Furthermore, there are many related findings, such as the fact that gun owners are happier than non-gun-owners, on average.
Now, before any conservatives get out their big foam fingers and liberals flame me to within an inch of my life, let me stress what these data are not saying.
• The data don’t say that all conservatives are happy, that all liberals are unhappy, or that all conservatives are happier than all liberals. Such claims would be absurd and wrong.
• The happiness differences here do not indicate that conservatives are better than liberals, righter than liberals, or even that they deserve to be happier. In fact, a major criticism of conservatives by liberals is that they have no right to be so happy—that they really should feel worse because they are misguided, or even malevolent. I’m not claiming here that the right wing merits their relative happiness. You can be the judge of that.
• The differences here mask all sorts of variations between different flavors of conservatives and liberals. Are right-wing libertarians as happy as religious conservatives? Are economic lefties more or less depressed than social liberals? We don’t know, because the data are too limited to get into that kind of detail.
In a post next week, I’ll dig into why conservatives have the happiness edge, hypotheses about world view and psychological differences, as well as some important lifestyle distinctions between right and left. After that, I’ll write about the happiness differences between people with moderate and extreme political views.
In the mean time, I welcome your thoughts.
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
Later followups by Brooks:
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There is good evidence to back up demographic explanations for the happiness gap, and I have found in my research that they soak up about half the gap between left and right. Religion is arguably the most important of these characteristics.
Consider a couple of facts:
• The 2004 General Social Survey (G.S.S.) reveals that 43 percent of people who attended a house of worship weekly (“religious” people, for short) said they were “very happy” with their lives, versus 23 percent of people who attended seldom or never (“secularists”).
• Religious people are a third more likely than secularists to say they are optimistic about the future. Secularists are nearly twice as likely as religious people to say, “I am inclined to feel I am a failure.” Big happiness differences persist between religious and secular folks even when we correct for income, education, race, sex, and age.
Now combine these with the familiar evidence on politics and religion:
• According to the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, religious conservatives outnumber religious liberals in America by nearly four to one.
• The American political left is getting more godless, while the right is turning ever-churchier. While 27 percent of “extremely liberal” American liberals attended religious services weekly in 1974, only 16 percent did so by 2004.
In contrast, the percentage of “extremely conservative” church-attending conservatives rose over the same period from 29 percent to 57 percent.
No surprise, then: religious practice explains a good portion of the left-right happiness gap. In fact, when we combine religion and politics, happiness differences explode: see the chart below.
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
In my last post I showed the large happiness differences between religious Americans and secularists, and argued that this is a big part of the reason conservatives are so much happier than liberals. But I also noted that religion and other lifestyle distinctions still only explain about half the gap. In this post, I’ll look at the role of divergent world views to explain the rest.
Before I turn to my own explanations, here are two that I got from people I admire.
Nobel laureate and Princeton professor Daniel Kahneman has pioneered happiness measurement techniques with several of his colleagues (including Princeton star economist Alan Krueger, with whom I shared a fun discussion about happiness on a radio show last week). Mr. Kahneman told me that conservatives think the world is fairer than liberals do, and this makes them happy:
If you believe that people generally get from life what they deserve to get, and if you belong to the majority who are doing fairly well (employed and healthy, for example), you will probably be more satisfied with life than an equally fortunate person who believes that there is much stubborn unfairness in the world.
In other words, that liberal you know who drives a Beemer isn’t very happy about it because he feels guilty.
Psychologist Philip Tetlock is a professor of leadership at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He suggests that conservatives seek out simplicity and clear moral values:
Conservatives quite unapologetically prefer leaders who project can-do decisiveness and dissonance — free rhetoric anchored in solid moral principles.
Assuming that it is easier to be happier in a world where right and wrong are crystal clear, this might lead conservatives to be happier than liberals.
In my book I argue that conservatives are more optimistic about the future than liberals are, and believe in each individual’s ability to get ahead on the basis of achievement.
Liberals are more likely to see themselves and others as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. Consider a bit of evidence.
• The 2005 Maxwell Poll on Civic Engagement and Inequality asked, “How much upward mobility — children doing better than the family they come from — do you think there is in America: a lot, some, or not much?” Among those sampled, 48 percent of below-average income conservatives believed there’s “a lot,” versus 26 percent of upper-income liberals.
• In the same poll, 90 percent of the poorer conservatives agreed that, “While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.” Just 65 percent of richer liberals agreed.
• The liberal-conservative differences on these questions persist when we control not just for income, but also for education, sex, family situation, religion, and race.
You can decide for yourself whether the conservative edge in hope and optimism is warranted or not. You might think that conservatives are in La-La Land, and that people really are stuck, socially and economically. Or you might think that liberals are a bunch of pessimistic grouches. Some hypothesize that the basis of liberal political power is convincing folks that they are victims, and keeping them that way. Others say conservative power actively perpetuates what we academics like to call “false consciousness.”
So far, I have been clumping together all “liberals” and all “conservatives” in the discussion. Of course, there are many flavors of each, from centrists to radicals. So who is happier — moderates or extremists? That will be the subject of my next post.
But here’s a hint: Remember that guy in front of you in traffic with the “If You Aren’t Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention” sticker on his car? Believe it or not, he’s probably happier than you are (unless, of course, you have a similar sticker on your car). Stay tuned for proof, and in the meantime, thanks for your thoughts.
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com |
