January 9, 2003
REGRESSIVE PROGRESS:
And the pursuit of happiness: 'Tis the season to be happy - but will it last? (History News Network, December 27, 2002)It is a time of the year when people wish each other happiness, yet it is a remarkable fact that people are unlikely to be any happier this Christmas than 50 or 100 years ago. Although life has improved to a degree our parents or grandparents could scarcely have imagined, we are - in general - no more satisfied with life. The American Declaration of Independence proclaimed the pursuit of happiness as an "unalienable" right - but greater happiness is an elusive target. [...]The link between well-being and marriage is particularly strong. Married people live longer - about three years extra, on average. They are richer,earning between 10 and 20 per cent more than single people. And they are happier, whatever comedians say about their spouses.
Is this because the most productive and healthiest people are those who marry and stay together? Apparently not: young married people earn little more than singles but the gap widens as they age. The two professors suggest that married people are driven by their genes to work harder, to impress each other and build the family nest. Once married, they eat better and worry less, improving their overall well-being.
The happiness that can come from family life is also reflected in the Pew Center survey. In every one of the 44 countries, family life was the greatest source of satisfaction - ahead of income, jobs, the state of the country or the state of the world. In most, the satisfaction ratings for family life were more than 80 percent.
This misunderstanding has played itself out most spectacularly and disastrously in feminism. One of the key premises of feminism was that our great-grandmothers must have been miserable and that women would be more "fulfilled" if they could only ditch the outmoded model of the traditional family and go out into the world and support themselves financially. So we are arrived in the early 21st century and the family has been nearly demolished, most women have to work (because in order to double the workforce business had to halve remuneration), and, far from being "fulfilled", they find themselves miserable, or at least conflicted. Great grandma, even wearing an apron all day and bearing ten kids, was likely more happy than her great grandaughters are. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 9, 2003 5:25 PM
You left out the change in average tax burden, from 10% of income to 52%. Two incomes wouldn't be necessary if the tax rate hadn't quintupled.
Posted by: Christopher Badeaux at January 9, 2003 4:48 PMI remember going to college and lawschool in the '80s with women who would constantly talk about how their mothers were oppressed. It always did strike me as whistling past the graveyard.
Posted by: David Cohen at January 9, 2003 6:29 PMMy great-grandma starved to death during
Reconstruction. I'd say my sister is probably
a lot happier than great-grandma was.
I doubt it. I bet great-grandma was happy until the South lost.
Posted by: oj at January 9, 2003 6:57 PM"(because in order to double the workforce business had to halve remuneration)"
Your quote above is a classic example of the "lump of labor" fallacy. The LoL fallacy holds that their is a fixed amount of work to go around; however, in a market economy, more wage earners means more consumption means more work to satisfy the consumption.
Ordinarily it is the communitarians (left) which falls prey to this.
Jeff Guinn