Ezra Klein, now of The Washington Post finds… problems with erstwhile blogger Ross Douthat, now yet another conservative columnist at the New York Times.
Ross Douthat wrote a column yesterday bemoaning the decline of female happiness. The takeaway is that women are less happy, both in absolute terms and relative to men, than they were before Betty Friedan published her manifesto. “All the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness,” Ross writes.
That is, I think, what we’d call a correlation/causation error. There’s no evidence that women wouldn’t be much more unhappy without the advancements of the past 50 years. Same goes for men, for that matter. Both groups would be, among other things, quite a bit poorer. And this data would be measuring something else for women: Happiness at home, rather than at home and at work. Meanwhile, some of the data directly contradict Ross’s reading.
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What’s striking about [a graph Klein posts from the pdf-format paper Douthat cites] is not that women are less happy. It’s that men and women alike — that is to say, everyone — have grown markedly less happy over that time period. Women’s satisfaction has dropped a bit more quickly, but not all that much. And the two sexes are much closer to each other than to their 1960s-era selves. Or take this data [in a second chart], on suicide rates
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As the authors say, “contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample.” This is the sort of thing that economists might call “revealed preference.” Happiness is a subjective measure. Suicide rates aren’t.
Which is all to say that data this broad are, inevitably, a bit of a Rorschach test. A lot of variables go into individual happiness, after all. Among them, expectations. The Danish are famous for being very happy because they expect very little. Women might be less happy because they now have the opportunity to desire more from life. Or maybe not. The best we can say, really, is that the data are sort of interesting.
In other words Douthat’s not even coughing up apple- and orange-shaped hairballs. To do that he’d at least need to compare breakouts of stay-at-home vs. working women both from the years before and after feminism. And failing to mention that both men and women are measurably less happy today than they were before feminism doesn’t seem terribly honest. Also, to paraphrase Paul Krugman, “Um, dismantled safety net?”
Which raises the most significant point: a lot of things have changed in the last 50 years that pundits from across the spectrum could have chosen to blame for both the overall and sex-specific declines in happiness. Everything from the collapse of labor unions to the introduction of The Pill to Brown vs. Board of Education to prohibition of (forced) prayer in school to the advent of color television to the British Invasion to industrial competition from Japan and other Asian nations to civil rights to voting rights to the discovery of LSD to the Miranda Rights decision to… to… to… yeah, there are some things for progressives to be sour about but by and large it’s complaint a la carte for conservatives.
Yet the single issue Douthat pulled out of that giant bingo cage to blame for all that unhappiness was feminism?
Hmmm. Agenda much?
Submitted by 2975 (not verified) on Wed, 2009-05-27 23:09.
As Mark Liberman at Language Log points out, we are also talking about a pretty small effect size to start with.
Liberman is offering free copy of the original paper on his website. A nearly identical discussion of the paper appeared in the NYT two years ago.