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Apr
2
Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals
Filed Under conservativism, happiness, liberalism, psychology
Research on happiness shows some interesting conclusions: Parents are happier than those without children and conservatives are happier than liberals.
The numbers aren’t just lower for the left because George W. Bush has been making liberals crazy for the last 8 years. Studies show conservatives have been happier than liberals for 35 years.
The Economist reports about the happiness findings:
Despite this, American parents are much more likely to be happy than non-parents. This is for two reasons, argues Mr (Arthur) Brooks, an economist at Syracuse University. Even if children are irksome now, they lend meaning to life in the long term. And the kind of people who are happy are also more likely to have children. Which leads on to Mr Brooks’s most controversial finding: in America, conservatives are happier than liberals.
Several books have been written about happiness in recent years. Some have tried to discern which nations are the happiest. Many more purport to offer a foolproof guide to self-fulfillment. Others wonder if the obsessive pursuit of happiness is itself making people miserable. Mr Brooks offers something different. He writes only about Americans, thus avoiding the pitfalls of trying to figure out, for example, whether Japanese people mean the same thing as Danes when they say they are happy. And he writes intriguingly about the politics of happiness.
In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44% versus 25%). One might think this was because liberals were made wretched by George Bush. But the data show that American conservatives have been consistently happier than liberals for at least 35 years.
This is not because they are richer; they are not. Mr Brooks thinks three factors are important. Conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to be married and twice as likely to attend church every week. Married, religious people are more likely than secular singles to be happy. They are also more likely to have children, which makes Mr Brooks confident that the next generation will be at least as happy as the current one.
Some factors are in play in discovering happiness.
Religion makes people happier, whether they are liberal or conservative.
Also, ideology plays an important role in happiness. Conservative philosophy holds that people are in control of their destiny — it just takes hard work and effort — therefore conservatives tend to be optimists because they can always adapt and change their situation. Liberalism continually stresses the notion that the average person’s life at the mercy of outside powers and forces. The idea that the system is rigged is a depressing one indeed and is a factor weighing against liberals’ happiness.
Who are the happiest people?
Political extremists who believe they are absolutely right. However, those people are often so convinced they are right that they come to see their ideological opposition as being “evil,” reports the Economist. Despite their happiness, the extremists are the ones who make everyone else unhappy.
