Text 17965, 66 rader
Skriven 2006-02-23 19:41:46 av Alan Hess
Ärende: liberals less happy
===========================
This is for my conservative friends (and enemies <grin>.)  I thought you'd
enjoy it.

********

washingtonpost.com

By George F. Will
Thursday, February 23, 2006; A19

To bemused conservatives, it looks like yet another example of analytic
overkill by the intelligentsia -- a jobs program for the (mostly liberal)
academic boys (and girls) in the social sciences, whose quantitative tools have
been brought to bear to prove the obvious.

A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that conservatives are happier than
liberals -- in all income groups. While 34 percent of all Americans call
themselves "very happy," only 28 percent of liberal Democrats (and 31 percent
of moderate or conservative Democrats) do, compared with 47 percent of
conservative Republicans. This finding is niftily self-reinforcing: It
depresses liberals.

Election results do not explain this happiness gap. Republicans have been
happier than Democrats every year since the survey began in 1972. Married
people and religious people are especially disposed to happiness, and both
cohorts vote more conservatively than does the nation as a whole.

People in the Sun Belt -- almost entirely red states -- have sunnier
dispositions than Northerners, which could have as much to do with sunshine as
with conservatism. Unless sunshine makes people happy, which makes them
conservative.

Such puzzles show why social science is not for amateurs. Still, one cannot --
yet -- be prosecuted for committing theory without a license, so consider a few
explanations of the happiness gap.

Begin with a paradox: Conservatives are happier than liberals because they are
more pessimistic. Conservatives think the Book of Job got it right ("Man is
born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward"), as did Adam Smith ("There is a
great deal of ruin in a nation"). Conservatives understand that society in its
complexity resembles a giant Calder mobile -- touch it here and things jiggle
there, and there, and way over there. Hence conservatives acknowledge the Law
of Unintended Consequences, which is: The unintended consequences of bold
government undertakings are apt to be larger than, and contrary to, the
intended ones.

Conservatives' pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First,
they are rarely surprised -- they are right more often than not about the
course of events. Second, when they are wrong, they are happy to be so. Third,
because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government
-- they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They
believe that happiness is an activity -- it is inseparable from the pursuit of
happiness.

The right to pursue happiness is the essential right that government exists to
protect. Liberals, taking their bearings, whether they know it or not, from
President Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 State of the Union address, think the
attainment of happiness itself, understood in terms of security and material
well-being, is an entitlement that government has created and can deliver.

<snip>

The full column is on the Opinions page of the Washington Post.  *adh*

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