Women are in a happiness decline

Via Greg Mankiw:

“According to new research from Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson:

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging — one with higher subjective well-being for men.

I am not at all sure how to interpret this finding. It sounds like either the women’s movement was a mistake or subjective happiness is not the right objective.”

BusinessMinded: This further adds to my inability to understand women.  This is a very interesting finding.  Whenever you dig into anything a little further you may find out that things are exactly as they seem.  Many people would probably assume that if the well-being of women is increasing that happiness would be increasing as well, but apparently this is not the case.

This is what is amazing about economics.  It doesn’t JUST deal with money.  It looks to explain relationships and tries to find causality.  Economists, especially Steven Levitt, can sometimes show that society’s way of thinking is quite backward and flawed.