Marriage and Money: How Much Does Marriage Explain the Growing Class Divide in Happiness?

-
What makes us happy? Many people would answer spending time with friends and family. But as it turns out, money can make a difference, too: There is happiness in not having to worry about paying your bills and in living in a comfortable and safe home.
In a recent analysis of 40,000 Americans over age 30 in the General Social Survey, we found that people with more money were happier, as were people with more education and more prestigious jobs.  
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Because the survey data went back to the 1970s, we were able to measure whether the link between happiness and money changed over time. It has: happiness is now more strongly linked to money than it once was. Happiness is also more strongly linked to education and job prestige, other measures of socioeconomic status (SES). 
Among White Americans, the happiness of lower-SES people decreased over time as the happiness of higher-SES people stayed steady. Among Black Americans, the happiness of higher-SES people increased as the happiness of lower-SES people stayed the same. In both cases, the class gap in happiness widened between the 1970s and the 2010s. So not only does money seem to buy happiness, but it buys more than it used to.
The question is: Why? Income inequality is one reason: The divide between the rich and poor is much larger than it used to be. However, relationships also make a difference to happiness—more specifically, marriage.
Over time, the class gap in marriage rates has widened. While marriage rates (the percentage of people who are married) once differed very little between White Americans with a college education and those without, marriage rates have declined more among those without a college degree (see Figure 1; this zeroes in on Whites to rule out any possibility that effects are due to race). 
This growing marriage gap matters for happiness because married people are happier than unmarried people by a fairly large margin. In the GSS, for example, 42% of married Whites said they were very happy, compared to 22% of unmarried Whites; 33% of married Blacks said they were very happy, compared to 17% of unmarried Blacks (see Figure 2; this uses all of the data from 1972-2016).
Over time, the number of unmarried people in the lower-SES group grew much faster than in the higher-SES group. The result: Less happiness among those with lower SES. Although marriage doesn’t account for the entire class gap, it does explain about half of it.
This data can’t answer the question of whether marriage causes happiness or happiness causes marriage. Nevertheless, it does suggest that one reason for the growing class gap in happiness is the growing marriage gap by class. If some of the causation goes from marriage to happiness, then encouraging marriage might be one way to close the gap.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The bioecological model

-
Image
An email sent to Kristin Jacobson, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago Medical School Dear Prof. Jacobson, I was just leafing through my University of Chicago Magazine this evening when I came across the article summarizing your new grant. I have to say I was amazed. Though the author tiptoed around the area under investigation, you are entering some very choppy waters. The attempt to identify the genetic and biological contributions to anti social behavior and cognition is normally considered taboo, since it inevitably ventures into racial variables. Though I am familiar with some work reported in press releases and abstracts of journals, as you can see from my weblog, most researchers, considering the downside, tend to avoid such studies, even with the best of intentions. I can't help be reminded of the unfortunate lesson of Chicago's Dr. Bruce Lahn, with whom you undoubtedly have discussed your research interests. As was noted several years ago in the Wall Stre...
Read more

Brain imaging study suggests risk-taking behaviors can be contagious

-
Image
BY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ON APRIL 14, 2016  COGNITION Why do we sometimes decide to take risks and other times choose to play it safe? In a new study, Caltech researchers explored the neural mechanisms of one possible explanation: a contagion effect. The work is described in the March 21 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . In the study led by John O’Doherty, professor of psychology and director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, 24 volunteers repeatedly participated in three types of trials: a “Self” trial, in which the participants were asked to choose between taking a guaranteed $10 or making a risky gamble with a potentially higher payoff; an “Observe” trial, in which the participants observed the risk-taking behavior of a peer (in the trial, this meant a computer algorithm trained to behave like a peer), allowing the participants to learn how often the peer takes a risk; and a “Predict” trial, in which the ...
Read more

Temperamental differences by race

-
Excerpted from: Solving The African IQ Conundrum : "Winning Personality" Masks Low Scores By J. Philippe Rushton VDare August 12, 2004 https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t148855/ Over a century ago, Sir Francis Galton initiated research into individual and race differences in intelligence and temperament. He was the first to propose the study of human twins and of selective breeding in animals to disentangle the effects of heredity and environment. And it was Galton—who spent several years exploring in what is now Namibia as a young man—who first contrasted the talkative impulsivity of Africans with the taciturn reserve of American Indians, and the placidity of the Chinese. Galton further noted that these temperament differences persisted irrespective of climate (from the frozen north through the torrid equator), and religion, language, or political system (whether self-ruled or governed by the Spanish, Portuguese, English or French). Anticipating later studies of tr...
Read more