Happiness lost Each year since 1972, the United States General Social Survey has asked men and women: "How happy are you, on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3 being very happy, and 1 being not too happy?" This survey includes a representative sample of men and women of all ages, education levels, income levels, and marital status--1,500 per year for a total of almost 50,000 individuals thus far--and so it gives us a most reliable picture of what's happened to men's and women's happiness over the last few decades. As you can imagine, a survey this massive generates a multitude of findings, (see the full report by Wharton Professors Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers) but here are the two most important discoveries. First, since 1972, women's overall level of happiness has dropped, both relative to where they were forty years ago, and relative to men. You find this drop in happiness in women regardless of whether they have kids, how many kids they have, how much money they make, how healthy they are, what job they hold, whether they are married, single or divorced, how old they are, or what race they are. (The one and only exception: African-American women are now slightly happier than they were back in 1972, although they remain less happy than African American men.)
Women are not "free" people. Some Westworld columnists pretend that huge remuneration from "productivity", broadcast exposure, marriage status, or all attributes foregoing establish an accurate index of the welfare every "woman," as compared to male and man reported satisfaction with individual performances in fulfilling life goals (if any).
Sadly, every woman is not female. Not every man is male. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
There are all sorts of damned if you do damned if you don't messages in America toward women. For example, women are expected to rear children, but there is little state support for women staying home with young children. There is no long term paid maternity leave with employment promise when she returns to work. The quality of child care is often second rate and even then expensive. The people who look after young children are often poorly paid and poorly educated professionals. The focus is on warehousing children, not cultivating their minds and bodies.
If a woman should quit her job to take care of children, then she earns no retirement (the government does not provide social security recognition, for example) and no income and it is nigh impossible to re-enter the workplace after several years of being a stay-at-home mother. Older women may feel useless in America after they no longer can have children, especially if no employer will hire them for what they are worth.
Conversely, if a woman should focus on her career, then she may be seen as a bad mother. She may have to go back to work weeks after her baby was born. Employers may be inflexible about hours, nursing, or needing to stay home with a sick child or family member.
Add to this an onslaught of negative body images and plastic body being held up as the example, a woman may feel compelled to spend time at the gym or saving up for plastic surgery or some other 'beautification' effort. Women are objectified and not taken seriously. Women politicians get more feedback on their wardrobe and hairstyles than their positions and policies.
Finally, American women are expected, I think, to do the housework and cooking. With only 24-hours in the day, there isn't much time left for a woman to do things for herself to help her be happy.
At the moment, it is interesting how much the financial crisis is changing the gender happiness perceptions. There is quite some talk, how much the crisis is hurting male egos, which probably shows, how relatively easy it was to grow macho together with growing markets (and might explain slightly growing male happiness perceptions).
But it is hard to see how the crisis can improve the general female happiness. Women might be indeed very sensitive to expectations, including their own - but they are also the choosers and expectation creators. If the future won't offer anything like what used to be conventional expectations, their gender sadness might inflate.
Female happiness must be much more than new feminist powers or opportunity promises. Humanity might have forgotten a lot of "know how" about happiness during the latest "enlightenment" revolution.
So at least some of the decline in happiness is due to fewer of the really unhappy women actually killing themselves. Reassuring, in a way.
Hamburg hopes its new half-a-billion-dollar concert venue, Elbphilharmonie, will help unite the city.HAMBURG, Germany -- Into a skyline dominated by the cranes loading and unloading the thousands of tons of goods that pass through its port each day, Hamburg is erecting an ambitious concert complex topped by an undulating clear glass roof. The projected cost of Elbphilharmonie has tripled in recent months to 323 million euros, roughly half a billion dollars, but project officials have staunchly defended the expense. The complex, they say, is more than an arts venue: It will give the city a fresh identity and help unite what is one of Germany's most socially divided populations. "This is a segregated city with completely different worlds from more slum-like parts to more suburban settings," said Elbphilharmonie's artistic director, Christoph Lieben-Suetter. "This [building] is exactly what is needed here: a bit of grand craziness."
HAMBURG, Germany -- Into a skyline dominated by the cranes loading and unloading the thousands of tons of goods that pass through its port each day, Hamburg is erecting an ambitious concert complex topped by an undulating clear glass roof.
The projected cost of Elbphilharmonie has tripled in recent months to 323 million euros, roughly half a billion dollars, but project officials have staunchly defended the expense. The complex, they say, is more than an arts venue: It will give the city a fresh identity and help unite what is one of Germany's most socially divided populations.
"This is a segregated city with completely different worlds from more slum-like parts to more suburban settings," said Elbphilharmonie's artistic director, Christoph Lieben-Suetter. "This [building] is exactly what is needed here: a bit of grand craziness."
BERLIN (Reuters) - One in seven Germans want the Berlin Wall back because they were better off when the country was divided, according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday ahead of the 20th anniversary of its collapse on November 9, 1989. The survey of 1,002 Germans by the Forsa institute published in Stern magazine said 15 percent of the country's 82 million long for the days when there were two Germanys. Some 16 percent pining for the Wall were westerners and 10 percent easterners.
BERLIN (Reuters) - One in seven Germans want the Berlin Wall back because they were better off when the country was divided, according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday ahead of the 20th anniversary of its collapse on November 9, 1989.
The survey of 1,002 Germans by the Forsa institute published in Stern magazine said 15 percent of the country's 82 million long for the days when there were two Germanys. Some 16 percent pining for the Wall were westerners and 10 percent easterners.
Google Books and most European countries are still at odds over whether the Internet giant will be allowed to extend it's business model from the US to Europe - scanning books and selling them in digital form online. In the De Slegte shop in Brussels book-lovers find a full four storeys of second hand books. Among them are many rare copies, books that long have been out of print. The people browsing the endless shelves for a hidden gem mostly want the real thing - a physical book. For many, the hunt for the book is almost as important as the book itself. "I would kill to find the book I want," one of them jokes. Just down the road from De Slegte bookshop, however, executives from Google have been setting out their vision for an entirely different world. A global empire of digitalized books that's set to revolutionize the way we read. Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Wíll reading a book made from paper soon be a thing of the past? "If I had my way in fifteen years from now, I should be able to go into a bookstore and buy any book ever published, any book ever printed," says Dan Clancy, Director of Google Books Engineering. "I should be able to buy it as a physical book or a digital book. Some people will physical books, some more digital books, others both."
In the De Slegte shop in Brussels book-lovers find a full four storeys of second hand books. Among them are many rare copies, books that long have been out of print. The people browsing the endless shelves for a hidden gem mostly want the real thing - a physical book. For many, the hunt for the book is almost as important as the book itself. "I would kill to find the book I want," one of them jokes.
Just down the road from De Slegte bookshop, however, executives from Google have been setting out their vision for an entirely different world. A global empire of digitalized books that's set to revolutionize the way we read.
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Wíll reading a book made from paper soon be a thing of the past?
"If I had my way in fifteen years from now, I should be able to go into a bookstore and buy any book ever published, any book ever printed," says Dan Clancy, Director of Google Books Engineering. "I should be able to buy it as a physical book or a digital book. Some people will physical books, some more digital books, others both."
Alyssa Monks paints these images, paying meticulous attention to detail. The 31-year-old said: "I have always wanted to paint for as long as I can remember. "I took classes at school and then went to college and University before ending up at the New York Academy of Art"
This research says that advertising has "seriously interfered with the quality, accuracy, and breadth of content and programming in the media." The proposed solution is to ensure that there is "vigorous competition in media markets," and to provide "public funding of informative media as a public good": Regulating for an independent media: The problems of political and commercial bias, by Matthew Ellman and Fabrizio Germano, Vox EU: There is a crisis in media and journalism, and policymakers have to tackle both political and commercial influence in the media. Political bias has been thoroughly analysed in the economics literature, but commercial bias has received markedly less attention than it deserves. For decades, commercial interests delayed public awareness of tobacco health risks. The literature on tobacco and public health contains the most systematic evidence. Health risks went essentially unreported in the mainstream press for decades (Baker 1994;Bagdikian 2004). Reporting on climate change and its causes suffered similar delays. More recently, some critics are suggesting that business interests (especially of insurance and pharmaceutical companies) are impeding an informed and balanced media debate on healthcare reform in the US. Others claim that a truly independent media could have helped to avert or mitigate the current financial and housing crises. -Skip- Some options include: creating national endowments for journalism and media to ensure long-term financial independence allocating funds to content-providers as a function of audience and/or via a range of voting mechanisms expansion of the public broadcasting model to provide space and visibility for these outside content-providers subsidising investigative reporting (at the local, national, and international levels) as well as professional training for journalists subsidising media infrastructure (see e.g., Obama and Gordon Brown's commitments to breach the digital divide) removing advertising from public TV stations, as imminent in France and Spain. This reduces commercial bias of their content and pressures their competitors to reduce bias; it also shifts ad revenues to private media, complementing plans to subsidise media consumption and media entry.
Regulating for an independent media: The problems of political and commercial bias, by Matthew Ellman and Fabrizio Germano, Vox EU: There is a crisis in media and journalism, and policymakers have to tackle both political and commercial influence in the media. Political bias has been thoroughly analysed in the economics literature, but commercial bias has received markedly less attention than it deserves. For decades, commercial interests delayed public awareness of tobacco health risks. The literature on tobacco and public health contains the most systematic evidence. Health risks went essentially unreported in the mainstream press for decades (Baker 1994;Bagdikian 2004). Reporting on climate change and its causes suffered similar delays. More recently, some critics are suggesting that business interests (especially of insurance and pharmaceutical companies) are impeding an informed and balanced media debate on healthcare reform in the US. Others claim that a truly independent media could have helped to avert or mitigate the current financial and housing crises. -Skip- Some options include: creating national endowments for journalism and media to ensure long-term financial independence allocating funds to content-providers as a function of audience and/or via a range of voting mechanisms expansion of the public broadcasting model to provide space and visibility for these outside content-providers subsidising investigative reporting (at the local, national, and international levels) as well as professional training for journalists subsidising media infrastructure (see e.g., Obama and Gordon Brown's commitments to breach the digital divide) removing advertising from public TV stations, as imminent in France and Spain. This reduces commercial bias of their content and pressures their competitors to reduce bias; it also shifts ad revenues to private media, complementing plans to subsidise media consumption and media entry.
Political bias has been thoroughly analysed in the economics literature, but commercial bias has received markedly less attention than it deserves. For decades, commercial interests delayed public awareness of tobacco health risks. The literature on tobacco and public health contains the most systematic evidence. Health risks went essentially unreported in the mainstream press for decades (Baker 1994;Bagdikian 2004).
Reporting on climate change and its causes suffered similar delays. More recently, some critics are suggesting that business interests (especially of insurance and pharmaceutical companies) are impeding an informed and balanced media debate on healthcare reform in the US. Others claim that a truly independent media could have helped to avert or mitigate the current financial and housing crises.
-Skip-
Some options include:
