,
11 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Google "Paul Dolan Marriage Happiness" and you'll find a zillion news stories saying something like "Happiness Expert Says Women are Happier Without Marriage and Children." All of the articles quote Paul Dolan of the LSE saying that when their spouses...
leave the room, married women admit in surveys that they are, in Dolan's memorable phrase, "f***ing miserable." But as @graykimbrough points out, this is almost certainly a misreading of survey data from the American Time Use Survey that present data on happiness...
in the categories Married Spouse Present and Married Spouse Absent. But those don't mean "spouse wasn't in the room when the question was asked" as Dolan claims. It means spouse isn't in the household.
No survey run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics like the American Time Use Survey is going to have spouses leave the room to get a more honest answer. These surveys are conducted by telephone (bls.gov/tus/atusfaqs.h…). So the whole...
"We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population." Alas, science is tricky. Perhaps there is other evidence in Paul Dolan's book backing up the claim. But I'm pretty sure...
that the American Time Use Survey doesn't show what Paul Dolan thinks it shows. I feel bad for Dolan and the student he thanks in his book for her work on the American Time Use Survey, Laura Kudnra. It's easy to misinterpret data. What is more interesting to me...
is how many people will now "know" that marriage and children are overrated for women because an LSE expert told them so. And if I am right and this really is such a bad misinterpretation, how many of these news sites will write an article explaining the mistake? I have written..
Dolan and Kudnra. I will keep you posted if they respond and I may write up something longer on this. The irony is that a few weeks ago I had an interesting twitter convo with @juliagalef where I suggested it might not be so helpful...
to have survey data on whether people are happy or unhappy having had children. I don't think survey data are very informative on this. People lie. And what makes most people happy or unhappy may have a different effect on any one individual. But this example above shows even...
the basic challenge of figuring out what you're measuring is tricky.
