Thread by @jasoncrawford

🤔

This is from theatlantic.com/family/archive…

Yes, I suppose if you cherry-pick your starting point, and assume that a change of any size is significant, you can interpret a flat line as a “trend”.

I didn't go find my own data, by the way, I literally just clicked the link in the article.

There's more. 🤔

Yes, if you use an insanely truncated y-axis, you can make a drop of about 5% over more than 40 years look like a crisis.

Here's a much better analysis from @OurWorldInData: “in the majority of countries the trend is positive”, and life satisfaction is correlated with income, both within and between countries: ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-…

The thing is, Brooks didn't even need to exaggerate the facts to make his point. He could have just said “amid these advances in quality of life across the income scale, average happiness is *not increasing* in the U.S.” And then written the exact same article afterwards.

The whole article is just a justification for a homey platitude that amounts to “money can't buy happiness”, with some blame on the “consumerocracy, bureaucracy, and technocracy” which supposedly don't deliver what they promise:

Did you notice the switch there? Consumer purchases promise beauty and entertainment—but don't provide love, purpose and meaning. In other words, they only deliver what they promise, not what they *don't* promise.

Brooks then concludes the opposite: that a promise was broken.

I *might* even agree with some of Brooks's conclusions, depending on how they're formulated. But this is a very poor way to argue for them.