In my flagship publication, Forecasts & Trends E-Letter, which I have been continuously writing in one format or another for over 45 years, I focus on the economy, the markets and investing in general, with some of my political commentary sprinkled in now and then. If you are a regular reader, you know that my focus can vary widely in F&TE.
Over the years, we have surveyed my F&TE subscribers numerous times asking if they would like me to focus on any other topics aside from whatever I normally write about. Every time, the answer has been the same: ”Just continue to write about what interests you the most.” So, that’s what I do. And I do the same thing for Between The Lines.
Today’s topic just happens to be one of the most interesting I ran across in the last week. The topic is, who are the happiest people in America? And the answer may surprise you… or maybe not. Let’s find out.
Americans who are married with children are now leading happier and more prosperous lives, on average, than men and women who are single and childless. And the gap is HUGE with 30% more married people happy than their unmarried counterparts.
Is that statement surprising? In an age that hails individualism, workism and a host of other self-centric “isms” above marriage and family, it may well be. But the reality is that nothing currently predicts happiness in life better than a good marriage.
But does this latest finding really surprise you? It didn’t me. I have long realized that my loving marriage and our wonderful kids are the main reasons why I am so happy with my life. I married my best friend and business partner 36 years ago, and she remains my best friend and business partner today.
It helps, of course, that we have a successful business with clients I consider friends all across the country. So, THANK YOU for that!!
Now let’s take a closer look at why married people are so much happier on average than their unmarried brethren.
New research from the University of Chicago found that marriage is the “the most important differentiator” of who is happy in America, and falling marriage rates are a chief reason why happiness has declined nationally. The research, surveying thousands of respondents, revealed a startling 30-percentage-point happiness divide between married and unmarried Americans. This happiness boost held true for both men and women.
“Marital status is and has been a very important marker for happiness,” researcher Sam Peltzman concludes. “The happiness landslide comes entirely from the married. Low happiness characterizes all types of non-married. No subsequent population categorization will yield so large a difference in happiness across so many people.”
Other factors do matter — including income, educational achievement, race, and geography — but marital status is most influential when it comes to predicting happiness in the study. “This difference is stable over time. It is about the same whether the unmarried state is due to divorce, separation, death of spouse or never having married,” Peltzman says.
What’s more, he finds that happiness has fallen since the turn of the millennium, and points to marriage as the biggest driver of that decline. In his words, the “recent decline in the married share of adults can explain (statistically) most of the recent decline in overall happiness”.
Notably, this decline has been concentrated among less educated and lower-income Americans; college-educated and affluent Americans have seen virtually no dip in their happiness. Psychologist and author Dr. Jean Twenge, in her own analysis of the General Social Survey, finds that the decline in marriage among working-class and poor Americans is one of the biggest factors explaining the growing happiness divide between the privileged and unprivileged.
The bottom line is the United States is increasingly divided when it comes to happiness between the haves and have-nots, in large part because record numbers of less privileged Americans are not succeeding at getting, not to mention remaining, married.
To fix what ails America, we need to renew marriage and familial ties, especially in poor and working-class communities where the fabric of family life is weakest. A big step forward would be to eliminate marriage penalties that keep too many parents from exchanging vows.
The blame lies at the federal level, where policymakers have established tax and safety-net benefits over the last six decades that too frequently punish marriage, especially for the working class and poor. Programs like Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit, for instance, often penalize couples with kids if they marry. The Government must stop making marriage a bad financial bet for lower-income families.
It’s well past time we acknowledged that helping American men and women build meaningful and satisfying lives for themselves and their children requires a renewed emphasis on the importance of marriage. This should not be dependent on where they sit across the class divide.
This is one of the more interesting topics I ran across in the last week. Hope you enjoyed it as well. I’ll leave it there for today.
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