What Makes People Happy?
From the Seattle-PI:
The keys to happiness are simple — grow up, get married, have children, go to church and try to forget about the wilder days of youth.
Fifty-two percent of Americans say they are “very happy” with their lives, according to a Scripps Howard/Ohio University survey of 1,007 adult residents of the United States. Forty-three percent said they are “fairly happy,” 3 percent said they are “not too happy” and 2 percent are undecided.
That might not seem sufficiently ebullient for a nation that embraces the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right. But the survey found Americans with particular lifestyles — especially those having a family and planting roots in a community — are much more likely to say they have found contentment.
I’m doomed.
But wait!
Those just happen to be the groups of people who have the social advantages in our society. They’re the ones with the license to keep the rest of us as their slaves, rarely missing a chance to steal the freedom and money of others by imposing their will on the marketplace.
There’s more.
The study was sponsored by the Scripps Howard Foundation. This is a portion of their mission statement.
The Scripps Howard Foundation is the corporate foundation of The E.W. Scripps Company. Our mission is to advance the cause of a free press through support of excellence in journalism, quality journalism education and professional development. The Foundation helps build healthy communities and improve the quality of life through support of sound educational programs, strong families, vital social services, enriching arts and culture, and inclusive civic affairs, with a special commitment to the communities in which Scripps does business.
It looks like their “study” gave them a “scientific basis” for their agenda. The journalists and editors who covered the story are so lacking in excellence, none of them reported the correlation between the mission of those who paid for the study and the results.
I’ll file this under science even though its junk science.
The analysis of the data, which did include other factors such as wealth, did not attempt to correlate social power and the ability to control one’s own destiny with happiness.
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