The Well-Being Gap Between Liberals and Conservatives | Hacker News Reader

The Well-Being Gap Between Liberals and Conservatives

americanaffairsjournal.org

17 pointsnoch8 comments

When did the word 'liberal' start to be used as synonym of progressive or to mean 'opposed to conservative'? because I don't think it should be like that

Roughly speaking, the 1930s.

It's a US-only phenomenon. In Europe, liberalism means something roughly closer to "small-government libertarian". It meant that in the US, too, up to the early 20th century.

Then it got associated with a reform movement that was not as radical as the progressive movement, which promoted very active government. It became contrasted with conservatism, which meant "avoid socialism at all costs" in the United States.

That's still more or less what the terms mean, but none of them have precise definitions. They're kinda-vaguely useful in a study like this, which is deliberately drawing really broad generalizations. Whether it's conclusions are useful, I can't really say.

> epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and coauthors identified a significant gap in depressive attitudes between liberal and conservative teens

Seems to be about teens as opposed to everyone

Ahh yes well being as a bar chart. I can’t possibly see how this will go wrong.

The problem with this and many other self-reported happiness surveys is that they measure what people think about themselves, rather than actually observing their behaviors.

Generally, Conservatives ideologies (by nature) lean toward conformism, and being happy is a type of conformism.

Looking at natural experiment representations of happiness (like obesity/compulsive eating, alcohol abuse, etc.), the narrative is much less clear

EDIT: Even moreso, at a global level, liberalism appears to be huge positive indicator of self-reported happiness [0], so take this with a grain of salt.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

In my experience liberals tend to have less coherent philosophies and understanding about how the world works, and more often than conservatives have "nothing matters" nihilistic beliefs, so I'm not too surprised they have more mental illness and lower happiness. They also more often advocate odd life paths (anti-marriage, anti-kids, pro-drugs, pro-transgenderism, sex-positive, polycules, etc.) that tend to result in more unhappiness.

>In my experience liberals tend to have less coherent philosophies and understanding about how the world works

You may want to test whether you're trapped in a confirmation bias bubble, as sounds likely.

Each group, conservatives and liberals, tends to feel the other group has "less coherent philosophies and understanding about how the world works" than their own group.

I think GP is pointing out a legitimate asymmetry between the "two sides": there's one* way for a conservative to do things the way they've always been done, and there's an infinite* number of ways for a progressive to change things to do something different, for better or for worse. The Paradox of Choice affects one side much, much more than the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

* I'm exaggerating a bit of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com