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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

Funny, a gallop study just concluded, after polling people in the US from the early 2000's through 2023, that married people are happier- across race, age, gender, economic bracket and education level. Over time, this has ranged from well-being and happiness of those married over unmarried by 12-24 points difference.

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Is this a bit of a selection bias, though? Unhappy married people get divorced, so they no longer count in the married group. Similarly, happier people might be better able to find someone to marry them, therefore increasing the number of happily married people.

This would indicate there’s some survivorship bias there: married people are happier because unhappily married people are free to get divorced.

In addition, it’s obviously possible to be single, unhappy about it, but happier than you were in a bad marriage.

There’s no conflict between the facts that married people as a population are happier, and also that allowing people to leave marriages also makes them happier.

That's not the same estimand. Maybe happier people are more likely to get or stay married. Changes in laws are more likely to be exogenous to this.

At the same time the headline already simplifies the article, which focuses a lot on laws about division of property after divorce, and the article itself is dodging some of the negative consequences of easier divorce. See e.g.:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/423155

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-012-0435-7

For those who won’t click through those are two decent studies showing there are significant negative impacts on children based on childhood exposure to unilateral divorce laws — ie at least one parent could have unilaterally divorced.

That's not enough data to form any conclusions though, correlation is not causation. A lot of work has gone into trying to disambiguate "does marriage make people happy, or are happy people likelier to get (and stay) married?" but there is no clear answer yet.

Remember that if unhappy people are more likely to divorce or never marry, this has a double-whammy effect on the average happiness gap: the unmarried person pool gets unhappier because of the new person, and the "married person" pool gets happier on average because of a survivorship bias after the unhappy person was taken out. This happens even if marriage has no effect on happiness.

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