Many married couples are perfectly happy, but don’t ask politically correct behavioral scientists.
According to Paul Dolan — whose Happy Ever After: Escaping The Myth of The Perfect Life published in January — unmarried, childless women are the happiest group of people.
Dolan made his claim in Happy Ever After based on the American Time Use Survey, which asked married, divorced, separated, widowed, and never-married people to report their levels of happiness.
“Married people are happier than other population sub-groups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are,” Dolan said at an event last month. “When the spouse is not present: f–king miserable.”
The problem with this assertion is that it doesn’t actually reflect what the survey said. As economist Gray Kimbrough pointed out, the survey didn’t ask for a response before and after a spouse was in the room. Kimbrough told Vox, “It’s a phone survey.”
The “spouse absent” category to which Dolan was referring means the couple is not living together — that they’ve split up — not that they were merely absent from the room where the survey was being taken.
Dolan’s erroneous and rather ridiculous claim, which he admitted to Vox was inaccurate, was changed in the Guardian article that cited his talk. It will also be edited in his book. But, as Kimbrough points out, that’s not the only way Dolan played fast and loose with the facts.
The citation in that second paragraph crucially does not say that there are no benefits to women marrying, only that they are *not as large as benefits to men*. An older article he cited earlier claims that unmarried women have 50% higher mortality rates than married women. 7/ pic.twitter.com/zRGJL82A5K
— Gray ‘serial millennial myth debunker’ Kimbrough (@graykimbrough) June 1, 2019
So there does not appear to be evidence supporting *any* of the dramatic claims in the press. While one has been retracted, I believe that all of them should be retracted and corrected. And I would be glad to walk @profpauldolan or any journalist through any of this. 12/12 pic.twitter.com/P5j4B4MRZx
— Gray ‘serial millennial myth debunker’ Kimbrough (@graykimbrough) June 1, 2019
Before Dolan got called out, news outlets ranging from Cosmopolitan and Elle to Fox and the Huffington Post repeated his claims, which were based on lots of conjecture and few accurate readings. Journalists, as well as readers, should take note that surveys are not always reliable, and they can easily be misread. This incident also contains a few hints about how science is constantly being misrepresented in the popular press. Some scientific narratives, it turns out, are just too good to check.
