In his blog, Bryan Caplan makes some amusing and reasonable points about Barbara Ehrenreich’s criticism of some happiness research. My eyes widened as I read. This is so much better than what’s usually in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. It reminded me of Spy, except the level of thought is deeper. It’s as if blogs allow and encourage intelligent people to say what they really think about stuff. Whereas in any mainstream venue there are tremendous constraints.
I saw Ehrenreich on the Daily Show and the focus in that interview was on things like _The Secret_, where she certainly has a point. As for happiness research, if someone could convince me that “happiness” (defined in a way that it’s something I care about) can be reliably measured, I’d take it seriously. The happiness research I’ve been exposed to so far has left me with the impression that the researchers haven’t had any first hand experience with happiness themselves.
Geoff Pullum, over at Language Log, has been debunking these “happiness gap” articles for years now. They keep repeating the same claims, and he keeps going to the raw data and finding nothing there but noise.