When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (31 page)

In addition, Stevenson and Wolfers released a new study, “
The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness
,” that is bound to generate a great deal of controversy. By almost any economic or social indicator, the last thirty-five years have been great for women. Birth control has given them the ability to control reproduction. They are obtaining far more education and making inroads in many professions that were traditionally male-dominated. The gender wage gap has declined substantially. Women are living longer then ever. Studies even suggest that men are starting to take on more housework and child-raising responsibilities.

Given all these changes, the evidence presented by Stevenson and Wolfers is striking: women report being less happy today than they were thirty-five years ago, especially relative to the corresponding happiness rates for men. This is true of working women and stay-at-home moms, married and single women, the highly educated and the less educated. It is worse for older women; those aged eighteen to twenty-nine don’t seem to be doing too badly. Women with
kids have fared worse than women without kids. The only notable exception to the pattern is black women, who are happier today than they were three decades ago.

There are a number of alternative explanations for these findings. Below is my list, which differs somewhat from the list that Stevenson and Wolfers present:

1
.     Female happiness was artificially inflated in the 1970s because of the feminist movement and the optimism it engendered. Yes, things have gotten better for women over the last few decades, but maybe change has happened a lot more slowly than anticipated. Thus, relative to these lofty expectations, things have been a disappointment.

2
.     Women’s lives have become more like men’s over the last thirty-five years. Men have historically been less happy than women. So it might not be surprising if the things in the workplace that always made men unhappy are now bedeviling women as well.

3
.     There was enormous social pressure on women in the old days to pretend they were happy even if they weren’t. Now, society allows women to express their feelings openly when they are dissatisfied with life.

4
.     Related to number three: these self-reported happiness measures are so hopelessly garbled by other factors that they are completely meaningless. The ever-growing army of happiness researchers will go nuts at this suggestion, but there is some pretty good evidence (including
a paper
by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan) that declarations of happiness leave a lot to be desired as outcome measures.

Stevenson and Wolfers don’t take a stand on what the most likely explanation might be. If I had to wager a guess, I would say numbers three and four are the most plausible.

Meanwhile, I asked a female friend what she thought the answer was, but she was too depressed to respond.

It’s that time of year: graduation.
Celebrities
,
dignitaries
, and the occasional
wild card
are ushered forth to send graduates into the future with courage, confidence, conviction (blah blah, blah blah, blah blah) . . .

And then there’s a woman we’ll call only S., for her mission is a secret one. Her son, N., is about to be graduated from high school, and S. is putting together an “album of advice” for him. She’s been writing to all sorts of people (including us) and asking: “What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve ever been given?” As she writes further: “My mom did this for me when I graduated high school, and I wanted
to carry on the tradition for my children. It was the most memorable gift I’ve ever received.”

How could anyone possibly turn down this request? My first inclination was to tell N. that the best advice I could give him was to have a mother who cared enough about her kids to solicit advice from strangers.

Anyway, here’s what I sent him. I can’t say it’s all that interesting, or even such great advice, but this is what came to mind:

Dear N.,

I once received a piece of advice when I was about fourteen that wasn’t even meant to be advice, but has stayed with me for my entire life.

I was out fishing on a small lake in a little motorboat with a man named Bernie Duszkiewicz. He was the local barber (well, one of two—but you get the idea: it was a very small town). My father had died when I was ten, and there were a few nice men around town who went out of their way to take me on little adventures. Most of these adventures involved fishing. I didn’t really like fishing all that much but I think my mom thought I did, and I was too timid or obedient to ever object.

We were out on the lake, fishing for bass, I suppose, going from one theoretically good spot to the next and catching absolutely nothing. Then it started to rain. Mr. Duszkiewicz drove the boat over toward the shore and anchored us under some low-hanging trees so we wouldn’t get drenched. We started casting from there—and lo and behold, I finally caught a fish. It couldn’t have been more than six inches long, a sunfish or rock bass, but at least it was a fish. And then I caught another, and another. They were too small to keep but it was fun catching them.

Then the sun came out, and Mr. Duszkiewicz pulled up the anchor. I was a very shy kid and it took everything I had to speak up: “Where are we going? This is a great spot!”

“Ah, we don’t want to keep catching these little ones,” he said. “They’re not worth the time. Let’s go catch a real fish.”

To be honest, my feelings were a little bit hurt—the fish I was catching
were
real fish, and a lot more fun than catching nothing at all. And we had the same bad luck when we got back out to the deeper spots in the lake: no fish at all.

But the lesson stuck with me. Even though we returned home empty-handed, we went for the big fish. In the short run, this kind of thinking might not be as much fun. But it’s the long run you should be thinking about—the big goals, the ones that require a lot of failure along the way. They might be worth it (of course, they might not be, too). It’s a lesson in opportunity cost: if you spend all your time catching the little fish, you won’t have time—or develop the technique, or the patience—to ever catch the big ones.

Wishing you the very best,

SJD

Well, that’s my fish story. The funny thing is that, as memorable as that advice was, I constantly fail to follow it today.

But just think how much worse off I’d be if it weren’t at least haunting me, like a second conscience.

(SDL)

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