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Why isn't female happiness declining in Europe, where all of these same factors are in operation? The 'paradox of declining female happiness' is sometimes said to exist in Europe as well, but this is misleading, because while in the US female self-reported happiness has been declining in absolute terms, in Europe it has been declining only relative to men. Both sexes report becoming happier over the past several decades, which doesn't seem like a problem to me.
Fixed. It's a graph.
The question is whether the lack of a father is what is responsible for these poor outcomes, or whether it's down to confounding. The lack of poor outcomes among the children of widows suggests the latter. Of course it's not 100% positive proof, it's possible that the children of non-widowed single mothers would do fine with a father, but do poorly without one, even though the children of widows seem to do alright either way. But I don't see a better way to test this question short of highly unethical experimentation.
I can concede that child support is a drawback of modern society for men (though it seems child support is awarded to only about 60% of custodial mothers, which while a majority, is actually lower than I expected). Overall I think pre-modern society was worse for women than modern society is for men.
People in Europe work significantly less than people in America, so I assume women in America also work more than women in Europe. I will admit I'm speaking from a very American-centric perspective but the cultures in Europe and America are very different even if both are Western nations. It's very difficult to compare statistics across countries as it's difficult to account for the hundreds of other factors that could play a role. An analysis on a single country is easier because fewer of these factors have variance to consider (but should still be considered for an actual, statistically valid analysis). I don't know if the factors in consideration are the same and to the same degree between the European countries and the United States.
I'll check later to see if if I can find any graphs/stats but if I recall correctly it's mostly older middle-aged single women who are committing suicide the most among females in the United States. It's usually at that stage in life where if a woman has been unable to secure a partner and a family all she has to show for it is a career which as I explained in my post is not really fulfilling for many women, at least to the degree that it may be fulfilling for men.
Thanks!
It's been difficult to find similar studies of impact of single parent households in the European countries, most are based on US data, but this study has some statistics on European countries. An important caveat the study points out: "because single parents in the United States differ from their European counterparts on a variety of social and economic characteristics (Gornick and Jäntti, 2011), it is difficult to generalize from Europe to the American context." When possible, they did acknowledge/try to account "for a variety of demographic and economic variables" so, on a statistic on childhood accidents from single mother to non-single mother homes they did find that there was no statistical significance once they accounted for other factors. I tried to put below some examples below where they did not call this out:
Consistent with these observations, studies have shown that youth from single-parent households have an elevated risk of being homicide victims in Sweden (Weitoft et al., 2003) and the United States (Winpisinger et al., 1991).
Studies have shown that children living with single parents are especially likely to think about or attempt suicide in New Zealand (Donald et al., 2006; Fergusson et al., 2000) and the Netherlands (Kienhorst et al., 1990). A large-scale longitudinal study in Sweden found that youth (boys as well as girls) living with single parents were more likely to commit suicide than were youth living with two parents (Weitoft et al., 2003). Similarly, a study from Denmark found a link between parental divorce and completed suicide among children and youth age 10—21 (Agerbo et al., 2002). Whether a similar link between single-parent households and youth suicide exists in the United States is unknown.
I'd like to point out while the paper does say "In contrast, children from widowed singlemother homes are not significantly different than those from two-biological-parent families on any of these dimensions, with the exception of having slightly lower odds of completing high school." they used a p-value of 0.001 which is extremely robust. If their criteria was a p-value of 0.05 as is standard in academic literature it's possible the other dimensions for widowed mothers would also be considered significantly different based on the criteria as defined in the study. Look at the chart and you'll see widowed mothers have -0.19 on 9th grade completion and -0.13 on college completion relative to two-biological parents households. Widowed mothers like I pointed out earlier are a very small percentage of the population so the sample size of widowed women may also have been small enough to make it difficult to achieve the desired p-value of 0.001.
In some metrics yes, in others worse, It's quite hard to pinpoint anything in regards to an overall evaluation but I think most people would be in agreement that modern life is better for any demographic solely due to technological advancements. Is it possible to have a society with a culture from the past with newer technology? Hard to say, considering social media and the internet have such as huge influence on modern culture.
Cross-country comparisons are always shaky, but it is at the very least clear that it's not as simple as "60s liberalism line go down."
Those seem like pretty small effects. But there should be more research done on this.
That's probably correct because like most things in life, reality is complex and there are likely many factors that go into play. I do think the sexual revolution did play a role but if I had to make a guess I would probably put its impact at explaining maybe at most 10-25% of the total causes that have an impact on the drop of happiness of women in the United States.
Yes, it would be good to have more research on this, but I doubt there would be many studies that try to explicitly study this. Usually, anything that can produce results that can be used as a counterpoint against a leftist viewpoint of the world doesn't get produced often out of academia, because it's usually the humanities/social studies/psychology departments producing research/studies on these kinds of topics, and those departments are heavily biased towards democrats/marxists/socialists. It could also be the actually skilled people in academia are putting their efforts into researching other topics.
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