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Comment by badRNG | Hacker News Reader

This is based on data from 2021. Since even then, there have been several significant regressions for women and LGBT rights, most notably the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Women of the next generation are growing up in the difficult position where they have less rights and bodily autonomy than their grandmothers grew up with.

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The leaders of some local governments in recent years are especially cruel terrible people. Imagine if your representative was Matt Gaetz with sex trafficking allegations and trying to feel good about the direction your state is headed. Imagine if your neighbors were throwing his campaign signs in their lawn; is this a community you want to be a part of long term? Do they even value women such as yourself?

unpopular opinion here; there has been over 30M abortions in the united states since 1973. Whether you believe in life before death or not, that leaves 30M people who never got the chance at life. The thought of 'what if' haunts some women, despite what the media says.

Do rights and autonomy make people happy? Lots of research shows that the happiest people in the country are conservative women: https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-are-liberals-less-happy-than-...

Indeed, the past 30 years has seen a consistent expansion of rights and autonomy and relaxation of social rules, and happiness has been declining pretty consistently the whole time: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/22/americans...

It's also the case that happiness among women has been declining since 1970: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14969/w149.....

The data in that survey comes from the American Family Survey, which seems to be taken pretty seriously, but the commentary is from the Institute for Family Studies, which is taken... less seriously. Caveat lector. Maybe the underlying data supports the point you (and IFS, for its own reasons) are making, but it's worth digging in, I guess.

One supposes it's easier to be happy as a conservative woman in 2022 given that identifying as such likely means you're sanguine about Roe --- which is a point even the IFS article makes.

I don't think IFS is any less objective than social science academia, which is dominated by people who take "rights" and "autonomy" as essential ends in themselves. Indeed, I'm not sure it's even possible to be objective in this space. The underlying phenomenal are complex and multi-faceted, while the broader principles are quasi religious in nature. That said, the underlying survey is from Yougov/Deseret, and it says what it says.

Also, it's not an isolated finding. The finding that conservatives are happier is consistently replicated (and long before 2022).

Regardless of how objective the IFS is, the specific page you linked to is not high quality research.

It uses data from a survey commissioned by the Mormon church and does not account for any confounding factors.

The study is conducted by the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at BYU, Deseret News, and Yougov.

Yes, the "Mormon Church" thing here seems like a super cheap shot.

Deseret News is a wholly owned subsidiary of the LDS church. BYU is part of the Church Education System, which is part of the LDS church, and the president of the church directly controls BYU via his chairmanship of the BYU board.

Yougov is a surveys for hire company.

So, yeah, it’s a survey run by the Mormon church.

But, more importantly, the conclusions drawn from it by IFS are simply not academically rigorous.

If you look again, you'll notice that I didn't incorporate any social science academia into my point. I'm not violently allergic to that research, but it's not something I keep tabs on, so you can usually assume I'm not trying to take down an argument you're making with "The University of California, Berkeley Center For Comparative Family Welfare says...".

Unlike the sibling comment here, I'm not trying to disqualify the underlying survey, just to point out that it's framing in the article you cited is heavily motivated; countervailing results or analysis presumably would not be allowed to run on the IFS website.

> Unlike the sibling comment here, I'm not trying to disqualify the underlying survey, just to point out that it's framing in the article you cited is heavily motivated; countervailing results or analysis presumably would not be allowed to run on the IFS website

IFS is "heavily motivated" compared to who exactly? Would New America or whoever NPR and the NYT turn to for analysis ever run with a similar story? The notion that increased autonomy and reduced social restriction is an unalloyed good is almost axiomatic among the folks who run every mainstream intellectual institution that isn't expressly conservative. It's the closest a lot of these folks have to a religion. They're highly motivated not to publish contrary evidence.

I mean: IFS is much, much more motivated than NYT is, but if your point is that NYT is not, on its own, entirely trustworthy about subjective evaluations of research: sure. That's true. But: I didn't cite the NYT.

For what it's worth, most of my conservative friends would strongly disagree with you about the importance of individual autonomy!

> Lots of research shows that the happiest people in the country are conservative women

If you are a woman in a country that is increasingly oppressing women, it seems it goes without saying that the women most at peace with that state of affairs are the women supportive of that oppression. I'm sure this is as true of the USA as it is of Iran.

Why would anyone, let alone tens of millions of people, be supportive of their own oppression?

That's a good question that probably doesn't have a single good answer. Conservative Muslim women have strongly opposed feminist movements in Iran and elsewhere. Pro-monarchy peasants have often killed proponents of democracy throughout history. Some have a reactionary impulse to oppose progress even if it is in their self interest.

What if they disagree that it is in their interest? Is there any objective way to say whether something is in someone’s interest? Consider the Amish, for example: they disagree that adopting all modern technology is in their interest. Should we force our opinion upon them? If not, should we force it on conservative women?

It would seem to me that a conservative could live how ever conservatively they want, even if others think it oppressive. A Southern Baptist has as much access to dance freely but may chose not to do so; just because they don't believe dancing is okay and can refuse to partake, it doesn't mean there should be laws to prevent it for everyone. Why should anyone be allowed to oppress those that do not wish to be repressed, simply because they themselves prefer it?

[edit to add] One can be conservative in a liberal environment, but to be liberal in a conservative place such as Iran has dire consequences. The only people being imposed on are the ones not free to live to their choosing, so there is no equivalent to forcing upon a conservative in the way conservative laws force upon non-conservatives (that I am aware of)

Well that's not really a full picture if you take into account that we live in a society... Everyone's actions have externalities, living in a liberal culture is a very different experience for a conservative than for that same person living in a conservative culture, their communities will be very different and affected by the larger culture, etc etc etc. Yours is a very liberal/individualistic point of view. Which is fine but there are plenty of other points of view.

That's the social liberal version of the "rational economic person” fallacy. It assumes that people know what will make them happy, and that people--especially young people with developing brains--can work toward those ends without education and social reinforcement.

In reality, most people don't know what choices will make them happy. How could they? And even if they did, they wouldn't know how to get from Point A to Point B, or have the willpower and discipline to stick to it. They need society to develop generational knowledge about those things, socialize children and young people to understand that learning, and socially reinforce good choices. And frankly liberals know that because in other respects, they support societal intervention to protect people from bad choices and help them make good ones. They just have this huge blind spot. The act like the young adult who needs society to protect them from predatory lenders doesn’t need protection from people who might exploit them in other ways. Or that the person who needs education and social pressure when it comes to sugary soft drinks doesn’t need it when it comes to far more impactful decisions about how to live.

And that's before we get to externalities. That's another concept liberals understand but pretend has no application to social norms and behaviors. As if divorce or drug use only affect the individual and not people around them.

You assume incompatible axioms. If everyone can live however they want, then oppression would be impossible if they don't want it.

There’s nothing more condescending liberalsplaining aimed at conservative women, except maybe liberal mansplaining aimed at conservative women.

Quite the condescending view there. I invite you to consider that our society and our women are aware and educated enough not to fall for rosy words like "progress" to actually mean true progress, and to us it is actually a regression, so it doesn't really interest us.

The study you linked to about conservative women seems to totally ignore the fact that there are confounding factors. To pick just one, conservatives are about half as likely to make under $30k/year compared to liberals:https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...

Additionally, lots of things have been happening in the last 30 years. The erosion of reproductive rights has been a slow process happening since right after Roe. Income inequality has been rising. Etc.

Party affiliation isn’t a good proxy for “liberal” versus “conservative” in this context. A lot of women who vote democrat are fairly socially conservative but vote democrat for other reasons. Only 58% of democrats, for example, say that “changing gender roles” has made it “easier” for “women to lead satisfying lives.” https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/10/18/wide-pa...

If you look at another proxy for privilege, education, the trend runs in the opposite direction. Only 31% of women with only a high school education say feminism has helped them, versus 55% of those with a college education: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/07/07/a-centu...

The alternative read of the data, which I suspect is more accurate, is that increased rights and autonomy disproportionately benefits high status women (e.g. pursuing interesting careers, etc). Lower status women, meanwhile, disproportionately suffer the burdens (decreased pressure for men to make commitments and support families).

Yougov’s standard liberal/conservative axis question (something along the lines of do you identify as strongly liberal/liberal/center/conservative/strongly conservative) maps pretty well to party affiliation.

Pew surveys are much more sophisticated and do differentiate between some of those finer points that you mentioned.

It depends. Happiness is about wanting what you get, and oppression is about denying someone their wants. Obviously people often have different wants, otherwise there would be no such thing as politics. So rights and autonomy can make some people happy if it brings them what they want, and vice versa.

Also, conservative women being happy is not surprising. This is because happiness breeds conservatism. Why? Because you're happy, and you want to keep that status quo. If you were unhappy, you'd want to change things to what you're happy with. People may overlook this, because they typically use the terms conservative and liberal as historical egos, rather than their root meanings.

Unless you're told the status quo is what you're postulated to be happy with and unhappiness is due to something else, e.g. appointed enemy, so you must double down on the postulate and destroy the enemy.

In which case, you're unhappy, and seek change to what you think would bring you happiness (eg removing the enemy). Whether achieving this bring you happiness or not, is a separate matter, as happiness is about wanting what you get, not getting what you (think you) want.

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