The Formula for Happiness: Be a Religious Conservative

This year's result of the Pew Research decades-long happiness survey are entirely consistent with those of previous years. One is much more likely to be happy if one is in any of the following categories: politically conservative, married, religious or wealthy. People with all of these characteristics are very likely to be very happy. A number of these traits are inter-related: religious people are more likely to be both conservative and married, and marriage and conservativism tend to lead to wealth.

Unfortunately these results are not widely emphasized because the positions of ideological gatekeeping such as journalism and higher education have been taken over by anti-religious leftists in favor of alternatives to marriage.

Of course, like nearly all studies on human behavior, this one is tainted in that cause cannot separated from effect, because it is not a prospective study. A prospective study on the effect of marriage and happiness, for example, would have to randomly impose marriage or divorce on half of the study participants to truly judge its effects.

Some research is comically ignorant of cause and effect. For example, a famous study "demonstrated" that lack of breakfast causes poor school behavior. But what kind of parents would send children to school without eating? Generally those who are negligent about teaching them character as well.

This study justified the enormously expensive school breakfast program, which does not seem to have ameliorated behavior problems. I was assaulted many times, for example, by students who had eaten a free breakfast.