As the aricle below rightly notes, there is a long history of survey findings which show conservatives to be hapier than Leftists. It would be surprising otherwise. Leftism is almost by definition dissatisfaction with the world about the Leftist so that should show up in characteristic mood. Leftists are the miserable people politically so one might expect that description to be generally true
And the article below does deliver that expected conclusion.
I am going to be a spoilsport, however, and say that while I do agree with their concluson and am myself a happy conservative, their findings in fact show something quite different from what they claim.
The big problem with their research is that it used as data that old standby of lazy psychologists: The responses of college students. Such subjects can be very different from what you find among general population studies. During my long career as a survey researcher, I used almost entirely general population samples and what I found might as well have been from another planet when compared with student "samples".
It compounds the difficulty that most of the student samples in the literature were not in fact samples in any sense, They were just available groups.
The nature of the "samples" used by the authors below makes their findings very easy to understand. If you look at the tables of correlations their report, the correlations between conservatism and happiness were very weak, quite marginal. They were generally in the right direction but that is about all you can say
The fact of the matter is that happiness was by far best predicted by richness of experience. Young people like to be out and about doing and experiencing different things. That is what explains the findngs below. Their findings tell us nothing more than that.
Sad that such an extensive body of work yields such an unremarkable conclusion
Title and abstract only below:
Differing worldviews: The politics of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness
Abstract
Objective/Background
Conservative ideology, broadly speaking, has been widely linked to greater happiness and meaning in life. Is that true of all forms of a good life? We examined whether a psychologically rich life is associated with political orientation, system justification, and Protestant work ethic, independent of two other traditional forms of a good life: a happy life and a meaningful life.
Method
Participants completed a questionnaire that assessed conservative worldviews and three aspects of well-being (N = 583 in Study 1; N = 348 in Study 2; N = 436 in Study 3; N = 1,217 in Study 4; N = 2,176 in Study 5; N = 516 in Study 6).
Results
Happiness was associated with political conservatism and system justification, and meaning in life was associated with Protestant work ethic. In contrast, zero-order correlations showed that psychological richness was not associated with conservative worldviews. However, when happiness and meaning in life were included in multiple regression models, the nature of the association shifted: Psychological richness was consistently inversely associated with system justification and on average less political conservatism, suggesting that happiness and meaning in life were suppressor variables.
Conclusions
These findings suggest that happiness and meaning in life are associated with conservative ideology, whereas psychological richness is not.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12959
**************************************************The American Economic Association Leaves Out the Free Market
Loaded political jargon populates the program for its annual conference.
Mark Skousen’s op-ed “The American Economic Association Snubs Hayek” (Sept. 16) calls attention to political bias at the American Economic Association’s annual conference. While I have not seen Mr. Skousen’s rejected proposal on economist F.A. Hayek, several accepted proposals on the AEA’s program point to a leftward drift in the organization.
The coming conference will feature seven papers on Karl Marx and Marxian economics, a fringe school that almost all professional economists reject. Loaded political jargon similarly populates the program. It features six papers on the critical-race-theory concept of “intersectionality” and 16 papers on “neoliberalism,” a pejorative term used by left-wing activists to attack free-market thinkers. The far-left Union for Radical Political Economics has 16 dedicated panels and lectures on the program. Progressive economist John Maynard Keynes appears to be the dominant lens at the conference, with 32 abstracts mentioning Keynes and various Keynesian schools of thought.
By contrast, free-market perspectives are rare at the AEA. Only two accepted papers mention Hayek, with another two mentioning Milton Friedman. The monetarist school appears twice, and the public-choice tradition appears only once. I make no claim of knowing the optimal balance between these competing perspectives, but the AEA’s current ideological filter is proving to be a poor mechanism for rationing scarce conference space.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/aea-economics-leaves-out-the-free-market-398aeb0b
***************************************************Taxpayer-funded Minneapolis food pantry bans white people - as boss' astonishing outburst at local who complained is revealed
The boss of a Minneapolis food pantry, funded by city taxpayers, has banned white people from taking advantage of the resource.
Mykela 'Keiko' Jackson used a Minnesota State grant to launch the Food Trap Project Bodega designed to help poor and hungry residents living close to the Sanctuary Covenant Church in the north of the city.
The pantry only opened up on July 27 but within months it has been forced to close and relocate away from church grounds after Jackson attempted to block white people from accessing the service, including a local chaplain who complained.
A sign that on the door to the pantry reads how the food inside was specifically for 'Black and Indigenous Folx' only. After a civil rights complaint was made against the pantry by a local, Mykela accused the complainant of 'political violence.'
'The resources found in here are for Black & Indigenous Folx. Please refrain from taking anything if you're not,' it stated.
Jackson used a Paths to Black Health grant which aims to reduce health disparities among African Americans while fostering a 'vibrant and thriving' community.
The last census showed Minneapolis to be 58 percent white with 18 percent of the population African-American.
But a number of reports have emerged suggesting how non-black residents are being denied access to the pantry, sowing the seeds of racial discrimination in an area considered to be an ethnically diverse.
The grant's description states how the 'funds are specifically designed to support organizations that work with U.S.-born African Americans... for whom studies indicate that health has been impacted as the result of historical trauma. This trauma includes post-traumatic slave syndrome (PTSS) and epigenetic inheritance.'
Chaplain Howard Dotson, 54, went to take a look at the pantry for himself, but claims how as a white man was refused service.
'This is not building community, it's destroying it,' Dotson said to Alpha News. 'I went over there and confronted her. I told her that I saw the sign and I asked if she really thought she could take grant money from the state and discriminate against poor white people.'
Dotson then filed a complaint with the Minneapolis Civil Rights Commission.
He claims that Jackson told him in person how the food pantry was set up to serve black and indigenous people and was told how he should go across the road to the church's free pantry should he needed it.
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What The Left Is Getting Wrong About The GOP’s Health Ideas/b>
In an interview the other day, J.D. Vance said that Donald Trump will “promote more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of the same people into the same insurance pools.”
In no time at all, left-wing critics pounced.
Trump and Vance would “permit insurance companies to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions,” wrote Jonathan Chait. They would allow insurers to “charge less to the healthy and more (much more) to the sick,” added Josh Barro. “That’s exactly how health insurance worked before Obamacare,” said Paul Krugman.
Yet it is the critics who don’t understand how Obamacare is working and how it needs to be reformed. When insurers are forced to sell to everyone at the same price, they have strong incentives to attract the healthy (on whom they make a profit) and avoid the sick (on whom they incur losses). That is what is happening today.
Obamacare didn’t solve a problem; it merely changed the nature of the problem. In the old days, some chronic patients couldn’t get health insurance. As I show below, today they can get insurance, but they may not be able to get health care.
So, what’s the answer? It begins by recognizing that almost everyone in America today who buys private health insurance is getting a tax subsidy for their purchase. People who get insurance from an employer have that benefit excluded from their taxable income. People who buy in the (Obamacare) exchange are getting tax credits, which are transferred to the insurers along with the buyer’s payment.
Part of the premium we pay is coming out of our pockets, and the rest is picked up by government. Even if our part of the premium is community-rated (that is, the same price regardless of health status), there is no reason why the government’s share has to be restricted in that way.
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New Jersey Moves to Deregulate Home-Based Businesses
The New Jersey state legislature advanced legislation this June that would give entrepreneurs more freedom to open a business cheaply. As South Jersey-focused publication 70 and 73 reports, the Home Business Job Creation Act, which still awaits state senate approval, would allow homeowners to operate a business from their own home by-right, without approval from municipal zoning authorities. The change mirrors a trend towards online commerce and is a welcome reexamination of strict use separation rules that prevent entrepreneurship nationwide.
Allowing business owners to operate from their homes would help save money and lower entry barriers. In Jersey City, Class C retail space rents are in the ballpark of $40 per square foot annually, based on LoopNet listings. This works out to at least $40,000 (and often much more) in yearly rent for ground-level storefronts in the state’s many urban neighborhoods.
Nationally, prices for Class C retail tend to be much lower (in the $10-20 per square foot annual range). But the point still stands: if you’re an upstart entrepreneur who can’t afford 5-figure rent and live in a city that bans home-based businesses, you’re out of luck.
The proposed New Jersey reform would not only help entrepreneurs, but could also make neighborhoods more walkable and mixed-use, serving much of the same need as accessory commercial units. In New Jersey itself, the format harkens back to older land-use styles, where the state’s charming urban cores, such as Union City and Hoboken, are replete with apartments near businesses.
The law’s authors, Assembly members Jay Weber, Robert Auth, John DiMaio, and Dawn Fantasia, point out that numerous businesses in the state would be forbidden under strict enforcement of current laws. Carveouts exist for businesses like doctor’s offices and accounting services, but the more workaday enterprises are beholden to municipal regulations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the New Jersey State League of Municipalities is fighting the law on the grounds that it undermines local control.
Many jurisdictions heavily regulate or outright ban home-based businesses on the premise that they create externalities such as traffic congestion or are difficult to regulate safety-wise. According to 70 and 73, New Jersey’s bill will include similar stipulations.
Such criticisms often do not pass muster. Home-based businesses have become more logistically easy with the rise of service-based apps and websites that allow small-scale businesses to connect with a broader customer base. For example, Etsy, a crafts sales platform, saw its membership increase by over 4 million from 2019 to 2021. Rather than drawing customers to their homes, Etsy merchants ship their products outward (or often drop-ship from a 3rd-party location). So the traffic caused is minimal compared to what craftsmen would’ve drawn 20 years ago.
Since the pandemic, food businesses have also emerged. Readers might be familiar with “ghost kitchens,” a franchise-like business model where a distributor like WoodSpoon and Shef allow users to sell meals directly to consumers. Its membership has also grown significantly.
But New York and other states forbid its use for hot food delivery. Generally, according to the Institute for Justice, hot food businesses operating from people’s homes are tightly regulated, if not banned, on safety grounds. Even pre-prepared food is scrutinized: Rhode Island made barely any allowance for home food sales until late 2022. Georgia had similar restrictions, requiring anyone who wanted to sell food to do so in a certified commercial kitchen.
The Institute for Justice conducted a review of the states with the most permissive home-based food rules, including Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, which do not require special permitting for such business, and found that “not a single state had a confirmed case of a foodborne illness caused by food sold under its homemade food law.”
What’s more, the proscription of such businesses does not guarantee that food sales will be safer, as banning them may just drive them onto the illegal market, where no oversight exists. There isn’t any particular reason why appropriate health and safety regulations cannot apply to home-based businesses.
Beyond food, other businesses have faced scrutiny from regulators. In Nashville, a joint hair salon and recording studio was shut down because both businesses relied on in-person visits. Childcare services have often run afoul of zoning regulations, motivating reform in several states.
The inherent tradeoff here—if we’re to conclude that many of the “safety” concerns are just a disingenuous smokescreen—is about traffic. Even if home-based businesses are “online” now, they’ll still inevitably cause more parking and congestion than if homes were strictly residential. The upside is that more small-scale entrepreneurs can afford their shot at growing a successful business.
Hopefully, the New Jersey Senate will see the positives and pass the bill. It will only be an early step towards broader liberalization, but it will unlock opportunities for many people.
“My whole life, people told me, ‘You need to do something with your food,’ but I always shut myself down without even trying,” one user of WoodSpoon told the New York Times. “Now I have weekly income.”
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/09/16/nj-home-businesses/
**************************************************My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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