Opinion-Editorial Response

The New York Times opinion-editorial columnist Ross Douthat claims that in the past three decades the average female happiness rate has dropped dramatically. Douthat bases his ideas off of a paper that was written by two economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, and titled “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness”. Stevenson and Wolfers’ paper explores the role of the modern woman and how women’s relatively new position in society is negatively affecting the state of female happiness. Douthat quotes from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” throughout his column in order to enforce his argument that changes in the American society within the past thirty years have placed more responsibility upon women and forced them to suffer.


Douthat states that during their study, Wolfer and Stevenson measured current female happiness and compared it to the happiness of the past generation of women. However, he does not find it important to inform the reader on how the economists gathered the information. How were Wolfer and Stevenson able to measure current happiness? There is no scale for calculating how happy mankind is! Their data most likely consisted of a series of questions, but how do they know that participants answered truthfully? How do the researches know that they did not interview women who were simply having a bad day? In addition, the studies of current happiness levels and those of thirty years ago were not conducted by the same researchers or even with the same method. The measurement of the modern woman’s happiness has a monstrous margin for error, making it unwise for Douthat to hold Wolfer and Stevenson’s study in high regard.