The Pew Research Center has been doing surveys on happiness for several years now. I could not find the 2008 report on-line, but the 2007 report is available, and reaches many of the same conclusions. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/301/are-we-happy-yet
The reason is not obvious, but the Pew researchers hypothesize that conservatives have found rationalizations for the extreme inequalties in personal wealth and income, and accept those inequalities; while for liberals, the inequalities are a constant source of discontent.
My own experience correlates well with the Pew study. I am generally a pretty happy guy. I belong in most of the categories that demonstrate higher degrees of happiness: married, pet owner, more than average wealth, and yes, Republican and somewhat conservative. So it seems likely that I would be happy.
Interestingly, one of the few topics that brings a scowl to my face is income inequality. That topic feeds the unhappy liberal part of me. No doubt about it, whenever I dwell on the subject, my happiness goes into hiding. I have discussed it in some of my previous posts on the blog about wealth and taxes.
Three of the Seven Deadly Sins are economic: greed, sloth, and envy. But I have always been a diligent worker, and I don't think the source of my anger is either envy or greed--I am content with what I have earned in my lifetime. Rather, it is my perception that much of the wealth of the rich guys is derived from greed, sloth, or envy: either unearned, or undeserved, or illegally obtained, or received for activities that our society places a distorted value upon.
- In my Shangri-La, wealth is not "redistributed." Inequalities of wealth still exist. But the difference are:
Those who obtain their wealth illegally are stripped of their wealth and jailed. - Those who don't work don't receive money, except from charitable and generous friends and family.
- Work is compensated in proportion to its true contribution to the well-being of the society. That is, doctors are paid more that baseball players, firefighters are paid more than pop singers, teachers are paid more than tv talk show hosts, research scientists and engineers are paid more than insurance brokers, and so on.
Those things only happen in a society where every individual places higher values on education, health, and safety than he does on sports, entertainment, and the accumulation of money. When it comes to values, we all vote with our pocketbooks. And with our pocketbooks we unconsciously betray our traditional values. More than one person I know brags about paying $200 a ticket to attend a rock concert, and in the next breath complains about paying $65 for an office visit to his doctor.
A society must develop and preserve a traditional value system through continuing and intense education of the young, both by parents and in schools. Some people tend to discard the traditional values in their pursuit of change for change's sake, or simply because they are too lazy to preserve them. When members of a society begin to abandon those higher values, they sow the seeds of the society's own discontent, and its eventual destruction.
