6 posts
The earliest known writing in Latin by a woman is an invitation to a birthday party. It says the same thing Sei Shōnagon said a thousand years later — which raises the harder question of who the record reaches, and what Shōnagon herself thought about the happiness of everyone else.
Around the year 1000, a Japanese court lady wrote down lists of what pleased her. Read against the World Happiness Report's 142-country data on shared meals, her lists are not a curiosity — they're the closest thing we have to a control group a millennium deep.
Stevenson and Wolfers' 'Paradox of Declining Female Happiness' is famous for its title. Its last four pages spend most of their effort taking the paradox apart.
In Denmark, the share of gender earnings inequality caused by children went from 40% to 80% in three decades — not because children got more expensive, but because everything else got fixed.
The strongest statistic in the literature on women's welfare — a 30% drop in domestic violence, 10% fewer women killed by their partners — comes from a law whose own legislative history never mentions the women's movement. Rank these results by causal rigor and by feminist provenance and the two orders nearly invert.
Five studies of how women's economic position actually changed. In every one, the mechanism that moved was not the mechanism being debated.