Newmark's Door

Last week I saw a lot of discussion this result. Some folks seemed to love to speculate about the causes of this "real" gap. My reactions:

1. It's based on one survey at one point in time. If the reproducibility crisis has taught us anything, we should want more confirmation before speculating about "causes".
2. Granting for the moment that the finding is reproduced we would still need to wonder about meaning of the result. It's a poll, after all, with nothing--I presume--on the line for how people respond. Maybe there's no difference in subjective happiness between the two groups but Liberals just respond differently to poll questions.
3. That said, if the happiness gap is actually real, then we perhaps could speculate about causes. A basic inquiry would try to answer which direction causality runs: are unhappy people drawn to Liberalism or does Liberalism prompt people to be unhappy? Or both.