Why American Happiness Just Fell Off a Cliff

The United States was a reasonably happy country for a long time. It is not happy now. That's a quote from a new paper by the University of Chicago economist, Sam Peltzmann, analyzing data from the long-standing General Social Survey. He showed what he called a sudden, sharp, and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the U.S. after COVID, which persisted through 2024, the latest year through which that survey counts. After 50 years of mostly steady levels of self-reported well-being, American happiness has plunged and it's hardly bounced back. Peltzmann's analysis is not alone. Last week, the Federal Reserve's measure of American worker satisfaction fell to its lowest level since that survey began in 2014. One week before that, consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan, fell to its lowest level ever recorded in that survey's 70-year history. Finally, in the World Happiness Report, the U.S. fell to its lowest ranking ever, largely due to a swift decline in well-being among young people. Put it all together, and those are four data points showing that this decade has been the tragic '20s for American. Being very significant has bludgeoned Americans well-being in the last six years without discriminating much by age or ideology or education or gender. So what is it? I want to think about this, this episode a little bit like a murder mystery. Here we have the dead body, and we need a culprit that fits the crime. Most importantly, we need a culprit that fits the timing of the crime. And that rules out several otherwise plausible suspects. For example, cultural conservatives might try to explain the tragic '20s by citing the rise of secularism or individualism or pointing out that American liberals tend to be less happy than conservatives in large part because they're less religious. But the rise of religious non-affiliation in America has been a steady 30-year trend. In fact, it's a trend that's fallen off a bit in the 2020s. So that explanation will not do. Meanwhile, someone on the left might be inclined to argue that American misery is the reasonable and automatic societal reaction to severe class inequality. But that story doesn't fit the details of this phenomenon, either. Inequality is a long-term trend. And low-income wage growth was an usually strong after the pandemic. Another suspect who's timing gives it a sort of alibi. So what does explain the fall? Today we have two guests to handle the burden of answering this question. David Wallace-Welles is one of my favorite writers for the New York Times, the best-selling author of the uninhabitable Earth. And Morgan Housel is one of my favorite writers anywhere, the best-selling author of the psychology of money and the art of spending money. And we get at this question of its driving American unhappiness in the 2020s from every possible angle, virology, psychology, sociology, economics, media, technology. As it turns out, the death of American happiness has had many killers. I'm Derek Thompson. And this is "Pin English." Morgan Housel, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Derek. Happy to be here. David Wallace-Welles, welcome back. Thanks so much. Good to talk to you guys. David, I want to start with you because the initial collapse in happiness clearly coincided with the pandemic. It happened in 2020. But then this collapse in self-reported well-being, it didn't go away. Almost as if the pandemic itself didn't end. We know that the pandemic, the coronavirus pandemic, ended. But I wonder if something that came out of the pandemic didn't end, that stuck with us. Something psychological, sociological. What do you think that is? I think there's a lot of stuff that happened, but I actually think it's useful to start with the trauma of the disease itself, which doesn't end as soon as people stopped getting hospitalized and infected. And, of course, this was a disease. We don't like to talk about it so much anymore, but it's a disease that killed one and a half million Americans, hospitalized tens of millions, infected hundreds of millions. There are probably five, ten million people who are dealing with some amount of long-COVID consequence from the disease itself. And that, we may think of that as something that happened in 2020, but it really happened 2020-2021 into 2022 before the impacts really started to soften. They lessened a little bit over the course of that period of time, but there was still a lot of infection and death going on. And I think, on some basic level, we really should anchor our understanding of this dynamic in that fact. When we see a huge break there, you have to think, what happened at the point of that break? And that was the pandemic itself. But there were all these second-order effects too, right? So, you know, in addition to the disease, we saw the fragility of our biological bodies and our political systems, our social networks. All of those things were undermined, if not worse, in the period of 2020-2021. We did a lot to try to protect one another, but we also exposed quite a lot of raw imperfect social dynamics. This was a time, especially 2022 into '23, where we had huge spikes in crime, we had huge spikes in overdose deaths. You know, there was still a lot of frustration kind of on both sides about how the pandemic had been handled. But across the board, you know, Americans had a much longer list of complaints, but the state of their society than they might have compiled a few years earlier in 2019. And I think we have to think about all of those things as pandemic effects. There are other ones too. There are economic effects, you know, there are ways in which it changed the labor market and we can get into all of that. But I think in a very fundamental way, we should not forget that this was effectively a century scale traumatic biological event, which scrambled the lives of everyone we know. And even those of us who endured it relatively well, had a pretty hard couple of years. And maybe we shouldn't be so surprised to see self-reported happiness decline pretty rapidly in that time. The question of. Let me just jump right in there. I'm glad you showed it with biology. I want to add a layer of psychology. In my reporting for this piece, I found as you may have already been aware of an analysis of the Spanish flu that found that the disease had, according to those researchers, "permanent consequences on individual behavior in terms of lower social trust." And in fact, in this big study that kicked off my piece by Sam Peltzmann, he found that the confidence in practically every institution you could possibly ask about, the federal government, the military, companies, education, science, religion, all of it declined. And so you had this event that walloped trust in institutions while at the same time coincided with this great like pulling in, this withdrawal. People spend more time alone, more time by themselves, more time in their homes, and indeed today still we find that people are continuing to spend more time alone and more time in their homes. And so I feel like in addition to everything that you said about the biological fact of the pandemic, there's also this societal aftershock that has left us with where individualism is more running rampant, is more run amuck, and faith in institutions has collapsed so that people feel like when they're stressed, they can't trust on institutions outside of their household to help them. They feel like they are more individual, more alone than they used to be. I wonder if you think this decline of institutional trust and surge in individualism might play a role in the picture that your painting of how the pandemic is still with us. The way that I think about it is that these are long-term trends which were punctuated in profound ways by the experience of the pandemic. And here I actually disagree a little bit with Sam Peltzman in the sense that when I look at surveys of social trust going back decades, I see pretty linear declines. In certain sectors, there's a bigger drop-off around the pandemic. In some cases, a bigger drop-off around the arrival of the smartphone. But you know, trust in media has been declining since 1972. It wasn't because of how we covered the pandemic, it wasn't because of how we covered Donald Trump. Decline has been very steady. Decline has been very steady in trust in the U.S. Congress and the president in the Supreme Court. And even some institutions that we think of as being somewhat resilient in the face of declining social trust, like the military. your public schools. They are also experiencing long-term declines here. And so I often think, you know, we focus a lot on the last 10 years, and maybe when we're talking about the pandemic on the last five years, but the truth is, these are much longer-term stories, which are only becoming visible to us in the recent past, and then we shouldn't forget the longer-term trajectories. But that's not to say that, you know, the experience of the pandemic didn't worsen our faith in all of these institutions. And one thing that I think is really tricky and complicated about that part of the story is that different Americans have different ideas about what went wrong here. So, you know, when people like you and me talk in, you know, in places like this or publications like the ones that we write for, we often tend to emphasize the sense of public health overreach that the government was excessive in its caution, that people's lives were too disrupted by this quite punishing deadly disease. And I don't even want to adjudicate that question on a moral level just to say that that is one perspective on COVID. And another one is that we didn't do enough to protect one another. And there are actually plenty of people in the surveys who say that too. But overall, actually, you know, the numbers are relatively surprising that Americans are not on mass, raging still about the experience of the pandemic. There are pockets, maybe 10, 20% on either side of the argument, the thing things went wrong. But what that tells you is that the outcome here, where we went through this, again, once in a century biological trauma and came out the other side, really frustrated with our institutions, I'm not sure how much better we could have done it, because if we had recalibrated things slightly in one direction, we probably would have alienated people on the other side. And if we had turned things in the first direction, the reverse would have happened. So again, I think even these effects are in some ways fundamentally about the disease itself, the difficulty of navigating a disease like this, especially at a time like ours, when we don't expect to have our lives disturbed by so much turmoil, illness, and death as we did, and any outcome in that context is going to frustrate an anger and distress many different kinds of people. And I do think that one of the most profound experiences of the pandemic was that all of us retreated from our social lives, began living, even if it was for a period of two, three, four months, in a much more circumscribed way, and that that taught us that the distant society that we used to think of as our community was now not just farther from us, but also in certain ways a threat to us. It trained us to see one another as, you know, as risks as opposed to part of a social network. And it did make us, as you say, I think not just more self-interested, but also more competitive, more avaricious, and fundamentally more zero sum. And I think all of that has been quite corrosive. To flesh out that last point that you made, for decades, the general social surveys asked Americans the same question. And that question is, quote, do you think more people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair? End quote. And the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Americans overwhelmingly agreed that other people were more or less trustworthy. Confidence in strangers plummeted in between the 2010s and the 2020s, according to Peltzmann. So it's not just, as we were just discussing, our faith in institutions that has declined over a long period of time, it's our faith in each other, person to person that seems to decline even more, more recently. Morgan, I want to bring you in because we've talked about biology and we've talked about psychology, but I think we have to talk about economics. Inflation has been the story of the decade that simply will not go away. A consumer prices and home prices have basically increased roughly three times as fast in the 2020s as they did in the 2010s or the 2000s. So everything that people buy feels like it is constantly slipping out of the zone of affordability, even if they are getting raises, they still feel like everything is getting expensive three times faster than normal. As the author of a book entitled The Psychology of Money, why do you think inflation? Maybe even more than economic recessions, maybe even more than unemployment might be a unique tax on broad nation-wide happiness. I think there's two big points here to bring up with inflation. One is that it is one of the only economic variables that people are very cognizant of what is happening in real time. If you go out in the street and ask and pick a random person and say, hey, last year, what was GDP growth? Or what do you think it was? Do you think it was 3 percent, 3.6 percent? They have no idea, the average person, even the very informed educated person has no idea, but ask them how much does a gallon of gas costs at your station? They will tell you $4.67. And two weeks ago, it was $4.48, so they know exactly. And as they're filling up, they can see the bank account draining. It's a very psychologically pertinent thing that you're aware of, more than almost anything else. Even the stock market, where we have a daily ticker, all the surveys would show that most people, even investors, don't really grasp what happened in the last year. Years when such as 2009, 2010, years where the stock market was actually doing quite well, people thought that it did quite poorly. But inflation, gas, rent, they remember. I remember what gas costs when I was a child. Like, people just remember these things in a way that they don't any other economic variables. The other thing that you brought up that's so pertinent right now is, I think the economy, particularly among young people, is split. It's halved in the center of, did you own a house before 2020 or did you not? And that makes such a profound difference. And not only is it the people who did not, you are by and large priced out, it's the people who did feel incredibly wealthy. And so imagine someone who bought in 2019, they might say, I bought a house for 700 grand, and now it's worth 1.8 million. They feel like geniuses, they feel rich. There's a spending component that comes with that because they feel like they're wealthy. And so the biggest economic boon to them, to the other person who didn't buy or maybe was just one or two years behind them, it's the biggest economic weight on their shoulders. And why I think this is so important, and this probably plays in so profoundly to like why there's so much distrust among each other. If you and I disagree about a topic, by and large, I don't view it, most people don't view it as a disagreement, they might view it as a threat. And so if you say, the economy's going great, I bought a house to triple and value, everything's good. If I don't feel that, what I buy and large people do not hear is, oh, we disagree with each other, it's Derek, you think I'm an idiot, because I believe something that you don't, you don't see where I'm coming from. And now this is not a disagreement, it's a fight. And I think that's always been true, but social media amplifies it a million fold. And it was not that long ago, we were just talking about media and stuff, that in 1990s, people got their news from Tom Broca. In 1960s, there was Walter Cronkite, fairly know of the road, and we all more or less heard the same thing. And now it's pick whatever you want to hear, no matter what you believe, someone out there saying it, and they will reinforce what you believe and tell you that you're right. And so I think it just leads to a profound sense of people don't understand what half the other side of the country is thinking and experiencing. And this was so profound during the pandemic, where imagine if you were a software engineer at Google in 2020, versus if you owned a laundromat in 2020, you were living in completely different worlds. That was not true during the Great Depression, when virtually everybody suffered. That was not true during the recession of the early 2000s. That was much more uniform. It was so black and white stark during this period. And then you mix that with people getting their own information from whatever they wanted to believe. And I think it feels more than ever like people live in completely separate worlds. I'm glad that you mentioned this bifurcation that happened around 2020 and 2021 with the housing market because I mentioned inflation and the fact the price index roughly tripled in terms of how fast prices grew in this decade versus previous ones. But the other thing that practically tripled were interest rates between 2021 and 2023. And that created exactly this dynamic that you're talking about where getting that same mortgage in 2023, 2024 was so much more expensive than getting the same debt mortgage in 2019. And maybe not only does the fact of expensive housing make people upset, but also the understanding that the housing market is is so split between people who just got in under the wire at the end of the 2010s. And those who were looking for a house in the 2020s creates this sense of resentment. You were beginning to unspool this idea that we're dealing with economic reality that is inflected by social media reality. But I want you to take a little bit further and address it in this context. We've had inflation before. We've had high interest rates before. The 1970s and early 1980s happened. But you didn't see at least in the surveys this same collapse in self-reported well-being, in happiness, in consumer sentiment. All these things have bottomed out and are currently at record lows. Why do you think inflation seems to upset or disturb or frustrate people in a way that it might not have at least in the context of these surveys the 1970s and 1980s? I think this goes much farther than inflation. But let me say a show that had a profound impact on me when I was a teenager and probably both of you as well Was MTV cribs. It was the first kind of generational thing of like. Oh, this is how other people live And it had such a profound effect of like I didn't know a house could be that Like I didn't know people could own that many Ferrari's it's amazing But was so important about that show that was powerful to a generation was Nobody watching it considered those people to be peers And so I'm watching it. I'm like yes, that's an amazing house But that's 50 cent of course he lives in that house. That's not something I should compare myself to and so it was just fun But I think what social media did is it gave that same impression of how the other half lives But it also told you these should be your peers And if you're not catching up with them you're failing you're falling behind in a way that we never had that In previous generations into our view of how the other half lives and so no now no matter how well you're doing No matter if you're employed and if you owned a house before 2019 if you checked all of those boxes A million times a day when you open up your phone There is an endless infinite feed of people who at least appear to be happier hotter wealthier more successful than you are And I think I think of course that is just ruined the expectations of a whole of a whole generation of it was not I I don't think it's an exaggeration to say That if in the 1990s if you owned a very modest two-bedroom house and earn a median income and drove a median car You felt pretty good about yourself and it is so easy today particularly among young people To statistically be even in the top 10 percent Even top 1% and feel like they're falling behind by comparison the pure group that you compare yourself to Is just astronomically wider That then it then it has been in any other era and so You know when when you put that together I just think another thing that we don't talk about enough here Is that in the last generation or two We as a society in an innocent way and we had good intentions with this But we more or less told a generation of young people that a bachelor's degree from a flagship university A white collar job with a hundred thousand dollar starting salary nine to five good benefits Three-bedroom house in the suburb in two SUVs was what they should expect And but what I just described there is like a top 5% outcome And so we told a whole generation that 100% of you Should expect to have what is effectively a top 5% outcome And so I think between that and then to show the comparison aspect on social media the the expectations inflation like yes, there's price inflation and that's that we can measure that Expectations inflation is much harder to measure But psychologically, I think it has a way more profound impact on how people Feel that they're doing now. It is it is unwise and you will not get anywhere by telling people Statistically, you should feel good, even if you don't I think you Derek you you brought this up on one of your recent shows That vibes are a data point and you can't just tell people look you're telling me that you feel bad But statistically you shouldn't that doesn't work vibe just I tried I tried for years to make that argument And then I realized that not only was I getting a lot of hate mail, but also the hate mail was right Um, when I say the soft data is wrong and the hard data is right I'm essentially saying that the soft data isn't data But it is the people's feeling is the people's feelings are a fact and it's a fact that Shapes politics it's shapes elections and therefore shapes policy policy shapes economics So you you cannot ignore sentiment. I want to Hold on this idea of inflation is a little bit longer David because When you look at Sam Peltzmann's Studies going back the last few years this University of Chicago economist who has been studying happiness in general social survey He continually shows that married Americans are happier and rich Americans are happier But in this his most latest study married Americans saw their happiness drop just as Much as non-married Americans essentially rich Americans saw their happiness drop essentially just as much as non-rich Americans It's really interesting That whatever has happened this decade is like this rave It's like this this this curse of happiness that is affecting not only the lower and middle classes But also the upper classes as well What do you think that's about? Well, I think there are two ways of thinking of it right one is that everybody got hit quite hard in 2020 And it's still suffering Another is that previously very well-established advantages Were eliminated which is to say Five or eight years ago if they were changes in the general social survey measure of happiness You would expect that they would be concentrated among the less well-educated the less well-off and the single and in this period We didn't see that we saw those advantages basically disappear and in some cases actually the declines We're larger among the groups that had previously previously enjoyed these advantages When I spoke to Peltzmann about it what he said is that it may be that the Poor people the less well-educated had already been exposed to a sense of social disorder and disarray And so weren't as perturbed by the perceptions of Changes around them as maybe wealthier people were and to me that makes a fair amount of sense We talked a lot through the pandemic about the fact that white collar workers were protected from the disease were relatively safe They were able to order their delivery food and And work work from home But it's also the case that they had something profound taken away from them Which was the sense that they enjoyed a kind of social advantage and a set of expectations to Morgan's point about the way that the world would work for them and to their benefit and it may be the case that Shouldering a burden a social burden that was shared around the society as a whole was more damaging to the psyche of the well-off who expected more Um, then it was to those who had gone into the pandemic not expecting very much at all and maybe were even somewhat impressed by the gestures of solidarity and mutual care that we exercise at certain points in the pandemic Imagine setting your makeup then forgetting it's even theirs Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all-day comfy grip No tightness, no stickiness, no residue Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin Try new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York Maybe it's Mabelie Morgan, I want you to jump in on this because one really interesting thing about the 2020s Is that it's been a decade of relatively full employment It's been a decade when the wages of low-income workers Have in many years been rising faster than the wages of higher income workers and you would think that overall this is a situation that would make Americans happy It's a situation where wage inequality is being compressed But the economic researcher Matt Darling made this really interesting argument He said that in a world where labor intensive stuff is getting more expensive and low-income workers are making more money That's in making a lot of services More expensive for the middle and upper middle class I want to just quote from an analysis of his before throwing to you He said quote I think part of what happened is that many middle and upper income households Were used to being able to afford low wage labor on demand For childcare, for food service, for home care Middle and upper income households found this frustrating And assumed it was part of the broad story throughout the economy Not realizing that much of this frustration was driven by low wage workers Finally earning a little more bargaining power And quote I love you to talk a little bit about this irony This frankly quite sad irony that full employment Which is a policy goal that I support and have always supported Has pushed up the wages of low-income workers At a time of high inflation In a way that is made middle and upper income households The most frustrated in many cases by how expensive everything is How much credence do you put into that theory? I think there's a lot of credence to that I mean you see this in places like California That have much higher minimum wage laws and regulations than they did in previous years And so if you ask people Hey should the guy at McDonald's flip in your burger Should he make seven dollars an hour? And I was just like no that's not fair That's not a living wage We should pay him 15 dollars an hour That's very popular Now all of a sudden your big Mac costs 16 bucks Do you do you like that? No, I don't like that whatsoever And so there's I think that tradeoff is Is is profound in that sense And it is true that a lot of particularly upper income workers Whether it was childcare or fast food or whatever that might be Benefitted over the last 20 years From a subset of people who were willing or just it was the only opportunity Was to earn a wage that was virtually unlivable And now that we have corrected that You pointed out that there have been years in the last decade When in percentage terms The highest wage growth went to the lowest income workers In percentage terms they were they were you know They're doing much better now Then they were back then But there's another side of that which is you know That that that side of inflation And so it has a huge impact on people Of just the services that they actually want And everybody knows in 2003 You know a flat screen TV costs $5,000 or whatever Now they're literally 300 bucks And so the price of goods Of TVs of socks of plastic toys Has plummeted like by profound degree And that of course shows up in the CPI numbers But the things that are actually moving the needle In terms of people's quality of life And there's their psychology Housing, child care, health care, gas Those kind of things are are in many ways so expensive that they are they are completely out of touch for people whether you so in the way that you can't afford a house you can't afford child care so even if you look at the CPI and the inflation numbers as a whole you get to numbers that for most in the last 10 years with the exception of like 22 23 we're not that bad they were high but they were not stratospheric but I think that hides a lot that look if you can't afford the house and you're living in your mother's basement you can't tell that person yes but a flat screen TV is very cheap so you should feel good about your life like that obviously does doesn't compute people right I just want to say I think it's a huge policy tragedy that the decade of full employment is also a decade where a pandemic created a supply side crisis that led to inflation and so right now it's a little bit hard to disentangle how much of this frustration is about the rising wage that the low income which I think is a good thing overall I want those wages to rise and how much of it is the fact that that's happening within a context of overall high inflation this is a conversation by the way that we had with the economist Aaron Dubay last year it's really too bad that we are running sort of employment low at the same time the economy so hot that inflation has has been elevated David why don't you jump in I just wanted to say just to be very clear about what we're talking about it is the case that full employment meant that there was considerably more bargaining power for low wage workers but I also want to be clear you know the increases in wages that we're talking about in real terms were much smaller for those people than at the high end of the income ladder which is to say someone who's making thirty forty thousand dollars a year sees their wages grow by seven percent that feels very fast it might be faster than the five percent that's being five percent improvement in the top ten percent but in terms of the money that these people have to spend it's still the gains from that period are accruing dramatically overwhelmingly to the very well off so there's one story to tell about you know using percentage changes which does suggest that actually in encouraging ways some of these trends are starting to reverse but in absolute terms it is still the case that in this period as our sort of stereotype of the people day trading at home during the pandemic tells us it was the well off that benefited more than more than I think the less well off right and we're not even talking about wealth and the fact that the top fifty percent tends to invest in the stock market while the bottom fifty percent is not and so I think that's another factor here as well David I want to bring in phones because this is the conversation on happiness in the 2020 so of course we have to talk about phones there's something weird about the global data of phones and happiness and that weirdness was put this way to me by John hella well who's the co-author of the world happiness report in an interview that we did last year he said quote if you're looking for something that's special about the countries where youth happiness is rising they're mostly developed countries and for the most part they are countries that speak English and quote and hella well and I sort of talked about a clever way to be could test this theory we said let's look at Quebec where eighty percent of the population speaks French and compare it to what the world happiness report found for neighboring Ontario whereby contrast less than four percent of the population speaks French right so the question was all right if there's something special about English speaking countries being made miserable by the age the smartphone this is where it would show up Ontario versus Quebec and strangers it seems according to hella well in galloped data that he conducted for the world happiness report life satisfaction for people under thirty in Quebec fell half as much as it did for people in the rest of Canada and there was a separate study that he did that validated that response something's weird is happening here and clearly the language of English itself is not making people miserable but there's something happening among English speaking populations in English speaking countries whereby their happiness has fallen much more not only the last five six years but also in the last twenty years then in the rest the world what is going on with the anglosphere well first of all I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that language is playing a role in the sense that people who speak the same language do live on the same social media as one another and live on somewhat different social media than people who speak other languages now people who live in France people who live in Zimbabwe people who live in in China they are having some experience of the global social media environment that you and I are but people in Canada or England and England are much much closer and you do see these sort of stories of social contagion and you know across cultures quite dramatically where for instance in the sort of the social justice period of the late 2010s into the early 2020s you started to see in Canada in the UK much more talk about racial justice in ways that previously would have struck those populations as quite foreign and American but they had become more central concerns because all of the people were looking at the same Twitter and the same Instagram is one another I do think that that's playing a role I also think that there are ways in which language is a proxy for cultural similarities I mean it is the case that America is speaks English because we were settled in large part by British people as was Canada as was New Zealand as was Australia now the differences between those who left and those who stayed behind are literally the subjects of books but nevertheless you can you know you can you can see some commonalities and track them not just in terms of deep cultural values like for instance you know maybe America is libertarianism or our you know our comfort with tools can be traced to where where our ancestors came from but even things that we weren't really thinking about you know three four five hundred years ago like how we relate to mental health and and care and I do think that there's a story over the last decade or two decades probably led by America in which we've brought along some of these sister countries brought them along with us where we've dramatically expanded diagnostic categories for mental ill health and probably as a result have helped many people who would have otherwise not gotten treatment but also convinced a lot of people who might have otherwise defined themselves as mentally healthy that they weren't so healthy and there is there are a number of fascinating ways to kind of slice that phenomenon but one of the ways that might be most starkest is a paper from I think last year that was looking at this long-standing gap in happiness between liberals and conservatives in the United States which has been a sort of a social science phenomenon for a long time I think you may have written about this paper dark I don't totally remember but the researcher you know substituted a question for about mood for the question about happiness and totally eliminated the gap between self-reported mental health and that means that you know some amount of what we're seeing here is just the category and the language that we're using to talk about whatever it is we're going through and this is not just true but the anglosphere I have a finished friend who you know Finland is always at the top of the world happiness rankings and he's always saying to me the fins aren't happy they're just content the issue is not that they're joyous it's that they don't ask for anything more than they have so you're measuring one thing thinking you're measuring happiness and in fact you're revealing an entirely different social phenomenon but there are also structural dynamics that follow from these same cultural patterns and I mean it's you know the the housing crisis that is so profound especially for young Americans is actually quite bad in Canada it's quite it's really bad in the UK it's quite bad in New Zealand and you know it probably takes a PhD thesis to explain exactly why that pattern has evolved over time but it is true that to the extent that young people are worrying about housing which is something that Morgan was focusing on earlier that does also seem to be especially true in the anglosphere Morgan David's answer laid out quite a buffet of possible reasons why the anglosphere might be sadder or seem sadder than the rest of the world I would love you to pick at some of the components of that buffet just to remind you of what the various stations are one I loved what I think I was picking up his numerous references to Albion Seed this idea that the British tradition in America despite the fact that people who came to the US from different parts of Britain brought very different cultures there is a culture of individualism in the US and a culture of individualism throughout the former Commonwealth that might correlate with you know maybe more neuroticism less time spent to run other people that might cash out in lower reports of happiness he brought up the fact of diagnostic inflation this fact that the US has in last few decades purposefully expanded the definitions of anxiety ADHD other mental health disorders which almost automatically and mechanically rules more people in for diagnosed anxiety and even I think David was referring to this too raises a kind of self awareness about one's own mental health that could make them more likely to answer certain questionnaires about happiness by saying yes I am unhappy and I'm fine talking about it because I talk about it with my counselor twice a month and mention the fact that the Commonwealth or former Commonwealth is also unfortunately united by similar problems of sufficient housing construction possibly related to a kind of culture of administrative law that came out of the British Empire or the you know whatever 18th century British tradition. that makes it easier for locals to stop housing construction. And therefore, we see throughout the Anglospheric World, housing has increased in value much faster than even in non-majority English-speaking countries in Europe. That was my attempt to briefly, or not to briefly remind you, of some of the stuff that David was putting on the table, but I would love to hear your mind were on this issue because I'm fast in it by it. What do you think is going on with the English-speaking world? It's always been the case in economics that when you're trying to study the correlation between money and happiness, people who are studying that for centuries, thousands of years. That one of the issues that you run into when you take that globally, and David had hinted at this, is that the word happiness means something very different to Americans than it does to finish people, to Spanish people, to Chinese people, to people in Africa. It's a very different-- this is not a standard term. And to one person, if you ask them, are you happy? They might immediately anchor towards how am I doing financially? What was my net worth? How is that doing? Another person might anchor towards, how's my family? Is everyone happy and healthy and doing OK? Am I my kids doing well in school? So these are not-- there's no universal definition of this. And it makes the comparisons, particularly, across cultures, very difficult. Now, I saw this study. I forget if it was Harvard and Princeton, but it doesn't matter which one of those. It was a study that in one of those Ivy League schools has, for many decades, asked the incoming freshman class, what do you want out of your Ivy League education? And if you go back to the '50s, '60s, overwhelmingly, the top answer was, I want to learn a philosophy for how to live a good life. That was the main reason. That was what people wanted out of their Ivy League education. And since about the 1980s, overwhelmingly, the answer is, I want to earn a lot of money. What I want out of my Ivy League education is something that's going to propel me into an economic class where I'm going to make a fortune. So even within the same country, the definition of success and what you want out of life can shift dramatically over generations across time. I also wonder-- and it's nothing more than that. I don't have any evidence for this-- but I wonder if one of the reasons why the English-speaking world appears to be doing so much worse mental health-wise than other countries is because-- and David had mentioned this that we're all on the same social media apps. One of the things that I think is under-discussed is that by coincidence-- and I think it was just coincidence-- right when COVID hit in 2020 was about when most of the social media companies, their algorithm got either very good or very bad, depending on how you look at it, got very good at hooking you in and sucking in that dopamine attention cycle to where-- if you'll remember what social media was in the mid-2000s and the 2010s, it was people who used friends who you followed, posting pictures of their wedding and their summer vacation. And around 2020, it very swiftly shifted towards, we will feed you videos of people who you don't know, but we know statistically are going to make your dopamine cycles go haywire. And so-- and I bring that up because I wonder if the algorithms, just because they were made primarily by English-speaking engineers, are more powerful and more profound than they would be in other demographics, other languages across the world. And so so much-- I mean, you've written more about this in almost anyone Derek about how much of the mental health crisis correlates with phones and social media. And so if we're seeing big differences across languages and across countries, I would focus on what are the differences in the media that we're consuming on those devices? Although I would say just to follow up on that, I mean, I think one big point to keep in mind for this whole discussion is, what is the question that we're trying to focus on? Is the question, why are Americans getting less happy over time? Is the question why are people in the English fear getting less happy over time? Or is it why was there an apparent dramatic jump in 2020, which we have not recovered from? And I think all of the things that we've talked about as long-term trends are contributing to long-term declines. But if the question is really about how we went in Pelsman's phrasing from being a quite happy and steadily happy country, going back decades and decades over many social and political crises to a country that is no longer happy and is, you know, not deeply unhappy, but no longer happy in the space of a single year. What explains that? I'm much more likely to focus on the things that actually happened right then, rather than to worry about in particular social isolation or smartphone use, or any of these other contributing factors, which I believe wholeheartedly are damaging our well-being as individuals and as a society. But I think can't really explain all that much of a phase shift, such a sudden phase shift in that one single year. I think that's a perfectly reasonable edit. I remember in my original article, I put this section on phones and the English fear in what I called an interlude. Because there's a question I'm fascinated by, even though it might not be directly relevant to, or might not specifically answer, the capital Q question that I'm interested in for the purposes of this podcast, which is what happened in 2020. I think they are both really interesting questions, though. Like, one, what happened in 2020? And two, okay, something is going on in the English fear, and I really, really want to understand what it is. They're also interrelated in the sense that, you know, countries which did not experience long-term declines and trust over decades are going to be less sensitive to the perception that society is falling as part during the pandemic. - Right, it's like a chronic condition interacting with an acute infection, right? If there's a long-term malady and then there's indeed acute malady. The last point that I wanted to raise here is that something has happened to news itself. There was a 2024 Brookings analysis of news sentiment that found that the tone of news, which actually, speaking of chronic conditions and acute conditions, had been getting more negative over time, really had a sudden break around 2018, 2020. And in the last few years, news hasn't just gotten negative. News is, this is according by the words of the Brookings analysis, surprisingly negative, even relative to the underlying facts of the news. And, you know, as Morgan was talking about algorithms, and the fact that we're all constantly interfacing with algorithms, one thing that I think is happening here is that news makers, news producers, and that's not just me and David and Morgan, that's many people listening, that post things on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or whatever else. Like, these are all news producers, right? And they learn over time as they write one news post and then write another, that negative words and catastrophic framing just tends to get more attention. And so all of these little news producers are learning the same lesson that catastrophizing pays off. But they're also news consumers. And so when they open their phone and they read the stuff that's being produced by all the people around them, who they know and don't know, what they tend to see more over time is messages that have been torqued toward catastrophe. And so I wonder if there's something to the idea that yes, there are many, many bad things that are happening in the world. And this has been a decade of one shitfire after another in many cases, between the pandemic, wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Persian Gulf, existential fears, climate, AI, like, there's been a lot going on. But I also do wonder whether there's something to this idea that like the experience of interacting with information about the world has become or has come to seem more and more catastrophic. Morgan, does this theory connect for you? Or do you think something else is going on? - Yeah, I mean, myself working in finance, I mean, if your view in economics is, it's very hard to know what's gonna happen next to actually predict these cycles. And if you're an investor, you should probably just dollar cost average into a low cost index fund and write it out. If that's your message, which by the way, I think is a very good message, watch how many times you're invited to come on to CMBC to talk about that message, zero, never. And so I think there's a lot of that of just the incentives and the economics of these businesses. I notice in my own media diet where I feel like I get the calmest, most balanced and I think the most relevant news is the stuff that I pay $75 a month for. The stuff that's just attention grabbing and just like an ad-driven media, they kind of have to gravitate towards that. I've seen this very often in my career as a finance writer, the stuff that I write, that I think is pretty calm and measured is never gonna do as well. Even if it's the stuff that I really feel proud of and believe in, once in a while, if I have something that is a pessimistic take, and I really believe in, I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, I believe in it, that's always gonna get 10 times the views of whatever I feel is much calmer. I think a lot of this too is what, and why the media producers gravitate towards this, because it works, is a lot of the reason that they're doing is because when viewers are interacting with the news, yes, they do wanna be informed, they do wanna be learned, they do wanna learn, but what feels better, what is a much bigger rush is just having what you already believe reinforced. And it's always been the case, this has been like an evolutionary thing that you're gonna react stronger and with a greater sense of urgency to a threat than to a risk. If I say like, hey, here's my view of what the stock market's gonna do, the stock market is going to double in the next year. If that's my view. A lot of people would say, "Hey, BS, I don't believe that, but if I say Derek, something's gonna happen to your finances and you're gonna lose 90% of your money in the six, you'll pay attention to that. That way people will perk up to that." And just like the algorithms have gotten stronger over time, the people that excel in financial media all the time have figured this out very clear. And a lot of people without naming names who are very pessimistic in what they write and go on TV. If you have lunch with them one-on-one, it's not what they actually believe. They're much more calm and measured. And I look down upon that, really, because I think it's had a huge impact on these numbers that we're talking about, of just how people feel about the economy. David, I want to ask you a question that exists a little bit outside of the parameters of this show's theme. Because you and I write a lot about things that are bad, like we write about things that are catastrophic. And there's this interesting balance that I don't think I've worked out exactly a formula for perfecting of how to write about things that are important and negative without falling prey to a kind of catastrophizing that is going to make people either pay less attention to me over time, trust me less over time, or simply build up a kind of biological reader tolerance of catastrophe that's so high that you can't get them to pay attention to anything that doesn't meet that high threshold of catastrophe. How do you work that out as a journalist who covers serious stuff that in many cases is in fact objectively quite bad? I certainly don't think I've solved it, but what I would say is that we're doing this in a setting that isn't defined entirely by news producers, it's also defined by platforms, it's also defined by readers, viewers, and that all of those groups are playing a role in driving this shift. I mean, if we think back to five or 10 years ago when the algorithms were maybe slightly less tuned towards outrage, it was still the case that readers were more eager to share, things that angered them, outraged them, or scared them, that was what the algorithm, the people who designed the algorithms were recognizing when they pushed things even further in that direction. I also am not entirely sure what the long-term cause and effect here is about trust. I mean, I mentioned earlier that as far back as we have data going back, trust in media has been declining, starting in the late '60s or early '70s. And so the high point, the registered high point for trust in American media was in the period in which we had, for instance, Richard Nixon conducting secret negotiations with Vietnam to extend the war so that he could win election, which was not reported on by the press. And one way of looking at the decline, the study decline over time, is to say that people like us have alienated our audiences and made them distrust us. Another is to think that maybe that distrust is its own secular trend, which is preceding almost independent of what we are doing, because, as Jack Schaeffer put it in a Harper's roundtable about trust in media, I think from last fall, nobody he knows is going to trade the New York Times of 2026 for the New York Times of 1976. Nobody knows, the news is better, fairer, stronger today. Not every item is going to be perfectly calibrated. Not every item is going to be perfectly sourced. But if you're taking the bundle of what the average consumer of news can get today, it is much better information than what that same person would have gotten from the equivalent institution in decades in the past. And his theory about why trust is the climate, which I'm not sure that I entirely agree with, but I think it's really interesting, is that it's a function of journalists telling the truth more, and telling uncomfortable truths, and being frank about social dysfunction, and not hiding the misbehavior of our leaders out of a sense of discretion, and that the more deeper digging and more expository reporting has been done over decades, the ultimate effect is not to have people believe that the media is great. It's to believe that society is broken, and with the media part of that. And I do wonder about how we've gotten to the place we are today and exactly how we apportion blame for it. When I see people talking about the way that the media covered the lab leak story, for instance, or covered the rise of Donald Trump, there are critiques to be made for sure. Some of them I agree with, some of them I don't, but when I look back over a 50-year period of steady erosion of trust in the media, I have a really hard time thinking that's a matter of catastrophism, or bias, or something else. I have a much easier time seeing it as the function of broad atomization, alienation, and the collapse of what had been America's social fabric. Where does that leave people like you and me and how we tell these stories? When I talk about climate, which is the subject that I've written most catastrophically about, I often say maybe a little defensively, that I think the main job here is to tell the truth. And we may want to affect an outcome or shape response by readers. Certainly, those are things that we think about when we tell these stories. But I think the ultimate obligation is to be clear about how we see the story we're telling, try to give readers the information that they need to assess those claims themselves, rather than strategically massaging our framing for achieve some effect in the audience, which may or may not actually work. Yeah, as you're including thought, I was thinking, David, about your comment, that we're talking both about long-term trends, like the decline of trust in media, the decline of trust institutions, like the CDC or the federal government. And we're also talking about short-term trends, like the fact that survey show happiness fell off a cliff in the 2020s and has stayed quite putrid throughout this decade. I think for the moment, I've decided that those trends are related, that what happened in the early 2020s really was akin to a kind of acute illness, that like the civic body of United States of America could not handle in part because of these chronic illnesses we've been talking about, like inflation is bad. And the decline of institutional trust and surge of individualism that happened in the early 2020s, that was its own bad thing. And other things that have happened in the 2020s, like the relentlessly negative news cycle, that's also bad. But I think that in part maybe one reason why Americans have struggled to be resilient in, at least according to these surveys, resilient in the face of these things, is because of the accumulation of longer-term trends, the rise of atomization, the rise of catastrophizing news, the decline of faith institutions outside of the family, the fact of, you know, smartphones and social media and diagnostic inflation, everything that's happened in the Anglosphere. I do think there's this like interesting interactive effect between like these 50-year changes accelerating the five-year change, that's like really, really interesting. So anyway, I think, thanks to both of you for helping me think through this, because it's a topic that I keep finding myself going back and back and back to. And I feel like I kind of made progress in terms of lining up the dominoes today. So David and Morgan, thank you very much. Thank you. [MUSIC]