Over at his new Substack home, Will Wilkinson suggests that Americans have been unhappy for a while. Here's his evidence:
Regular readers know that I'm not a stickler about charts having y-axes that start at zero. Still, this chart is pretty determined to show a tiny decline as a huge one. A careful look at the y-axis shows that general happiness has recently gone down from about 2.22 to 2.18. This is not a gigantic change.
I wouldn't bother pointing this out if it weren't for the fact that I think this is an important argument. As near as I can tell, Americans aren't especially unhappy these days. Here's the same GSS data plotted slightly differently:
The percentage of people who say they're happy declined from 90 percent in 2000 to 85 percent in 2010, and then bounced back to 87 percent in 2018. That's a net drop of three percentage points, which is barely even noticeable. (Note that all of this is pre-COVID.) Here's similar data from the World Values Survey:
Again, there's a slight decrease between 2000 and 2010, bringing us back to about the same level as the late '80s.
There's other data you can look at that's more specific—financial satisfaction, personal satisfaction, job satisfaction, etc. They all show much the same thing: either no change at all or else a very small change over the past couple of decades.
You can make a case that Americans are slightly less happy today than in the past. You can also make a case that happiness has dropped more dramatically for certain specific subgroups. But that's about it. In general, the changes are small and far from historically unprecedented. The real mystery is why Americans are so angry and frustrated despite being about as happy as ever. There's an answer to that question, I think, but in any case it's the question to ask.
Sorry, Kevin, but drawing conclusions about happiness "today" when your data only go as far as 2016 is just as wrong as failing to extend your graph to the zero point. Do you have any more recent data?
Up vote. The headline (and Kevin) says "these days." Is that an assumption that unhappiness didn't increase between Jan 2016 and Jan 2020? You need some very rose colored glasses to look at it that way.
Yeah, that was my exact thought. I kept looking for one of the charts to at least get into the Trump years. I'll go out on a limb and posit that the happiness index took a pretty big tumble in 2020.
looks like things are going well at your new interwebs home, kevin. glad you're still blogging at a pretty steady clip. one think that would improve my happiness as one of your long time readers is if you implemented a voting and sorting commenting platform. i think you have one of the most insightful and interesting commenter bases but i don't usually have time to read through ever comment, so a way to sort them by upvote count is a really nice feature. anyway, good luck here.
If your comment had an up-vote button, I click it.
ha! double upvote.
One explanation though is this: We humans are constructed to be happy. Or rather we evolved that way (those who are unhappy--have they a lower sex drive?).
There is this phenomenon that suicide rates are high when objective conditions are good and vice versa. This stuff is complicated.
At any rate self reported happiness is probably understood as happiness with one's private life and condition and does not reflect people's feelings about the state of the union...
I'd want to know who's getting less happy. Is everyone just a tiny bit unhappier, or are a very few people a whole lot unhappier? Very different stories.
The General Happiness chart tracks my life pretty well. Very happy in 1976 - I was a little kid with nothing to worry about beside toys and Saturday morning cartoons.
Late 80's/early 90's another high water mark. Enjoying college and meeting my wife.
Then a few years of moderately less happiness, most likely because of entering the real workforce.
Then a long, slow drop starting in 2000. About the time we bought our house and started to accept that restoring a cheap, old dump was not the romantic vision we had...
Yesterday I was 2.4 happy, but today I'm only 2.25 happy. Help me.
The Bobby McFerrin song came out 33 years ago. It seems like only yesterday.
Now that worries me!
& the Big Mouth Billy Bass that had the song as a preset (along with "Take Me to the River") is twenty years old.
There is no reason to assume that a question such as "Are you a) very happy, b) moderately happy..." is really giving useful information. It's pretty vague. If Americans are really angry and frustrated (what do the polls actually say about that?) how could they really be happy? They have certainly become increasingly dissatisfied and presumably "unhappy" about many specific things such as the political parties. How about their own prospects for economic advancement?
A question that could be asked is what respondents really mean when they say they are happy. Would admitting that they are unhappy mean that they are personally dissatisfied with themselves? It might take several well-designed poll questions to figure this out.
However if you want to design programs to improve life, you need information on specific things, not whether people are happy. Or should the flat response mean that things are going just fine for everyone and that nothing needs to be changed?
Not having anything to do with Substack.
I remember having my inbox crammed with useless newsletter I somehow thought I needed. The last and the best of them was Robert Park's What's New which I held on to until he died.
I guess nobody under 50 remembers what a bad idea it was.