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Carol Graham built her career on measuring happiness. Lately, the numbers keep pulling her somewhere darker. \u201cI used to work on happiness and I seem to work more on despair now,\u201d she told Fortune. \u201cSo that\u2019s not great, but that\u2019s the state we\u2019re in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Graham is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a professor at the University of Maryland\u2019s School of Public Policy, and a senior scientist at Gallup, whose World Poll supplied the data for her latest paper. She started in development economics, as a visiting fellow at the World Bank and a special adviser at both the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank.<\/p>\n
Her early books were about poverty and market reform in Latin America, but she has wrestled increasingly with more existential questions of how societies make their inhabitants feel. You can see the shift in her book titles: Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (2009), Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream (2017), and The Power of Hope: How Wellbeing Science Can Save Us from Despair (2023).<\/p>\n
Graham has spent years moving between the two subjects. \u201cI\u2019ve done a lot of hope and despair, or maybe despair and hope,\u201d she said. \u201cI go between them so I don\u2019t go crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
She has served on a United Nations expert group on measures of progress beyond GDP and on a National Academy of Sciences panel on well-being metrics. As Fortune reached her, she was preparing to fly to Geneva to deliver a lecture titled \u201cHope, Despair, and Life Outcomes.\u201d The Geneva Graduate Institute invited her \u201cbecause they said, you know, the young people, the graduate students were worried about despair.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her latest paper, written with Douglas Harris, Anjana Nair and Isabel Shaheen O\u2019Malley and summarized by Brookings on Oct. 1, applies that question to the United States. The authors used Gallup data from 44 middle- and high-income countries between 2006 and 2024. In the U.S. over that period, trust in government fell 31 percentage points, trust in the courts fell 24, and the share of Americans who feel free to choose how to live fell 19. The authors found that the U.S. converts income growth into well-being less efficiently than the average country, and they call it the most extreme case of what they term \u201cthe paradox of unhappy growth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Graham\u2019s explanation starts in Latin America. \u201cI was born in Peru and I worked initially on development economics,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I can tell you what real poverty is.\u201d That experience still shapes how she reads the American numbers.<\/p>\n
\u201cPoor people in Latin America are much more hopeful than poor people in the U.S.,\u201d Graham said. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve concluded that it\u2019s harder to be poor in a very rich country where you\u2019re sort of stigmatized. And plus the American Dream narrative sort of stigmatizes you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Happy peasants, miserable millionaires<\/p>\n
Graham first spotted the pattern in China. In research with Shaojie Zhou and Junyi Zhang, published in World Development in 2017, she found that life satisfaction dropped \u201cprecipitously\u201d during the early stages of the country\u2019s rapid growth. The researchers called it a \u201cparadox of progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were the fastest-growing country in the world and suicides were skyrocketing,\u201d she said, recalling with amazement how life satisfaction dropped on a par with the Great Recession or the COVID pandemic. \u201cIt disrupted everything,\u201d Graham said. \u201cIt changed lifestyles. It created inequalities they\u2019d never had.\u201d The suicide rate fell back down, she added, once the most dramatic part of China\u2019s transition to markets was over.<\/p>\n
The American version has played out more slowly. The U.S. has outgrown nearly every other wealthy country for two decades, Graham said, but inequality has kept \u201cgradually creeping\u201d up \u201cto the point that it\u2019s corrosive.\u201d The Brookings paper calls the U.S. the most polarized democracy in the developed world. By 2024, only 12% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans were satisfied with the country\u2019s system of government.<\/p>\n
\u2018Nobody ever talks about bad luck\u2018<\/p>\n
Happiness for All? traced how unevenly hope is spread across America. Graham said she found the idea of the American Dream turns falling behind into a personal failing.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo if you fall behind and you\u2019re poor, it\u2019s your fault because you didn\u2019t work hard to get ahead,\u201d she said. \u201cNobody ever talks about bad luck.\u201d<\/p>\n
She pointed to the founding myth of American self-making, the Horatio Alger stories of poor boys who rise on pluck and hard work. In Ragged Dick, Alger\u2019s best-known novel, a New York shoeshine boy gets his break when he saves a rich man\u2019s son from drowning and is rewarded with a job in the man\u2019s office. \u201cEven the old famous Horatio Alger story, he had a benefactor,\u201d Graham said, \u201cand they never talk about that when they tell the story.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Brookings paper makes the same argument in academic terms. The authors blame the U.S. happiness decline partly on \u201ca deeply rooted culture of individualism and distrust of social support.\u201d The U.S. has a \u201cthinner social contract\u201d than its peers, they write, \u201csomething the unequal distribution of hope in the U.S. also reflects.\u201d<\/p>\n
That distribution matters. In a study published this year with Redzo Mujcic of Warwick Business School, Graham followed 25,000 Australian adults for 14 years. Those with high levels of hope had better later outcomes in health, education and employment. They were also less shaken by negative life events, and they recovered faster and more completely. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve done a lot of hope, work on hope,\u201d Graham said, explaining that hope is different from happiness and optimism. There\u2019s an element of agency and what she called an \u201cinternal locus of control.\u201d People with higher levels of hopefulness did better on a range of outcomes, she found, including how they adapted more quickly to negative shocks. \u201cThey were able to kind of cope better to adversity.\u201d They were also able to measure out how much it changed over time. \u201cIt turns out it\u2019s incredibly consistent. And so I think life satisfaction has a bit of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The men the data misses<\/p>\n
Graham\u2019s research on despair keeps returning to people the standard statistics barely capture. Prime-age men who have left the labor force, she said, are \u201cnot counted in the data, not in the usual data we use. And they\u2019re in very bad shape.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a 2021 paper with Sergio Pinto, Graham found that American men outside the labor force were \u201cvery unhappy and very pessimistic\u201d and \u201cdisproportionately represented among opioid users.\u201d Many of them, she said, \u201cstill live in their parents\u2019 basements or in the parents\u2019 census tract. So they\u2019ve sort of failed to launch.\u201d Without a college degree, she added, the odds of finding a good job are low, which also keeps these men from moving to where the jobs are.<\/p>\n
This is where she parts with many of her colleagues in academia. \u201cThe macroeconomists go on and on and on about how strong the labor market is,\u201d Graham said, while for many Americans, \u201ctheir lives are so far from what the numbers are telling.\u201d She links the rise of populism, at home and abroad, to that gap: \u201cPeople are frustrated with the system and it\u2019s failing a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Americans she worries about are mostly not destitute. The system is \u201cleaving large sectors of society behind,\u201d she said, \u201cmaybe not totally out of work or totally penniless.\u201d It\u2019s leaving them without hope, she thinks.<\/p>\n
The case against despair<\/p>\n
Not everyone reads the data that way. Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, global chief economist at Boston Consulting Group, has argued that the American mood is worse than American reality. In a September report, \u201cThe Kids Are Alright,\u201d he and his co-authors found that since 2020, wage growth for the bottom quartile has outpaced the top in nearly every year, and that wealth gains have been roughly proportional across income groups. \u201cNothing is ever monocausal, but the biggest challenge is that of distorted expectations, in my view,\u201d he told Fortune in September.<\/p>\n
Retired University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman also complicates the picture. In the General Social Survey, he found that the 2020 crash in American happiness hit hardest among the most educated and the wealthy. Graham cautions that the GSS asks people to choose among only three answers, so \u201cyou lose a lot of the variance.\u201d Gallup\u2019s life-satisfaction question uses a 0-to-10 scale.<\/p>\n
On Gallup\u2019s scale, the Brookings data shows an America pulling apart. The share of Americans who rate their lives 7 to 10 out of 10 barely moved, while the average fell more steeply. Many Americans, the authors write, \u201ccontinue to be quite satisfied,\u201d while \u201cothers are increasingly unhappy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur narrative and our numbers,\u201d Graham said, \u201care really out of touch with how people are living right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
#close #American #Dream #turned #top #happiness #expert #specialist #despair #harder #poor #rich #country<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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