The change is driven by the number of people who say they’re not too happy: 13 percent in 2018 vs. 8 percent in 1990. That’s a more than 50 percent increase.

Other recent research confirms this trend. The latest World Happiness Report, released this week, finds that a separate measure of overall life satisfaction took a 6 percent plunge in the United States between 2007 and 2018.

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“Even as the United States economy improved after the end of the Great Recession in 2009,” that report noted, “happiness among adults did not rebound to the higher levels of the 1990s, continuing a slow decline ongoing since at least 2000.”

Economists have become more interested in happiness in recent years, party because of the growing realization that traditional economic measures — such as unemployment or gross domestic product — are incapable of fully capturing the state of human welfare.

Happiness research is “a useful antidote to the tendency of economists to focus exclusively on material determinants of social welfare,” as then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke put it in a commencement address in 2010. “GDP is not itself the final objective of policy.”

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There are many determinants of happiness in the United States. This year’s World Happiness Report, for instance, focuses on the role of digital media, noting that many of the activities correlated with unhappiness among young Americans — spending time on the Internet, listening to music alone, social media use — typically happen on a computer or cellphone. That study also cites the opioid epidemic and the poor state of American health in general, as both drivers and symptoms of American unhappiness.

Breaking out General Social Survey data among different demographic groups also offers some clues about the changing nature of American happiness.

Republicans, for instance, have maintained a consistent happiness edge over Democrats since the 1970s. The two trend lines generally move in tandem and don’t appear to show much response to changes in the occupancy of the White House. One potential explanation is Republicans’ greater religiosity, which other research has linked to happiness and life satisfaction.

The urban-rural happiness gradient also is shrinking. In the 1970s, the residents of rural areas were about 10 percent happier in absolute terms than their large-city counterparts. But the two groups are very close now, and some researchers suspect that the strong preference for urban life among millennials is a factor.

Looking at responses by self-reported economic class offers a complicated picture of happiness. Americans identifying as lower or middle class report a modest decline in happiness since the 1990s. But the picture is drastically different among the upper class, for whom happiness plateaued in the 1990s, dropped steeply about 2008, and has been then rising steadily ever since.

The drivers of this pattern aren’t immediately apparent. The share of Americans identifying as upper class has remained steady for decades, at roughly 3 or 4 percent. Because class is self-reported, the happiness trend may reflect cultural changes around the definition of class, with different groups of people becoming more or less likely to identify as middle or upper class over the years.

Money aside, one of the largest drivers of happiness in the General Social Survey is health. As of 2018, the happiness gap between those who say their health is poor, and those who say it’s good or excellent, is about one-quarter of the entire scale in absolute terms. Rendered on a happiness scale from 0 to 100, for instance, the least healthy would rate their well-being at about a 38, while the healthiest would be somewhere near 65.

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Perhaps more concerning than the absolute gap between the two is the fact that it has grown over the years, fueled chiefly by a decline in happiness among those who say their health is poor. This suggests that illness in America is becoming more difficult to deal with and exerting a greater toll on the well-being of patients. The potential culprits here are numerous: soaring medical expenses likely play a role, as do the frustrations of dealing with private insurance companies that have a great deal of power in determining which ailments get covered and paid for.

This last finding ties back to the data presented in the World Happiness Report: Our current state of national well-being is tied, in large part, to various public health challenges. The most daunting indicator in this regard may be the ongoing decline in life expectancy: The United States in the midst of the longest ongoing decline in average life expectancy since World War I. This despite the fact that the nation is in the midst of one of the longest economic expansions in its history.