We’re enjoying one of the best economies of our lifetime. The G.D.P. is growing at about 3.5 percent a year, which is about a point faster than many experts thought possible. We’re in the middle of the second-longest recovery in American history, and if it lasts for another eight months it will be the longest ever. If you were born in 1975, you’ve seen the U.S. economy triple in size over the course of your lifetime.

The gains are finally being widely shared, even by the least skilled. As Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute recently noted, the median usual weekly earnings for workers who didn’t complete high school shot up by 6.5 percent over the past year. Thanks mostly to government transfer programs, incomes for the bottom fifth of society have increased by about 80 percent over the past four decades.

And yet are we happy?

About 60 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in this country. Researchers with the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index interviewed 160,000 adults in 2017 to ask about their financial security, social relationships, sense of purpose and connectedness to community. Last year turned out to be the worst year for well-being of any since the study began 10 years ago.

As the recovery has advanced, people’s faith in capitalism has actually declined, especially among the young. Only 45 percent of those between 18 and 29 see capitalism positively, a lower rate than in 2010, when the country was climbing out of the Great Recession.