GoKawiil1. The Tragic Twenties
“The United States was a reasonably happy country for a long time,” the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman wrote in a 2026 paper. “It is not happy now.”
Crunching data from the General Social Survey, Peltzman documented “a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population” after COVID that “mainly persists” through 2024. He called it a “regime change” in national sentiment. After 50 years of mostly steady levels of self-reported well-being, American happiness plunged. And it’s hardly bounced back at all.
Peltzman’s analysis is not a lonely voice; there is a veritable chorus of gloomy sentiment. This week, the Federal Reserve’s measure of US worker satisfaction fell to its lowest level since the survey began in 2014. One week prior, consumer sentiment had fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in the 70-year history of the University of Michigan economic survey. Once again, the index plunged around 2020 and, like a hiker on the far side of a mountain, continues down step by step. Americans are telling pollsters that they are more depressed about this economy than they were during the depths of the Great Recession or the painful stagflationary years of the 1970s.
Finally, the U.S. has also fallen to its lowest ranking ever in the World Happiness Report, largely due to the astonishingly swift decline in well-being among young people in that international survey.
If you are looking for a sympathetic ear to explain this phenomenon, certainly do not seek counsel from your local economist. The American blues seem awfully curious to those who view the world through the keyhole of employment or income statistics. The unemployment rate has been below 5 percent for practically the entire decade, which is basically as good as you can ask for. For this entire decade, the US economy has significantly outgrown the Eurozone and other rich countries, such as Japan and the UK. Americans are rich and getting richer, by most conventional measures. More Americans are breaking into the upper middle class, and workers at the bottom of the income distribution have seen their wages grow faster than those at the top in the last few years.
So, those who privilege economic statistics over self-reports might be tempted to summarize the situation this way: America’s resilient economy is a fact, while Americans’ sad-sack survey results are mere irrational feelings. There is something to this; the gap between so-called “hard data” (e.g., the unemployment rate) and “soft data” (e.g., a survey) is certainly wide and widening. But a feeling is an important kind of fact. Feelings don’t just shape consumer behavior. They shape political attitudes; and attitudes influence voting; and voting determines policies; and policies shape the economy. To understand the future of the US economy and the United States writ large, one cannot afford a haughty indifference toward sentiment.
And on the sentiment front, what we’ve got are four survey results—four facts, you might even say, of American lugubriousness—all of which point to one unmistakable conclusoin. This decade has been the very opposite of “roaring.” We are mired instead in the Tragic Twenties.
2. Who Killed the Vibes?
One of the more remarkable discoveries in Peltzman’s paper is that the decline in self-reported well-being since 2020 has not been concentrated among young people, poor people, or unmarried people—three of the groups typically afflicted by higher levels of anxiety and sadness. Instead, the decline in happiness has been an across-the-board 10- to 15-point decimation experienced by practically every demographic. (In the graphs below, BLUE refers to happiness levels before 2020; PINK is happiness levels post-2020; and BLACK is the decline, which is remarkably uniform across groups.)
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