Carol Graham, a senior fellow in economic studies at Brookings, a professor at the University of Maryland and a senior scientist at Gallup, says her research on happiness has increasingly shifted toward despair and hope. With four co-authors, she analyzed Gallup data from 44 middle- and high-income countries between 2006 and 2024: in the United States, trust in government fell by 31 percentage points, trust in the courts by 24 points and the sense of being free to choose how to live by 19 points. The authors conclude that the United States converts economic growth into well-being less efficiently than the average country and represents the most extreme case of the “paradox of unhappy growth.” Graham attributes part of the decline to rising inequality, the stigmatization of poverty and a culture of individualism, while a 14-year study of 25,000 Australian adults linked hope with better health, education, employment and resilience to shocks. Economists dispute part of this interpretation, emphasizing that bottom-quartile wages have outpaced top-quartile wage growth since 2020, but Graham argues that aggregate indicators fail to capture the despair of many men who have left the labor force.
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