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If America's So Rich, How'd It Get So Sad?

derekthompson.org · 3,152 words · saved by 2 readers

Or: How the 2020s broke our brains

“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…

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