The unhappiness that outlasted the pandemic

Sam Peltzman has an alarming new paper about American happiness. Since 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a random sample of Americans how happy they were, and in the blue line of the figure above I’ve plotted average happiness by assigning numerical values to the possible answers. Peltzman documents a big negative trend break starting around Covid-19, which has persisted into at least 2024, well after the abatement of the worst of the pandemic. I was curious if this was some fluke in the GSS, so in the figure above, I added US data on self-reported life satisfaction from Gallup’s World Happiness Report. Gallup only has data from 2011 to 2025, and the two series do not exhibit the same year-by-year fluctuations. Nonetheless, both show American well-being remains near unusually low values, at least circa 2024 and 2025.