America is richer than ever. Why is it so unhappy? |
Ordinary Americans today enjoy a living standard that would have awed kings for most of human history.
We live in homes conditioned to our ideal temperature in any season; drive vehicles that pack the power of 250 horses into a 100-square-foot metal frame; carry six-ounce rectangles that offer instant access to virtually any loved one, book, song, fact, or pornography; inhale gases that take the pain out of any surgery; replace our worn-out hips with titanium; glide 40,000 feet above the Earth in pressurized aluminum tubes; and eat ground beef wrapped in tacos made of Doritos.
But we don’t seem that jazzed about it.
Key takeaways
• Wealthy nations have been getting richer — without getting happier — for decades, according to some studies.
• Consumerism often functions like a zero-sum status competition, in which people must buy more stuff just to retain their social rank (aka “keep up with the Joneses”).
• Given this, some environmentalists argue that we can shrink wealthy economies without sacrificing human well-being. But this is mistaken.
Since 1996, America’s median household income (adjusted for inflation) has risen by 26 percent, enabling us to afford more flights, smartphones, and Gordita Supremes than ever before. And yet, over that same period, the share of Americans who described themselves as “not too happy” in the General Social Survey rose by 9 percentage points, while the segment calling themselves “very happy” shrank by more than 9.4 points.
Meanwhile, measures of Americans’ economic confidence and consumer sentiment both declined. And in 2025, the percentage of Americans who were “very satisfied” with their personal lives hit an all-time low in Gallup’s polling.
This disconnect between America’s rising prosperity and sagging spirits has grown more conspicuous in recent years. Since the middle of 2023 — when inflation returned to normal levels following the post-pandemic price spike — Americans’ real wages and net worths have ticked up. But the public’s mood has scarcely improved.
Pundits dubbed this development “the vibecession” and proffered myriad plausible explanations for its emergence (people still haven’t adjusted psychologically to the new price level; housing remains unaffordable; living through a mass death event is a real bummer; Covid-19 turned too many of us into hermits; the kids need to get off their dang phones, and so on).
Yet to some economists and social theorists, the “vibecession” is less a new phenomenon than the wealthy world’s default condition. In their account, people in developed countries have been getting richer — without getting happier — for more than half a century.
That might seem bleak. For anti-growth environmentalists, however, it is actually a source of hope.
The “degrowth” movement believes that humanity is rapidly exhausting the Earth’s resources. Thus, to prevent ecological collapse — without condemning the global poor to permanent penury — the movement has called on rich countries to throttle their use of energy and material resources.
If economic growth had been making wealthy nations happier over the past 50 years, this would be a tall order. In that scenario, there would be a tragic conflict between the near-term well-being of the “first world” and the sustainability of the planet’s ecosystems.
But this conflict is illusory, according to degrowth proponents like the philosopher Tim Jackson and the anthropologist Jason Hickel. In their view, the wealthy world has been burning vast resources on a zero-sum status competition — in which workers must perpetually increase their consumption just to “keep up with the Joneses.” By abandoning such spiritually corrosive consumerism — and embracing more egalitarian and communal ways of life — rich countries can downsize their economies and uplift their people simultaneously.
Some aspects of this narrative are plausible. Growth may yield diminishing returns to well-being, and status concerns do loom larger in rich societies.
But it does not follow that wealthy nations can dramatically reduce economic production without harming their residents’ welfare. Optimizing the American economy for human happiness will require changing what we produce — but it almost certainly won’t entail producing less.
Can money buy happiness — or only rent it?
At first brush, the research on money and happiness can look puzzling. On the one hand, within countries, income and well-being are highly correlated: The larger a person’s paycheck, the happier they tend to be. And this same relationship holds between countries as well — nations with higher incomes report greater well-being than those with lower ones.
When one looks at happiness trends in rich countries over time, however, the correlation between income and happiness weakens — or, in some studies, disappears.........