For the past several years, Peltzman has been combing through the General Social Survey, a random-sample poll that has asked Americans the same simple question since 1972: Are you happy? What he found about the years since the pandemic stopped him cold. “There was a huge hit,” he told me recently. “And then it’s only a little bit coming back. So when you’re all done, there’s an unprecedented decline into the whole of the 2020s.” Americans are now at their least happy point in the survey’s 50-year history. Peltzman’s measure — the percentage saying “very happy” minus the percentage saying “not very happy” — ran at roughly +20 points on average from 1972 through the last pre-pandemic survey in 2018. That baseline held through wars, recessions, assassinations, stagflation, and 9/11. None of it broke the floor in any sustained way. Then 2020 hit. The crash was 22.2 percentage points — by far the largest single move in the survey’s history. The number of people saying “not very happy” actually exceeded those saying “very happy” for the first time ever. The measure has come back somewhat since 2021 to around +6 as of 2024, resulting in a shift from +20 to
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