Hope & Happiness
The U.S. is experiencing a nationwide crisis of despair. Despair is not only linked with premature mortality, but with the vulnerability to
I have spent much of my career as an economist studying the determinants of happiness in people in different countries and cultures around the world and, in turn, exploring how happiness affects important life outcomes such as work, health, longevity, and social life. While at first wellbeing was not considered the domain of economists, it is now a subfield in economics and includes collaboration with scholars in other disciplines, such as psychology, psychiatry, and the biological sciences as well...These are uncertain times. Given the damage that despair has already caused, including the prematurely lost lives of well over 100,000 Americans in 2021 alone, its spread to the next generation is a daunting thought. It is urgent that we expand our knowledge and put what we do know into practical policies. The science of wellbeing provides us with new tools to do so. Critical moments require radical new thinking on the importance of restoring hope.
Read more from Carol Graham.
Carol Graham is the interim vice president and director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires; The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being; Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream (Princeton); and other books, as well as numerous articles in academic journals.
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