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The article is smarter than the title makes it sound. He's not seriously proposing that being rich makes you happy. And he notes that there's a big drop aroun

The article is smarter than the title makes it sound. He's not seriously proposing that being rich makes you happy. And he notes that there's a big drop around 2020 specifically, which long-term trends don't explain. Just to state the obvious: 2020 was the year of COVID, which played hell with peoples' social lives. And I think it's been pretty well-proven that happiness is largely driven by the strength and quality of our social relationships. Anything that cuts us off from our friends, or prevents us from forming new friendships, is going to be visible in the happiness data. Judging by the stats, we haven't dug ourselves out of the post-COVID hole yet.

bombcar 6mo ago
I suspect that for many people, the pounding outside is what mainly affects their happiness - if everything reported in the news is sunshine and happiness, they tend happier. And if it's all doom and gloom and "go outside and you kill grandma" - are we surprised they get sad?
- autoexec 6mo ago
  In my experience most people don't care about what the news tells them anywhere near as much as what's going on in their personal lives. If they've got money and they aren't worried about paying their bills or the price of food or the price of gas and they can afford a nice place to live and can afford to send their kids to college and can take at least one big vacation a year and they're spending their time going out with their friends they aren't losing much sleep over news stories that mention war in Somalia, or some politician's latest scandal, or how deforestation is threatening the habitat of a bunch of animals. They might not like what they hear, but they'll feel pretty happy about their life. When their standard of living declines and they have to cut back to make ends meet and they watch their children struggle in ways they didn't have to at their age and their grandma actually dies because she went outside people start to get upset and suddenly the constant news stories about the latest pointless trillion dollar war, and the politician stealing from taxpayers, and the huge decline in wildlife populations starts to hit differently.
kenjackson 6mo ago
I agree the article is smarter than the title makes it seem. And honestly, much better than comments on HN. The articles keeps diving deeper and asking questions. The comments here take hold of a single theory, without even thinking about the counters that article mentions. This is probably the best example of read the article, and not the comments.
- pepperoni_pizza 6mo ago
  The HN comments are sadly mostly just people pushing their favorite thing, whether COVID denialism, "everything is going bad because people are atheists" or whatever, without engaging with the article at all.
  - decimalenough 6mo ago
    > COVID denialism > "everything is going bad because people are atheists" I don't think I have ever seen anybody express either of these opinions on HN, and if they tried, they would immediately get downvoted to oblivion.
    - FeteCommuniste 6mo ago
      Here's one example of the second, in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877926
  - hunterpayne 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - adamwk 6mo ago
      Where do you see the word ‘Evil?’ I don’t see the word in the title or anywhere in the article itself.
- phtrivier 6mo ago
  Substack tends to select for this kind of author. Not daily posts about their life and their latest hot take, but a few deep articles every few weeks, that make you think "hey, that's interesting". Although there is not necessarily an easy way to know where the author is talking from, whether they're entirely relevant, etc... Even the "superstars" (Krugman, etc..) are posting this is that could have been posted on twitter, with the same level of outrage and polarization, but at least the content is well structure, and they are allowed to use sentences in paragraph, with quotes, and figures, and links, etc... Yes, I know, it's called blogging. I'm saying that the new hot thing, in 2026, is blogging.
nslsm 6mo ago
>Just to state the obvious: 2020 was the year of COVID, which played hell with peoples' social lives. No, it was government mandates that played hell with peoples' social lives.
- amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
  Plenty of people cut back on socializing, separate from whatever local lockdown policies might have been in place.
- mcphage 6mo ago
  > No, it was government mandates that played hell with peoples' social lives. What did the government mandate about your social life?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - sokoloff 6mo ago
    Closing restaurants, bars, and movie theaters had a negative effect on social lives as a direct result of government mandates.
    - account42 6mo ago
      Much worse than that in Germany - they literally had rules for gathering with your family with complex charts to determine with you you are allowed to meet (with single adults living on their own getting the worst of it). Utter insanity, all of it.
sophrosyne42 6mo ago
These are the secondary and tertiary bad effects of lockdowns which were ignored at the time.
- ZunarJ5 6mo ago
  I have a complicated lisfranc injury that's taken years now to sort due to covid. My partner is still dealing with autoimmune issues. We will be dealing with the aftermath for decades.
- mindslight 6mo ago
  Have you found any studies showing long-term differences between the half of states that had "lockdowns" versus the half that did not?
- nephihaha 6mo ago
  A lot of things were, and continue to be ignored about lockdown. It killed a lot of addicts — alcoholics and drug addicts alike, probably online gamblers too. There were major jumps in suicide during the lockdown and in the next two or three years after.
mvdtnz 6mo ago
I wonder if COVID revealed to Americans how toxic their individualistic culture is. For a long time it kind of seemed like individualism was working well for you but COVID was the first crisis since WW2 where the country was asked to pull in the same direction together and it really just fell apart. I'd be miderable too if I learned my entire worldview, and that of my countrymen, was dangerously wrong and there's no way to really fix it.
- nephihaha 6mo ago
  Lockdown, not "Covid". And that Covid lockdown was a little taste of the extreme form of top down collectivism. (Covid was around both before and after the lockdowns.) The USA got off lockdown lightly in the main. Continental Europe, Canada and Australia all went nuts with it. Especially the Northern Territory and State of Victoria.
  - chasd00 6mo ago
    > top down collectivism The Dallas County judge was driving my neighborhood berating people for walking their dogs and telling them to get inside. It was totally insane, i couldn't believe what I was seeing. I met him at a fundraiser once and asked him why he wasn't wearing a mask. My wife's friend (hosting the fundraiser) asked me to leave. His little hobby authoritarian regime during that time was the stupidest thing i'd ever seen but what made me the most angry/shocked is everyone just complied. /I live in Dallas, TX. The judge is Clay Jenkons https://www.dallascounty.org/government/comcrt/jenkins/ https://www.dallascounty.org/government/comcrt/jenkins/
  - watwut 6mo ago
    But Europeans and Canadians and Australians are not nearly as much "traumatized" by idea that OMG lockdown happened due to covid. The complete societal inability to adapt seems to be bigger issue in USA. Neither Europe nor Canada are as much affected despite having more lockdowns. It was not lockdown as such, but something else about Americans
    - ryandrake 6mo ago
deeg 6mo ago
If it was COVID, though, wouldn't we expect to see the same thing in other countries?
- nephihaha 6mo ago
  You do. I don't live in the USA and things are worse since lockdown. Don't believe the propaganda that Nordic people are happiest. I reckon it's probably one of the Pacific islands.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
    >You do. I don't live in the USA and things are worse since lockdown. Yep, this. It's been worse everywhere since then. I didn't know how much I'd be missing the days of 2014-2018 right about now. If only I knew how good we had it. >Don't believe the propaganda that Nordic people are happiest. When you have the highest rates of suicides, coffee, alcohol and antidepressant usage, you're only left with the happy people ;)
    - hunterpayne 6mo ago
      Those happiness studies are more about cultural norms of communication and how questions about emotions translate into various local languages. They have little to do with happiness itself and say more about how cultures shape languages.
- spockz 6mo ago
  We do see it in other countries. But even if we didn’t see it, it could still be that the situation in the states was at such a precarious position that COVID tipped it there (more) than in other places, making it more visible. Also other places such as Europe in general have bigger safety nets so the fallout of the damage is less.
jmyeet 6mo ago
Covid wasn't some magical line in the sand when things got bad. It's really the tipping point for a trend that began in the 1970s of increasing inequality. Two big things happened in the pandemic that have nothing to do with other issues of social isolation: 1. The fear companies had of raising prices went away thanks to inflation. It's when dynamic pricing in various forms (eg RealPage for rents) really took off. Supermarkets started engaging in essentially unspoken collusion. This tends to get labelled as "price leadership" rather than "price fixing" where the only difference is the first is legal and the second isn't but they're otherwise identical; and 2. Governments around the world engaged in massive wealth transfer to the wealthy, which creates asset price inflation, particularly with housing. Some countries tried to claw some of this back with so-called windfall profits tax. Personally, I think there should've been a corporate tax of 80%+ for 2020-2023 (at least). The usual tool that governments use to tackle inflation is monetary policy. The theory goes that you raise interest rates, it makes borrowing more expensive and it dampens the heat in the economy. That's true but it's also a very blunt instrument. It hurts everyone from the biggest borrowers to people buying homes. What never gets serious discussion let alone policy discussion (at least in the US) is fiscal policy, secpfically taxation. Temporarily high corporate taxes would've had a similar effect on tempering M&A, share buybacks, etc but it would've only targeted companies who were profiting from, say, a huge spike in oil prices. But there are other factors too that existed before Covid such as private equity, which is simply buying up all the competition, making everything more expensive, paying back an LBO and then loading up a company with exploding debt so some sucker down the line can buy it before it blows up.
ActorNightly 6mo ago
Can we stop pretending that it was Covid, and not the felon pedophile and his cronies in charge of the country? You can see on the plot that the shit started in 2016.
- sph 6mo ago
  Sure, because the world was just great before 2016. The orange idiot is just the culmination of decades of decline, not a random blip in American history.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hunterpayne 6mo ago
    I agree but like most tragedies, it wasn't the event, it was the reaction. Trump did very little in his 1st term (especially in comparison to now), yet extremist/politically addicted people lost their minds constantly. It was their radicalization and increased extremism that caused most of the harm. And as most of their real life social circle pulled back from their extremism they got deeper into their social media bubble. And they still haven't come back and I don't expect them to for some time.
    - sph 6mo ago
      Trump might've been "subdued" in his 1st term, but social media was already at its breaking point even before he sat in the White House the first time. Remember the cesspool that was /r/TheDonald for example, the 4chan psyop factory, the pepe the frog memes, Steve Bannon, etc. Trump is a product of the idiocy of the American electorate. He's also a product of the forces that have worked for many, many years to have a guy like him run the country. Trump is what you eventually get after the Reagans, the Nixons, the George Wallaces have sown the seeds.
  - ActorNightly 6mo ago
    I mean, in a roundabout way you are right in your second sentence, it just wasn't decades of decline, on the opposite, it was a decade of positive growth. The world was pretty good prior to 2016. By all accounts, economy was doing good, tech was happening, cool things were being done. Most of the actual important issues were solved or on the way of being solved, so people slowly started to make the trivial problems seem way grander than they are. Hedonistic adaptation is part of human nature, and the cycle has been seen in history many times in many civilizations. Meanwhile, ironically, in societies where there is significant hardship every day, whether its going out and farming or having to work harder for your meal at home, dealing with adverse weather, and other things, you tend to see way more inclusion and coherence between humans, because they really never get a chance to get accustomed to a good life.
bjourne 6mo ago
100% right. What we (rather 80+ year old corrupt politicians) did to young people during covid was downright criminal. Almost two of their most important years destroyed.
- phtrivier 6mo ago
  Well, to be fair, it allowed some of the old people to survive more than two years, so... Young people should react by voting in people who will defend them. Instead, they joined the elderly un voting for Trump. Go figure.
  - tzs 6mo ago
    Boomers only slightly favored Trump in 2024. Young voters (Gen Z) went Harris by 10 points. People in the first ~1/2 of middle age (Millennials) slightly favored Harris. It was the second ~1/2 of middle age (Gen X) that were pro Trump, by 6 points. Boomers had the best turnout. 31% of eligible voters but 40% of actual voters. Gen X was 28% of eligible voters and 26% of actual voters. Millennials were also 28% of eligible voters and were 25% of actual voters. Gen Z was 13% of eligible voters but only 9% of actual voters.
    - phtrivier 6mo ago
      A group "slightly" favoring Harris, thanks to the electoral college, is a group that favors Trump :P Also, gen z favored Haris by ONLY 10 points ? As in 55/45 ? Isn't the stat usually more on the order of 60/40 (if not 65/35) for this age group ?
      - tzs 6mo ago
        But also due to the electoral college a small change in turnout in swing states can have a large effect. None of the swing states had higher than average Boomer concentration. Pennsylvania is right about average, and the rest were all lower. Gen Z went for Biden by 24 points, but the shifted right for 2024 so only went for Harris by 10. Millennials were similar, going for Biden by 19. Gen X favored Trump in 2020 by about about 6% and in 2024 by about 8%. Only Boomers have moved left. They favored Trump by 8% over Clinton, about 5% over Biden, but then only 1-2% over Harris.
lamasery 6mo ago
I can say that post-Covid inflation took us from feeling like we were on the edge of escaping the middle class, to feeling like we aren't even close and realistically won't ever be again. Even as our incomes went up quite a bit at the same time. And we're a lot better off than median. I can't imagine how crushing it's been lower "down the ladder".
- jimbokun 6mo ago
  Everyone expecting to escape the “middle class“ reminds me of Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average.
  - lamasery 6mo ago
    Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that's, like, the point of life or something, or something one ought to expect. It kinda snuck up on us, actually, until one day we were like "whoa, are we... on the verge of 'making it'?" Then a couple years later, not so much. The point I intended was that we were doing pretty great, and on paper should be doing even better now, but are actually doing less-great (though, still, can't truly complain). If that's how it's looked for us... I mean I look around and imagine trying to get by on a median household income, and holy shit. It seems a whole lot tougher now than it did when we were sitting around median, years ago.
    - kakacik 6mo ago
      Don't get mortgages/private schools/expensive cars or hobbies that you can't manage comfortably with 2/3 of your income (or if in faang-level than 1/3 to 1/2 max). Even less if you need to pay for your own healthcare outside of working contract. I know its very luring, but its a one way trap into misery and ruined life one way or another. Doesn't matter how well current economy is doing, what are projections etc. thats a basic 101 mathematics.
      - jimbokun 6mo ago
        Well you need to live someplace and homes near the best jobs are the most expensive, all new cars and many used ones are expensive, and state universities can also be expensive these days.
jmcgough 6mo ago
COVID almost certainly had something to do with it, but the US isn't the only country that faced lockdowns, nor is it the only country that experienced inflation. Why is it that most other countries' happiness scores have returned to near-baseline since then, while the US is still so much lower?
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  The USA really didn't have lockdowns, where people were actually forbidden to leave their homes. Apart from a handful of metro areas, what was actualy implemented were feeble 'stay at home suggestions' with tons of exceptions. It was entirely voluntary, and people broadly ignored them (again, outside a few areas). Around me, everyone was still out and about, eating at restaurants, buying their khakis, and basically ignoring that there was a deadly airborne disease being spread around. The only thing that seemed to be adequately enforced were school closures.
carabiner 6mo ago
Lockdown was such a massive mistake. Masks are good, vaccines are good, shutting down everyone's lives in hopes of protecting already extremely unhealthy people, to which effectiveness was never established, was devastating to the world. Cities were hollowed out - ask ANYONE who lives in NYC, LA, even smaller cities like Seattle, and they'll tell you how nightlife was decimated by pandemic.
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  Outside of those cities, though, there really wasn't a "lockdown." Nobody was forced to stay in their homes. People treated it as optional and were out and about despite the utterly unenforced "stay at home". Around me, it had a minor impact on traffic, but no noticeable impact on stores, restaurants, and socialization.
  - slaw 6mo ago
    National and state parks were closed. Flights cancelled. There was not much to do outside.
    - jerlam 6mo ago
      There were a lot more people outside during lockdown. There were running and cycling booms.
      - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
        Literally every form of outdoor recreational equipment from cornhole to million dollar power boats had a huge sales boom during covid.
tensor 6mo ago
Actually it's extremely well documented in science studies that money absolutely makes you happy up to a certain point. Basically if you don't have a home and food due to not enough funds, then yes money absolutely equals happiness. Inequality has grown to the point where the majority of younger people now have no hope of ever owning a home, and even large parts of the country are struggling with something as basic as food. The HN crowd lives in a top 5% bubble and often forgets how bad it is for most people. All this talk of "money doesn't make happiness" is terrible. Money for basic necessities is the problem here.
- justsomehnguy 6mo ago
  > in science studies that money absolutely makes you happy up to a certain point Perceived happines. It's hard to talk about happines with a person with an empty stomach. But I was much more happy when I was young and poor than I became a not poor but no longer a young one.
  - Gander5739 6mo ago
    > Perceived hapiness Is there any other kind?
    - justsomehnguy 6mo ago
      You can buy any bicycle[0] you want when you are rich but if you didn't had a bicycle in your childhood then you didn't had a bicycle in your childhood. [0] or LEGO, Transformers action figure, whatever
  - ninalanyon 6mo ago
    That's not because you were poor then and not now but because you had few responsibilities then and many now. When you were young your needs were small and solely affected you, now your needs encompass those of family (I'm guessing that you have children). Even without family you have responsibilities to society and employer that you either did not have when young or that were simply less urgent.
- 6mo ago
thephyber 6mo ago
2020 / Covid did A LOT of things, not just scramble our social lives. There was a pretty large check from the government to workers (which supercharged some people risk-taking in stocks, crypto, events betting, sports betting). It became the year of WallStreetBets and meme stocks. White collar people were working from home, which eliminated tedious commutes but also blended together work and home life. I’m pretty sure one of my sisters snapped dealing with several kids doing Zoom schooling and teaching her own classes over Zoom. Many Americans reconsidered what is important in life. Another one of my sisters was “an essential worker” but wasn’t (and still isn’t) paid well and the health benefits didn’t increase even when the likelihood of getting a debilitating disease did. It was also contentious politically, with a major election. I cut off half of my family after they went down the QAnon / Election Theft rabbit hole and they began to inhabit a completely different reality than I did. We all reacted to extreme stress in different ways and one of those ways was to distrust American institutions. There are some post-2020 things that happened. Interest rates rose in 2022 for the first time since 2009ish. Lots of tech companies hired like drunken sailors during 2020 and began to layoff once the interest rates rose environment started to curb spending and investment. Twitter was bought and most of the staff was cut, giving other executives in Silicon Valley cover for attempting the same. To stay with your theme of social lives changing, I think my personality has changed a bit where I am less likely to socialize with strangers (like in a 3rd space), to go out in the evenings, to hang out with coworkers.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- WarmWash 6mo ago
  Those checks had the smallest impact out of all the things the government did. 0% interest rates was insane when most cash cow workers simply shifted to working from home (sorry, I know it's harsh, but hourly workers are not the backbone of the American economy). The gov also froze student loan payments, and froze rent payments. It also payed full unemployment and for longer. Oh and PPP loans.... It was an absolute money bonanza, and way way far beyond what was actually needed.
keybored 6mo ago
> The article is smarter than the title makes it sound. He's not seriously proposing that being rich makes you happy. Not everything is supposed to be read literally. But this seems to be the Abundance author so maybe it really is unironic and that tediously sincere. > And I think it's been pretty well-proven that happiness is largely driven by the strength and quality of our social relationships. Everyone who has enough money to not worry about money agrees. > Anything that cuts us off from our friends, or prevents us from forming new friendships, is going to be visible in the happiness data. Great news for the developing countries with healthy social connections. Not so great news for a country with great wealth and income inequality and atomized connections.

bombcar 6mo ago

I suspect that for many people, the pounding outside is what mainly affects their happiness - if everything reported in the news is sunshine and happiness, they tend happier. And if it's all doom and gloom and "go outside and you kill grandma" - are we surprised they get sad?

autoexec 6mo ago
In my experience most people don't care about what the news tells them anywhere near as much as what's going on in their personal lives. If they've got money and they aren't worried about paying their bills or the price of food or the price of gas and they can afford a nice place to live and can afford to send their kids to college and can take at least one big vacation a year and they're spending their time going out with their friends they aren't losing much sleep over news stories that mention war in Somalia, or some politician's latest scandal, or how deforestation is threatening the habitat of a bunch of animals. They might not like what they hear, but they'll feel pretty happy about their life. When their standard of living declines and they have to cut back to make ends meet and they watch their children struggle in ways they didn't have to at their age and their grandma actually dies because she went outside people start to get upset and suddenly the constant news stories about the latest pointless trillion dollar war, and the politician stealing from taxpayers, and the huge decline in wildlife populations starts to hit differently.

kenjackson 6mo ago

I agree the article is smarter than the title makes it seem. And honestly, much better than comments on HN. The articles keeps diving deeper and asking questions. The comments here take hold of a single theory, without even thinking about the counters that article mentions. This is probably the best example of read the article, and not the comments.

pepperoni_pizza 6mo ago
The HN comments are sadly mostly just people pushing their favorite thing, whether COVID denialism, "everything is going bad because people are atheists" or whatever, without engaging with the article at all.
- decimalenough 6mo ago
  > COVID denialism > "everything is going bad because people are atheists" I don't think I have ever seen anybody express either of these opinions on HN, and if they tried, they would immediately get downvoted to oblivion.
  - FeteCommuniste 6mo ago
    Here's one example of the second, in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877926
- hunterpayne 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - adamwk 6mo ago
    Where do you see the word ‘Evil?’ I don’t see the word in the title or anywhere in the article itself.
phtrivier 6mo ago
Substack tends to select for this kind of author. Not daily posts about their life and their latest hot take, but a few deep articles every few weeks, that make you think "hey, that's interesting". Although there is not necessarily an easy way to know where the author is talking from, whether they're entirely relevant, etc... Even the "superstars" (Krugman, etc..) are posting this is that could have been posted on twitter, with the same level of outrage and polarization, but at least the content is well structure, and they are allowed to use sentences in paragraph, with quotes, and figures, and links, etc... Yes, I know, it's called blogging. I'm saying that the new hot thing, in 2026, is blogging.

nslsm 6mo ago

>Just to state the obvious: 2020 was the year of COVID, which played hell with peoples' social lives. No, it was government mandates that played hell with peoples' social lives.

amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
Plenty of people cut back on socializing, separate from whatever local lockdown policies might have been in place.
mcphage 6mo ago
> No, it was government mandates that played hell with peoples' social lives. What did the government mandate about your social life?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- sokoloff 6mo ago
  Closing restaurants, bars, and movie theaters had a negative effect on social lives as a direct result of government mandates.
  - account42 6mo ago
    Much worse than that in Germany - they literally had rules for gathering with your family with complex charts to determine with you you are allowed to meet (with single adults living on their own getting the worst of it). Utter insanity, all of it.

sophrosyne42 6mo ago

These are the secondary and tertiary bad effects of lockdowns which were ignored at the time.

ZunarJ5 6mo ago
I have a complicated lisfranc injury that's taken years now to sort due to covid. My partner is still dealing with autoimmune issues. We will be dealing with the aftermath for decades.
mindslight 6mo ago
Have you found any studies showing long-term differences between the half of states that had "lockdowns" versus the half that did not?
nephihaha 6mo ago
A lot of things were, and continue to be ignored about lockdown. It killed a lot of addicts — alcoholics and drug addicts alike, probably online gamblers too. There were major jumps in suicide during the lockdown and in the next two or three years after.

mvdtnz 6mo ago

I wonder if COVID revealed to Americans how toxic their individualistic culture is. For a long time it kind of seemed like individualism was working well for you but COVID was the first crisis since WW2 where the country was asked to pull in the same direction together and it really just fell apart. I'd be miderable too if I learned my entire worldview, and that of my countrymen, was dangerously wrong and there's no way to really fix it.

nephihaha 6mo ago
Lockdown, not "Covid". And that Covid lockdown was a little taste of the extreme form of top down collectivism. (Covid was around both before and after the lockdowns.) The USA got off lockdown lightly in the main. Continental Europe, Canada and Australia all went nuts with it. Especially the Northern Territory and State of Victoria.
- chasd00 6mo ago
  > top down collectivism The Dallas County judge was driving my neighborhood berating people for walking their dogs and telling them to get inside. It was totally insane, i couldn't believe what I was seeing. I met him at a fundraiser once and asked him why he wasn't wearing a mask. My wife's friend (hosting the fundraiser) asked me to leave. His little hobby authoritarian regime during that time was the stupidest thing i'd ever seen but what made me the most angry/shocked is everyone just complied. /I live in Dallas, TX. The judge is Clay Jenkons https://www.dallascounty.org/government/comcrt/jenkins/ https://www.dallascounty.org/government/comcrt/jenkins/
- watwut 6mo ago
  But Europeans and Canadians and Australians are not nearly as much "traumatized" by idea that OMG lockdown happened due to covid. The complete societal inability to adapt seems to be bigger issue in USA. Neither Europe nor Canada are as much affected despite having more lockdowns. It was not lockdown as such, but something else about Americans
  - ryandrake 6mo ago

deeg 6mo ago

If it was COVID, though, wouldn't we expect to see the same thing in other countries?

nephihaha 6mo ago
You do. I don't live in the USA and things are worse since lockdown. Don't believe the propaganda that Nordic people are happiest. I reckon it's probably one of the Pacific islands.
- joe_mamba 6mo ago
  >You do. I don't live in the USA and things are worse since lockdown. Yep, this. It's been worse everywhere since then. I didn't know how much I'd be missing the days of 2014-2018 right about now. If only I knew how good we had it. >Don't believe the propaganda that Nordic people are happiest. When you have the highest rates of suicides, coffee, alcohol and antidepressant usage, you're only left with the happy people ;)
  - hunterpayne 6mo ago
    Those happiness studies are more about cultural norms of communication and how questions about emotions translate into various local languages. They have little to do with happiness itself and say more about how cultures shape languages.
spockz 6mo ago
We do see it in other countries. But even if we didn’t see it, it could still be that the situation in the states was at such a precarious position that COVID tipped it there (more) than in other places, making it more visible. Also other places such as Europe in general have bigger safety nets so the fallout of the damage is less.

jmyeet 6mo ago

Covid wasn't some magical line in the sand when things got bad. It's really the tipping point for a trend that began in the 1970s of increasing inequality. Two big things happened in the pandemic that have nothing to do with other issues of social isolation: 1. The fear companies had of raising prices went away thanks to inflation. It's when dynamic pricing in various forms (eg RealPage for rents) really took off. Supermarkets started engaging in essentially unspoken collusion. This tends to get labelled as "price leadership" rather than "price fixing" where the only difference is the first is legal and the second isn't but they're otherwise identical; and 2. Governments around the world engaged in massive wealth transfer to the wealthy, which creates asset price inflation, particularly with housing. Some countries tried to claw some of this back with so-called windfall profits tax. Personally, I think there should've been a corporate tax of 80%+ for 2020-2023 (at least). The usual tool that governments use to tackle inflation is monetary policy. The theory goes that you raise interest rates, it makes borrowing more expensive and it dampens the heat in the economy. That's true but it's also a very blunt instrument. It hurts everyone from the biggest borrowers to people buying homes. What never gets serious discussion let alone policy discussion (at least in the US) is fiscal policy, secpfically taxation. Temporarily high corporate taxes would've had a similar effect on tempering M&A, share buybacks, etc but it would've only targeted companies who were profiting from, say, a huge spike in oil prices. But there are other factors too that existed before Covid such as private equity, which is simply buying up all the competition, making everything more expensive, paying back an LBO and then loading up a company with exploding debt so some sucker down the line can buy it before it blows up.

ActorNightly 6mo ago

Can we stop pretending that it was Covid, and not the felon pedophile and his cronies in charge of the country? You can see on the plot that the shit started in 2016.

sph 6mo ago
Sure, because the world was just great before 2016. The orange idiot is just the culmination of decades of decline, not a random blip in American history.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- hunterpayne 6mo ago
  I agree but like most tragedies, it wasn't the event, it was the reaction. Trump did very little in his 1st term (especially in comparison to now), yet extremist/politically addicted people lost their minds constantly. It was their radicalization and increased extremism that caused most of the harm. And as most of their real life social circle pulled back from their extremism they got deeper into their social media bubble. And they still haven't come back and I don't expect them to for some time.
  - sph 6mo ago
    Trump might've been "subdued" in his 1st term, but social media was already at its breaking point even before he sat in the White House the first time. Remember the cesspool that was /r/TheDonald for example, the 4chan psyop factory, the pepe the frog memes, Steve Bannon, etc. Trump is a product of the idiocy of the American electorate. He's also a product of the forces that have worked for many, many years to have a guy like him run the country. Trump is what you eventually get after the Reagans, the Nixons, the George Wallaces have sown the seeds.
- ActorNightly 6mo ago
  I mean, in a roundabout way you are right in your second sentence, it just wasn't decades of decline, on the opposite, it was a decade of positive growth. The world was pretty good prior to 2016. By all accounts, economy was doing good, tech was happening, cool things were being done. Most of the actual important issues were solved or on the way of being solved, so people slowly started to make the trivial problems seem way grander than they are. Hedonistic adaptation is part of human nature, and the cycle has been seen in history many times in many civilizations. Meanwhile, ironically, in societies where there is significant hardship every day, whether its going out and farming or having to work harder for your meal at home, dealing with adverse weather, and other things, you tend to see way more inclusion and coherence between humans, because they really never get a chance to get accustomed to a good life.

bjourne 6mo ago

100% right. What we (rather 80+ year old corrupt politicians) did to young people during covid was downright criminal. Almost two of their most important years destroyed.

phtrivier 6mo ago
Well, to be fair, it allowed some of the old people to survive more than two years, so... Young people should react by voting in people who will defend them. Instead, they joined the elderly un voting for Trump. Go figure.
- tzs 6mo ago
  Boomers only slightly favored Trump in 2024. Young voters (Gen Z) went Harris by 10 points. People in the first ~1/2 of middle age (Millennials) slightly favored Harris. It was the second ~1/2 of middle age (Gen X) that were pro Trump, by 6 points. Boomers had the best turnout. 31% of eligible voters but 40% of actual voters. Gen X was 28% of eligible voters and 26% of actual voters. Millennials were also 28% of eligible voters and were 25% of actual voters. Gen Z was 13% of eligible voters but only 9% of actual voters.
  - phtrivier 6mo ago
    A group "slightly" favoring Harris, thanks to the electoral college, is a group that favors Trump :P Also, gen z favored Haris by ONLY 10 points ? As in 55/45 ? Isn't the stat usually more on the order of 60/40 (if not 65/35) for this age group ?
    - tzs 6mo ago
      But also due to the electoral college a small change in turnout in swing states can have a large effect. None of the swing states had higher than average Boomer concentration. Pennsylvania is right about average, and the rest were all lower. Gen Z went for Biden by 24 points, but the shifted right for 2024 so only went for Harris by 10. Millennials were similar, going for Biden by 19. Gen X favored Trump in 2020 by about about 6% and in 2024 by about 8%. Only Boomers have moved left. They favored Trump by 8% over Clinton, about 5% over Biden, but then only 1-2% over Harris.

lamasery 6mo ago

I can say that post-Covid inflation took us from feeling like we were on the edge of escaping the middle class, to feeling like we aren't even close and realistically won't ever be again. Even as our incomes went up quite a bit at the same time. And we're a lot better off than median. I can't imagine how crushing it's been lower "down the ladder".

jimbokun 6mo ago
Everyone expecting to escape the “middle class“ reminds me of Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average.
- lamasery 6mo ago
  Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that's, like, the point of life or something, or something one ought to expect. It kinda snuck up on us, actually, until one day we were like "whoa, are we... on the verge of 'making it'?" Then a couple years later, not so much. The point I intended was that we were doing pretty great, and on paper should be doing even better now, but are actually doing less-great (though, still, can't truly complain). If that's how it's looked for us... I mean I look around and imagine trying to get by on a median household income, and holy shit. It seems a whole lot tougher now than it did when we were sitting around median, years ago.
  - kakacik 6mo ago
    Don't get mortgages/private schools/expensive cars or hobbies that you can't manage comfortably with 2/3 of your income (or if in faang-level than 1/3 to 1/2 max). Even less if you need to pay for your own healthcare outside of working contract. I know its very luring, but its a one way trap into misery and ruined life one way or another. Doesn't matter how well current economy is doing, what are projections etc. thats a basic 101 mathematics.
    - jimbokun 6mo ago
      Well you need to live someplace and homes near the best jobs are the most expensive, all new cars and many used ones are expensive, and state universities can also be expensive these days.

jmcgough 6mo ago

COVID almost certainly had something to do with it, but the US isn't the only country that faced lockdowns, nor is it the only country that experienced inflation. Why is it that most other countries' happiness scores have returned to near-baseline since then, while the US is still so much lower?

ryandrake 6mo ago
The USA really didn't have lockdowns, where people were actually forbidden to leave their homes. Apart from a handful of metro areas, what was actualy implemented were feeble 'stay at home suggestions' with tons of exceptions. It was entirely voluntary, and people broadly ignored them (again, outside a few areas). Around me, everyone was still out and about, eating at restaurants, buying their khakis, and basically ignoring that there was a deadly airborne disease being spread around. The only thing that seemed to be adequately enforced were school closures.

carabiner 6mo ago

Lockdown was such a massive mistake. Masks are good, vaccines are good, shutting down everyone's lives in hopes of protecting already extremely unhealthy people, to which effectiveness was never established, was devastating to the world. Cities were hollowed out - ask ANYONE who lives in NYC, LA, even smaller cities like Seattle, and they'll tell you how nightlife was decimated by pandemic.

ryandrake 6mo ago
Outside of those cities, though, there really wasn't a "lockdown." Nobody was forced to stay in their homes. People treated it as optional and were out and about despite the utterly unenforced "stay at home". Around me, it had a minor impact on traffic, but no noticeable impact on stores, restaurants, and socialization.
- slaw 6mo ago
  National and state parks were closed. Flights cancelled. There was not much to do outside.
  - jerlam 6mo ago
    There were a lot more people outside during lockdown. There were running and cycling booms.
    - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
      Literally every form of outdoor recreational equipment from cornhole to million dollar power boats had a huge sales boom during covid.

tensor 6mo ago

Actually it's extremely well documented in science studies that money absolutely makes you happy up to a certain point. Basically if you don't have a home and food due to not enough funds, then yes money absolutely equals happiness. Inequality has grown to the point where the majority of younger people now have no hope of ever owning a home, and even large parts of the country are struggling with something as basic as food. The HN crowd lives in a top 5% bubble and often forgets how bad it is for most people. All this talk of "money doesn't make happiness" is terrible. Money for basic necessities is the problem here.

justsomehnguy 6mo ago
> in science studies that money absolutely makes you happy up to a certain point Perceived happines. It's hard to talk about happines with a person with an empty stomach. But I was much more happy when I was young and poor than I became a not poor but no longer a young one.
- Gander5739 6mo ago
  > Perceived hapiness Is there any other kind?
  - justsomehnguy 6mo ago
    You can buy any bicycle[0] you want when you are rich but if you didn't had a bicycle in your childhood then you didn't had a bicycle in your childhood. [0] or LEGO, Transformers action figure, whatever
- ninalanyon 6mo ago
  That's not because you were poor then and not now but because you had few responsibilities then and many now. When you were young your needs were small and solely affected you, now your needs encompass those of family (I'm guessing that you have children). Even without family you have responsibilities to society and employer that you either did not have when young or that were simply less urgent.
6mo ago

thephyber 6mo ago

2020 / Covid did A LOT of things, not just scramble our social lives. There was a pretty large check from the government to workers (which supercharged some people risk-taking in stocks, crypto, events betting, sports betting). It became the year of WallStreetBets and meme stocks. White collar people were working from home, which eliminated tedious commutes but also blended together work and home life. I’m pretty sure one of my sisters snapped dealing with several kids doing Zoom schooling and teaching her own classes over Zoom. Many Americans reconsidered what is important in life. Another one of my sisters was “an essential worker” but wasn’t (and still isn’t) paid well and the health benefits didn’t increase even when the likelihood of getting a debilitating disease did. It was also contentious politically, with a major election. I cut off half of my family after they went down the QAnon / Election Theft rabbit hole and they began to inhabit a completely different reality than I did. We all reacted to extreme stress in different ways and one of those ways was to distrust American institutions. There are some post-2020 things that happened. Interest rates rose in 2022 for the first time since 2009ish. Lots of tech companies hired like drunken sailors during 2020 and began to layoff once the interest rates rose environment started to curb spending and investment. Twitter was bought and most of the staff was cut, giving other executives in Silicon Valley cover for attempting the same. To stay with your theme of social lives changing, I think my personality has changed a bit where I am less likely to socialize with strangers (like in a 3rd space), to go out in the evenings, to hang out with coworkers.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
WarmWash 6mo ago
Those checks had the smallest impact out of all the things the government did. 0% interest rates was insane when most cash cow workers simply shifted to working from home (sorry, I know it's harsh, but hourly workers are not the backbone of the American economy). The gov also froze student loan payments, and froze rent payments. It also payed full unemployment and for longer. Oh and PPP loans.... It was an absolute money bonanza, and way way far beyond what was actually needed.

keybored 6mo ago

> The article is smarter than the title makes it sound. He's not seriously proposing that being rich makes you happy. Not everything is supposed to be read literally. But this seems to be the Abundance author so maybe it really is unironic and that tediously sincere. > And I think it's been pretty well-proven that happiness is largely driven by the strength and quality of our social relationships. Everyone who has enough money to not worry about money agrees. > Anything that cuts us off from our friends, or prevents us from forming new friendships, is going to be visible in the happiness data. Great news for the developing countries with healthy social connections. Not so great news for a country with great wealth and income inequality and atomized connections.