America got rich and got sad. A top economist says 2020 broke something that hasn’t healed

Sam Peltzman is, by his own description, “a fossil from the last millennium.” The Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business — one of the most cited economists of the past half century — he works without research assistants, answers to no grant committee, and studies only what interests him. He may have just found the most important thing he’s ever studied. 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 single digits within just a few years, with no meaningful recovery. Peltzman calls this a “regime change.” In macroeconomics, that phrase means something beyond a shift in numbers — it’s a shift in the underlying mechanism generating the