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.
