For nearly 50 years, one number barely moved. Every year or two, the General Social Survey asks Americans how happy they are, and for decades the balance between “very happy” and “not too happy” held steady, from 1972 through 2018. But as soon as the pandemic hit, it came cratering down.
Sam Peltzman, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, has spent several years tracking that number. “It’s a huge change,” he told Fortune. “It always can come back more, and we hope that it does. But so far, it’s like a net of minus 20, which is utterly unprecedented.”
