Data and statistics work of public interest.
One line of evidence that AI might lead to explosive economic growth is the precedent set by the Industrial Revolution. For hundreds of years — 1252 to 1652, to be precise — the compound annual growth rate of per capita real GDP in the UK was around 0.07%. It then began to accelerate, settling into a new compound rate of around 1.02% per year by 1850, which it held until 1913. In other words,…
The number of positions advertised on the AEA’s Job Openings for Economists (JOE) board has declined in four of the six years since its 2018 peak. The 2025 academic year ended with 1,122 postings — near the COVID-year low of 1,074 recorded in 2020.
The Cantril ladder captures how satisfied people report feeling with their lives right now, but it says nothing about how long they live. A simple composite index — Cantril score multiplied by life expectancy at birth — adds that second dimension. This post constructs that index, plots it against GDP per capita, and examines within-country trends across the same five-period panel used in Income…
Income level is a powerful predictor of life satisfaction: across countries, a doubling of GDP per capita is associated with roughly half a point more on the 0–10 Cantril ladder, and the relationship holds within countries over time as well — see Income and Happiness Across 156 Countries. But does the pace of economic growth matter for happiness, above and beyond the level of income it eventually…
While Americans of all ages have become less happy since the 2010s (and especially since 2020), young Americans — those 35 and under — have long reported lower happiness than their elders and the gap has widened since 2010. At the same time, young people’s perception of their relative financial position has deteriorated over the entire post-war period, reversing a pattern from the 1970s in which…
The United States is one of 60 countries (out of 148) whose life satisfaction fell as income grew between 2010 and 2024, placing its within-country slope at the 18th percentile of the international distribution. The US is not an outlier in the cross-sectional sense — at its income level, its reported wellbeing is close to what the global trend predicts. And while its negative within-country slope…
Countries with higher GDP per capita report substantially higher life satisfaction: a doubling of income per head is associated with roughly half a point more on the 0–10 Cantril ladder. That cross-sectional relationship holds within countries over time as well. A two-way fixed effects regression controlling for permanent country differences and global period-to-period shifts yields a coefficient…
Among Americans right at the middle of the household income distribution, the share reporting that their family income is “below average” or “far below average” has roughly doubled since the early 1970s — from around 15% to around 30%. Most of this increase occurred after 2000. Among Americans in the upper half of the income distribution, the same share has been essentially flat across five…
American happiness is near all-time lows. This isn’t a new observation, but it is one worth documenting carefully, because the evidence is stronger than any single survey or question wording can convey.
Self-reported happiness and well-being has noticeably declined in the United States, and was near all-time lows as of 2024-2025. This is despite the fact that economic statistics are reasonably healthy - certainly not near all-time lows. Indeed, the country is by some measures richer than it has ever been (and much of that wealth is broadly shared).