Despite more jobs, improving economy, Americans are glum

“We don’t know what is going to happen next. There’s no clear path toward stabilizing either the country or the world.”

The U.S. economy looks pretty good by most measures: Jobs are plentiful, growth is picking up, prices aren’t rising too quickly, and unemployment is on track this year to hit the lowest level since 1969. But Americans aren’t happy.

In fact, Americans are more glum now than they were during the Great Recession, according to the Gallup-Sharecare WellBeing Index. While most Americans do think the economy is improving, the data show, they don’t think their overall well-being is going up.

The Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index started in 2008 as a way to assess how Americans are doing beyond the usual financial and economic metrics. Every year, Gallup interviews more than 160,000 adults in the United States and asks them about their sense of purpose, their social relationships, their financial security, their health and their connectedness to their community.

In a surprise to the researchers, 2017 turned out to be the worst year for well-being on record. The overall index score was even lower than during the financial crisis, and, for the first time in the decade that Gallup has done this poll, no state in the country showed a statistically significant increase in well-being.

“It was a real eyepopper for us,” said Dan Witters, Gallup research director for the Well-Being Index.

Twenty-one states had statistically significant declines in well-being in 2017 versus 2016. It was “by far the most states Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution

we’ve seen drop in a single year,” Witters said, and the decline appeared in almost every region, except the Rocky Mountain states.

People say they are not content in their jobs and relationships, and depression diagnoses are at an all-time high in the United States.

Some blame politics and polarization for causing people to feel more anxiety and bitterness toward work colleagues and family. There’s a constant narrative of division in the country between Republicans and Democrats, gunrights supporters and gun-control advocates, the religious and the nonreligious, and so on. And there are near daily headlines about chaos in the White House.

“We don’t know what is going to happen next,” said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “There’s no clear path toward stabilizing either the country or the world.”

Almost every demographic group dropped in well-being in 2017 — except for wealthy, white men. Not surprisingly, Democrats also showed far bigger declines than Republicans or independents. “Switching out the person in the Oval Office can and does have an effect on well-being,” said Witters.