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This article is a response to a piece in this journal, by David Bartram, which questions the validity of a vast literature establishing consistently a U-shaped relationship between age and happiness. There are 618 published studies that find U-shapes in that relationship in 145 countries, and only a handful that do not. Of the 30 countries that Bartram (2023, National Institute Economic Review, 1–15) examines, he finds U-shapes in 18. We show compelling evidence of U-shapes in the remaining dozen countries. Supporting evidence of a U-shape is found in objective measures including deaths of despair, depression, stress and pain that are worst in midlife.

Despair in America prevents labour market recovery and jeopardises wellbeing, health, and longevity and even national security. This growing problem was substantially exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. Despair in part results from the decline of the White working class and contributes to decreasing geographic mobility and even to far-right radicalisation. Yet other population groups also are suffering for different reasons. Policy is fragmented, with a focus on interdiction over root causes. Most local efforts to boost the wellbeing of vulnerable cohorts are siloed. There is no federal-level entity to provide the vulnerable with logistical support, nor to disseminate information to others seeking solutions. While federal agencies track mortality, no system tracks underlying causes. In contrast, many countries, such as the United Kingdom and New Zealand, track trends in wellbeing as part of national statistics. A coordinated federal effort in the United States is needed to address the crisis of despair as a first step to sustainable economic recovery.

Using a novel panel survey of relatively poor urban Peruvian adolescents, we explore the link between educational aspirations and propensity to invest in the future. Aspirations comprise hope and agency. We find remarkably high educational aspirations, even among relatively poor individuals and adolescents who were exposed to negative shocks, suggesting high levels of resilience. We also find high occupational aspirations and aspirations to migrate. High-aspiration respondents were also more likely to invest in their education and avoid risky behaviors. These are associations as we do not have enough data to establish causality, although we were able to control for within-person traits. Aspirations are stable over time and positively associated with personality traits such as self-efficacy and life satisfaction, which help explain their persistence over time. Our findings complement those of other recent studies that highlight the role of personality traits in addition to cognitive skills in long-term educational, health, and socioeconomic outcomes.

COVID-19 landed in a United States that is deeply divided in opportunity, health, and hope; a reality that is manifest in the million lives lost to deaths of despair in the past decade. We explore the places and populations most vulnerable to COVID and where they coincide with vulnerability to despair deaths. We use well-being metrics to explore spillover effects from the confluence of COVID and despair. Our earlier research finds that metrics like lack of hope and worry track with mortality patterns, with minorities more optimistic and less likely to die of despair deaths than whites. Using EMS first responder data, we compare trends in 2020 with those in 2018 to 2019, assessing excess deaths of despair and new survey data to explore changes in well-being. Remarkably, the cohorts with the highest COVID death rates—low-income Blacks—still report more optimism than other cohorts.

A number of studies—including our own—find a mid-life dip in well-being. Yet several papers in the psychology literature claim that the evidence of a U-shape is "overblown" and if there is such a thing that any such decline is "trivial". Others have claimed that the evidence of a U-shape "is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed," or simply "wrong." We identify 409 studies, mostly published in peer reviewed journals that find U-shapes that these researchers apparently were unaware of. We use data for Europe from the Eurobarometer Surveys (EB), 1980–2019; the Gallup World Poll (GWP), 2005–2019 and the UK's Annual Population Survey, 2016–2019 and the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey of August 2021, to examine U-shapes in age in well-being. We find remarkably strong and consistent evidence across countries of statistically significant and non-trivial U-shapes in age with and without socio-economic controls. We show that studies cited by psychologists claiming there are no U-shapes are in error; we reexamine their data and find differently. The effects of the mid-life dip we find are comparable to major life events such as losing a spouse or becoming unemployed. This decline is comparable to half of the unprecedented fall in well-being observed in the UK in 2020 and 2021, during the Covid19 pandemic and lockdown, which is hardly “inconsequential” as claimed.

We write in response to an article published in this journal, “The U Shape of Happiness Across the Life Course: Expanding the Discussion,” by Galambos, Krahn, Johnson and Lachman. The authors claim that “support for the purported U shape is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed” and “we believe the conclusion that happiness declines from late adolescence to midlife (the first half of the U shape) is premature, and possibly wrong.” We respectfully disagree. The authors’ main evidence is based on summaries of 33 articles; they find 12 to have U shapes, seven to have none, and 14 to be mixed. We found that most of these articles are misclassified: Four of them are ineligible for inclusion, 25 find a U, and four are mixed. We then identified a further 353 articles, including 329 in peer-reviewed journals, that all found U shapes that were not identified in the literature review. This is a major omission. We also present our own evidence of midlife nadirs in well-being using around eight and a half million individual observations from nationally representative surveys for the United States and Europe. The midlife low occurs in the mid-40s and its drop is equivalent to roughly three quarters of the unprecedented drop observed in well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.