America is richer than ever. Why is it so unhappy?
Ordinary Americans today enjoy a living standard that would have awed kings for most of human history. We live in homes conditioned to our ideal temperature in any season; drive vehicles that pack the power of 250 horses into a 100-square-foot metal frame; carry six-ounce rectangles that offer instant access to virtually any loved one, […]
Ordinary Americans today enjoy a living standard that would have awed kings for most of human history.
We live in homes conditioned to our ideal temperature in any season; drive vehicles that pack the power of 250 horses into a 100-square-foot metal frame; carry six-ounce rectangles that offer instant access to virtually any loved one, book, song, fact, or pornography; inhale gases that take the pain out of any surgery; replace our worn-out hips with titanium; glide 40,000 feet above the Earth in pressurized aluminum tubes; and eat ground beef wrapped in tacos made of Doritos.
But we don’t seem that jazzed about it.
Key takeaways
• Wealthy nations have been getting richer — without getting happier — for decades, according to some studies.
• Consumerism often functions like a zero-sum status competition, in which people must buy more stuff just to retain their social rank (aka “keep up with the Joneses”).
• Given this, some environmentalists argue that we can shrink wealthy economies without sacrificing human well-being. But this is mistaken.
Since 1996, America’s median household income (adjusted for inflation) has risen by 26 percent, enabling us to afford more flights, smartphones, and Gordita Supremes than ever before. And yet, over that same period, the share of Americans who described themselves as “not too happy” in the General Social Survey rose by 9 percentage points, while the segment calling themselves “very happy” shrank by more than 9.4 points.
Meanwhile, measures of Americans’ economic confidence and consumer sentiment both declined. And in 2025, the percentage of Americans who were “very satisfied” with their personal lives hit an all-time low in Gallup’s polling.
This disconnect between America’s rising prosperity and sagging spirits has grown more conspicuous in recent years. Since the middle of 2023 — when inflation returned to normal levels following the post-pandemic price spike — Americans’ real wages and net worths have ticked up. But the public’s mood has scarcely improved.
Pundits dubbed this development “the vibecession” and proffered myriad plausible explanations for its emergence (people still haven’t adjusted psychologically to the new price level; housing remains unaffordable; living through a mass death event is a real bummer; Covid-19 turned too many of us into hermits; the kids need to get off their dang phones, and so on).
Yet to some economists and social theorists, the “vibecession” is less a new phenomenon than the wealthy world’s default condition. In their account, people in developed countries have been getting richer — without getting happier — for more than half a century.
That might seem bleak. For anti-growth environmentalists, however, it is actually a source of hope.
The “degrowth” movement believes that humanity is rapidly exhausting the Earth’s resources. Thus, to prevent ecological collapse — without condemning the global poor to permanent penury — the movement has called on rich countries to throttle their use of energy and material resources.
If economic growth had been making wealthy nations happier over the past 50 years, this would be a tall order. In that scenario, there would be a tragic conflict between the near-term well-being of the “first world” and the sustainability of the planet’s ecosystems.
But this conflict is illusory, according to degrowth proponents like the philosopher Tim Jackson and the anthropologist Jason Hickel. In their view, the wealthy world has been burning vast resources on a zero-sum status competition — in which workers must perpetually increase their consumption just to “keep up with the Joneses.” By abandoning such spiritually corrosive consumerism — and embracing more egalitarian and communal ways of life — rich countries can downsize their economies and uplift their people simultaneously.
Some aspects of this narrative are plausible. Growth may yield diminishing returns to well-being, and status concerns do loom larger in rich societies.
But it does not follow that wealthy nations can dramatically reduce economic production without harming their residents’ welfare. Optimizing the American economy for human happiness will require changing what we produce — but it almost certainly won’t entail producing less.
Can money buy happiness — or only rent it?
At first brush, the research on money and happiness can look puzzling. On the one hand, within countries, income and well-being are highly correlated: The larger a person’s paycheck, the happier they tend to be. And this same relationship holds between countries as well — nations with higher incomes report greater well-being than those with lower ones.
When one looks at happiness trends in rich countries over time, however, the correlation between income and happiness weakens — or, in some studies, disappears.
There is a popular explanation for these paradoxical findings: Once people are already affluent, their sense of material well-being is determined less by their absolute living standard than by their relative position in a country’s economic hierarchy.
After all, status is a zero-sum game: One person can’t be in the “upper” middle-class unless someone else is in the lower one.
In this account, there are some things that humans strongly desire for their own sake, such as food, shelter, clothing, water, medical care, sanitation, and a little entertainment. When a person ceases to be too poor to afford these goods, she tends to become happier as a direct result of her higher living standard: A well-fed person is typically more content than a malnourished one, irrespective of their society’s prevailing norms or their own degree of social status.
By contrast, the desire to upgrade from a 55-inch TV to a 75-inch one, or from a Toyota to a Lexus, or from an iPhone 16 to an iPhone 17 isn’t etched that deeply into the human heart. An affluent American’s longing for the latter objects is socially contingent. His current TV would not seem small if he had not seen his brother-in-law’s 75-inch, 8K smart TV at Thanksgiving.
When this hypothetical American — let’s call him Tim — gets a raise and buys a new home theater, car, and smartphone, his sense of well-being might increase. But this gain in happiness will have less to do with the intrinsic qualities of his new consumer items than with the shrinking gap between his living standard and that of his wealthier peers. It’s the alleviation of relative deprivation — rather than the absolute variety — that accounts for the bulk of his newfound contentment.
That’s the theory, anyway. And some studies lend it credence. For example, in a 2023 paper, researchers at the University of California Riverside examined surveys that asked the same Americans about their incomes and self-reported well-being at multiple points in time. They found that respondents tended to report greater happiness when their relative income increased — which is to say, when they ascended to a higher percentile of the income distribution — even if their absolute income had barely changed.
By contrast, when a respondent saw their earnings rise while their position in the socioeconomic hierarchy stagnated or fell, they typically became no happier.
If money can buy Americans happiness — but only by purchasing them higher status — then the data on growth and well-being makes sense: In a rich society, we’d expect people with higher incomes to be happier than those with low ones, since the former enjoy greater relative status. But as that nation gets wealthier over time, we wouldn’t expect its average happiness to budge.
After all, status is a zero-sum game: One person can’t be in the “upper” middle-class unless someone else is in the lower one. Tim’s new TV might make him feel better about his social rank. But when his cousin Rick comes over to watch the Super Bowl, that giant Samsung could make him feel worse about his economic position, as now his own 42-inch Roku TV may seem pathetically small.
The case for degrowth
It isn’t hard to see why this theory appeals to many environmentalists. If Americans are consuming more and more resources — just to keep up in a zero-sum status game — then the human costs of degrowth are negligible.
From this vantage point, the rich world’s middle classes are effectively locked in a fruitless arms race: Tim works a little harder to buy nicer things than his cousin Rick, in order to improve his relative status and sense of well-being. Then Rick works a little harder so that he can buy the same things as Tim. Now, both are back to the same status position they started with — but had to perform more labor just to get there.
Degrowthers see this basic process playing out at a national scale. And they insist that it isn’t inevitable; humans aren’t innately programmed to jockey endlessly for position. Rather, degrowthers contend that corporate and political elites perpetuate this culture of competitive consumption. In Jackson’s telling, it requires the combined propagandizing of “politicians and policy-makers and bankers and financiers and advertisers” just to sustain the public’s appetite for more stuff.
If we embraced a less materialistic politics and more egalitarian economic system, the thinking goes, then we could end this lose-lose cycle of competitive consumption. In such a world, people could enjoy more leisure time without worrying about falling behind “the Joneses.” And rich countries could produce more of the things that actually improve well-being — such as health care, education, and clean energy — while consuming fewer material resources overall, thereby remaining within ecological limits.
In a well-planned, post-capitalist economy, in other words, less could truly be more.
This might be all wrong
It’s possible, however, that the foundational assumption of this entire narrative — and, to an extent, this article — is wrong: Some studies suggest that higher economic growth is associated with greater happiness over time, even when looking at rich countries.
Meanwhile, many analysts question whether well-being surveys are a reliable gauge of national happiness. An American in 1980 — and an equally happy American in 2025 — may answer poll questions differently, simply as a result of shifting cultural norms. (We have arguably seen this phenomenon in survey research about mental illness, where destigmatization and broadening conceptions of “anxiety” and “depression” may have boosted rates of self-reported psychological distress in recent years).
If these were the only problems with degrowthers’ argument, it might be salvageable. Some studies cut against their interpretation of well-being trends. But some support it. One can therefore reasonably believe that rich countries haven’t been getting happier as their economies have grown.
But it does not follow that wealthy nations can dramatically shrink their economies, at no cost to their people’s well-being.
When it comes to growth, size matters
For one thing, this conclusion requires wildly overreading what the well-being data actually tell us. America is plausibly no happier today than it was in 1996, despite significant economic growth. But a lot of bad things have happened in the United States over the past 30 years, many of which aren’t obviously a function of rising GDP — including the opioid epidemic, 9/11, deepening political polarization, a world-historic pandemic, and rising rates of social isolation, among many other things.
It’s possible then that economic growth increased Americans’ well-being over the past three decades — but that this benefit was simply outweighed by other, adverse social trends.
Indeed, one interpretation of the data on national happiness is that the magnitude of growth matters. The typical American household earns about 26 percent more today than it did in 1996. By contrast, that modern US household earns over 2,000 percent more than a typical family in Bangladesh. And while today’s median American isn’t much happier than her slightly poorer predecessor was in the 1990s, the former has much higher life satisfaction than her dramatically poorer Bangladeshi counterpart, according to the World Values Survey.
Perhaps, modest GDP gains don’t reliably increase well-being in rich countries. But it doesn’t follow that no amount of economic growth can make an already-rich country happier.
A dollar lost is a dollar mourned
For the sake of argument, however, let’s stipulate that increasing a wealthy nation’s income doesn’t improve its well-being. That still would not mean that you can shrink a rich country’s income without diminishing its happiness.
As decades of behavioral research has shown, people are “loss-averse” — which means they react more strongly to losses than to equivalent gains. For this reason, even if Americans derived little well-being from recent economic growth, they might still become unhappier were their incomes to abruptly drop.
And, in fact, this is exactly what happened amid the post-Covid surge in inflation. During that period, Americans suddenly found themselves unable to afford as many goods and services as they used to, since their real wages declined. At the same time, income inequality actually fell. Thus, by one metric, the median US worker’s relative position actually improved.
Yet Americans’ economic confidence and life satisfaction plunged, anyway. This suggests that losing absolute income makes Americans unhappier, even if they don’t simultaneously fall down the economic ladder.
Further, the public’s discontent on this front can scarcely be attributed to political elites’ consumerist propaganda. To the contrary, the Biden administration tried to persuade Americans that the inflationary economy was fine. Three years later, when Americans remained dissatisfied with how much stuff they could afford to buy, the Trump White House actually implored them to care less about consumption. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared in March that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” while Trump has told Americans, “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls.”
Nevertheless, Americans’ desire for cheaper goods persisted.
To be sure, this does not prove that Americans wouldn’t be happier under degrowth socialism. Hickel and Jackson never argued that people could enjoy greater well-being on lower incomes in the existing economic system, only that this would be true in an egalitarian, post-growth economic order.
My point is that this argument rests on pure speculation; data on happiness and growth in non-imaginary nations doesn’t actually validate degrowthers’ intuition. It’s impossible to know with certainty how people would think and feel in economic circumstances that humanity has never witnessed. But we do know that, to date, no country has ever grown happier while enduring a large and sustained decline in material consumption.
There are no MRIs without mineral mines
The most fundamental problem with the degrowth narrative, however, is that it does not work on its own terms.
An economy tailored to Americans’ true needs would produce more things that extend life, reduce suffering, and mitigate loneliness — and fewer that induce addiction and status anxiety.
Hickel and Jackson recognize that increasing some forms of production improves well-being, even in rich societies. No one thinks that Americans purchase cancer screenings or defibrillators or dialysis merely to “keep up with the Joneses.” As long as illness exists, boosting medical output and innovation is likely to make people better off. And much the same can be said of other goods and services that save lives or alleviate physical suffering, such as clean energy technologies that curb air pollution or self-driving cars that reduce traffic deaths.
This undercuts the notion that rich countries can abandon growth without sacrificing well-being. Perhaps, America’s specific approach to expanding GDP hasn’t been making people happier. But if we produced fewer things that plausibly reduce welfare (such as social media platforms and sports betting apps) and more that increase it (such as solar panels or Ozempic), surely we could make ourselves better off than we would be in a drastically smaller economy.
Hickel tries to preempt this objection. In his book, Less Is More, he suggests that degrowth really just means deciding “what kinds of things we want to grow (sectors like clean energy, public health care, essential services, regenerative agriculture — you name it), and what sectors need to radically degrow (things like fossil fuels, private jets, arms and SUVs).”
This proposal raises some obvious political challenges (by all appearances, the American public wants the SUV sector to grow). But bracketing the whole “how do we get everyone on-board with eco-communism?” question, the more basic issue is that Hickel’s vision almost certainly cannot work, purely as a technical matter.
In his view, the United States must reduce its use of material resources — metals, minerals, land, fossil fuels, timber, crops, cement, and the like — by 75 percent.
This is plainly incompatible with maximizing Americans’ welfare, even if one went further than Hickel — and stipulated that only the health care sector enhances well-being.
Degrowthers often refer to the medical industry as though it were a resource-light, service sector composed mostly of people, buildings, and a few machines. And this is how doctors’ offices can sometimes appear. Yet every encounter with a clinician is the tip of a vast industrial iceberg.
A single MRI machine requires superconducting magnets made of niobium-titanium alloys, liquid helium produced through natural gas extraction, high-purity copper wiring, cryogenic refrigeration systems, rare earth elements, and massive amounts of electricity, among other inputs.
Drug production, meanwhile, frequently demands starter molecules extracted from oil or natural gas, large volumes of chemical solvents, climate-controlled reactors, drying ovens, and myriad other energy-intensive spaces and components. Dialysis consumes hundreds of liters of ultrapure water per session and myriad single-use plastics.
Thus, the idea that we can grow the health care sector — while slashing our economy’s resource use by 50 percent — is far-fetched on its face. And it becomes all the more implausible when one considers the basic mechanics of industrial innovation and supply chains.
In his book, Hickel suggests that gutting frivolous consumer industries will free up enough resources to simultaneously grow the healthcare sector and shrink America’s material footprint.
But this ignores medical technology’s dependence on ordinary consumer markets. To appreciate that dependence, consider chipmaking. Developing advanced semiconductors entailed the construction of hundreds of fabrication facilities worldwide, each costing up to $20 billion; the formation of dense networks of suppliers for tools, chemicals, and ultrapure materials; and many years of learning by doing.
Hospitals need chips to power various devices. But the medical sector still accounts for a tiny fraction of semiconductor sales. It was demand for smartphones, personal computers, and other consumer electronics that enabled the chip industry to absorb the exorbitant costs of its growth and innovation. And absent that innovation, modern medical imaging would be less accurate and more people would perish from undetected infirmities.
One can tell a similar story about lithium-ion batteries, which corporate labs perfected to power camcorders and cellphones — but which are now indispensable to both modern medicine and the green energy transition.
In other words, without large and diverse markets for consumer novelties, the supply chains and technical know-how required for more essential products would not exist.
It’s therefore implausible that rich countries could radically contract consumer markets — to the point that resource use falls by 75 percent — and still sustain the health care and energy technologies that Hickel admires, much less, improve upon them.
More is more
Of course, none of this would matter much if degrowthers’ apocalyptic environmental assumptions were correct. If economic growth is physically unsustainable — and humanity must choose between gradually degrowing the global economy or having it chaotically contract amid ecological collapse — then the former is clearly preferable.
I think degrowthers’ catastrophism is unfounded (although the perils of climate change are quite real). But even if we are indeed racing toward oblivion, that still would not make Hickel and Jackson’s claims about growth and happiness correct. Perhaps, rich countries need to slash their production and consumption. But there is no good reason to believe that they can do this without undermining their people’s well-being. The degrowth vision is therefore much bleaker than its proponents wish to acknowledge.
This isn’t to say that critics of consumerism are wrong on all counts. There’s little question that increasing GDP doesn’t automatically enhance well-being. And competitive consumption is surely a real phenomenon, which can be collectively self-defeating. Many Americans would be happier if they traded a bit of purchasing power for more time with their friends and family. And policymakers could help workers avail themselves of more leisure time — without worrying about falling behind — by mandating paid vacation days, as many European nations do.
It’s clear that money isn’t buying the United States as much happiness as it should. An economy tailored to Americans’ true needs would produce more things that extend life, reduce suffering, and mitigate loneliness — and fewer that induce addiction and status anxiety. But such an economy would not be smaller than our current one. So long disease and drudgery exist, less will always be less.
This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
