Americans got much happier from 1959 to 2008, once you adjust for rising standards

Correcting life satisfaction scores for shifting standards, economists find Americans' well-being between doubled and grew more than 2.5-fold from 1959 to 2008, tracking GDP. The same method reveals hidden drops during COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.

A ladder that grows taller over the decades, with families from different eras standing on its middle rung.
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Average life satisfaction in the United States barely moved for half a century, even as the economy boomed. A new analysis argues that Americans did get much happier, but kept raising the bar for what counts as a good life.

The working paper is by Alberto Prati of University College London and Claudia Senik of Sorbonne University and the Paris School of Economics. It was posted on SSRN on July 7, 2025, and has not yet been peer reviewed.

It takes on the Easterlin paradox: richer people within a country are happier, yet national happiness scores stay flat as countries grow richer over decades.

A scale that keeps moving

Surveys ask people to place their lives on a ladder from 0, “the worst possible life,” to 10, “the best possible life for you.” The authors argue that the ends of that ladder move as the world changes, so a 7 in 2008 does not mean what a 7 meant in 1959.

To measure that drift, they used a second question: where people think they stood five years earlier. People consistently rate their past lower than they rated it at the time. After correcting for normal memory bias, which they measured at 0.12 points in a two-week US survey of 1,647 people, they treat the rest of that gap as a sign that the scale itself has shifted.

Half a century of hidden gains

The team assembled US surveys from Hadley Cantril’s original 1959 poll through Gallup data to 2008, including recently digitised archives. Reported satisfaction showed no clear trend, while GDP per capita almost tripled.

Their corrected index tells a different story. Depending on assumptions, latent well-being roughly doubled or rose to more than 2.5 times its 1959 level by 2008, moving roughly in step with GDP and a broad human development index. Under one scenario, the top of the scale in 2008 stood for almost two and a half times as much satisfaction as in 1959.

Crises look worse, children look better

The correction does not always push happiness up. In Germany and France, reported satisfaction rose in 2020, the first pandemic year. Retrospective answers instead point to a real dip that was masked by lowered expectations.

In Ukraine, reported life satisfaction was the same in 2023 as in 2018. The corrected measure shows a drop of almost two steps on the original scale during the Russian invasion.

The index also explained individual life events better. In German panel data from the 1980s, life events explained 1.5 to 2 times more of the change in the corrected measure than in raw scores. Having a child lowered raw satisfaction but raised the corrected score.

The authors caution that their US series ends in 2008, at the onset of the financial crisis, and may miss the more recent decline in Americans’ mental health.

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