How a close look at the American Dream turned a top happiness expert into a specialist in despair: ‘It’s harder to be poor in a very rich country’

Carol Graham built her career on measuring happiness. Lately, the numbers keep pulling her somewhere darker. “I used to work on happiness and I seem to work more on despair now,” she told Fortune. “So that’s not great, but that’s the state we’re in.”

Graham is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, and a senior scientist at Gallup, whose World Poll supplied the data for her latest paper. She started in development economics, as a visiting fellow at the World Bank and a special adviser at both the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Her early books were about poverty and market reform in Latin America, but she has wrestled increasingly with more existential questions of how societies make their inhabitants feel. You can see the shift in her book titles: Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (2009), Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream (2017), and The Power of Hope: How Wellbeing Science Can Save Us from Despair (2023).

Graham has spent years moving between the two subjects. “I’ve done a lot of hope and despair, or maybe despair and hope,” she said. “I go between them so I don’t go crazy.”

She has served on a United Nations expert group on measures of progress beyond GDP and on a National Academy of Sciences panel on well-being metrics. As Fortune reached her, she was preparing to fly to Geneva to deliver a lecture titled “Hope, Despair, and Life Outcomes.” The Geneva Graduate Institute invited her “because they said, you know, the young people, the graduate students were worried about despair.”

Her latest paper, written with Douglas Harris, Anjana Nair and Isabel Shaheen O’Malley and summarized by Brookings on Oct. 1, applies that question to the United States. The authors used Gallup data from 44 middle- and high-income countries between 2006 and 2024. In the U.S. over that period, trust in government fell 31 percentage points, trust in the courts fell 24, and the share of Americans who feel free to choose how to live fell 19. The authors found that the U.S. converts income growth into well-being less efficiently than the average country,........

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