Americans Are Feeling Better These Days
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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. A couple months ago on this podcast, I had a conversation about the rising levels of loneliness in the U.S. and its impact on politics with the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The data suggested that not only is loneliness tied to health and well-being, but also political behavior and propensity for extremism.

So I was heartened a bit when I saw a survey published last week by Gallup suggesting that loneliness in the U.S. has subsided from its pandemic highs. The number of Americans who said they were, quote, lonely most of the day yesterday was at 17%, down from a pandemic high of 25%.

If you're the type to think about polling question design, and after all, you are listening to this podcast, you might be thinking, hmm, that's an interesting framing of that question. Well, it's part of Gallup's National Health and Wellbeing Index, which has been asking Americans about their career, social, financial, community, and physical well-being on a rolling basis since 2008.

We actually talked about this survey for a good or bad use of polling segment back in July 2021, when a record high number of Americans reported that they were thriving. Well, I wanted to learn more about the survey and how Americans are doing. So I asked the director of the survey to join the podcast. And here with me now is Dan Witters. Welcome. Thank you, Galen. I'm happy to be here.

So I mentioned that loneliness levels are down, although 17% of Americans feeling lonely for most of the day still doesn't sound great. But can you help put that in context? Overall, how are Americans doing right now? That's an important question. As you note, the general trends since spring of 2021 has been a decline in the percentage of people reporting significant loneliness the prior day. This is all what's sometimes called daily affect.

where we're not asking people on a one-to-five scale how lonely are you or are you a lonely person. We're just asking them what they've experienced in the most recently completed day. And it's a fantastic way of figuring out how many people are feeling a certain emotion or experiencing a certain thing. Unfortunately, we didn't start measuring loneliness until March of 2020 when COVID hit.

And Gallup sprung in and started doing a lot of measurement of public opinion around a wide array of different topics that are relevant to COVID. Loneliness was one of them. And in those real early days, March, April 2020, when everything was shutting down, people who could work from home were sent home, all the social isolation policies were intact, loneliness was up, as you note, up to about 25%. It kind of hovered in the low to mid-20s.

right on to March of 21. And then it really started sharply coming down.

I think not coincidentally concomitant with the vaccine era. People, not everybody, of course, but most people started getting vaccinated. That was the beginning of moving kind of into greater endemicity where COVID is just a part of our life and we all move on with our lives. So definitely it was a COVID thing. And there's no question that we've got statistically significant, meaningfully large improvement in loneliness. Right.

So that's good news. And in a way, because of when you started tracking this metric, there's no way of really knowing whether we're, quote unquote, back to normal, because you started when COVID hit. But you measure a lot of things when it comes to health and well-being in this survey. And there are other baselines that you are familiar with pre-COVID. Are we, in general, back to normal? Have things gotten fully better, maybe when we look even beyond loneliness? Yeah.

Yes, and there's a lot of clues that we can draw upon using that very method with loneliness. One of them is some of the other emotions that we trend that are closely related to it. Stress, worry, anger. Those are all things that we've been tracking long before the COVID era, all the way back to 2008 with the onset of the National Well-Being Index.

When you look at those, it's a pretty fascinating story, Galen, because they're real, real stable metrics. Things like, did you feel worry a lot of the day yesterday or stress a lot of the day yesterday? Those things don't move around very much over time. Back when the Great Recession hit, this was in late 2008, compared to the start of the year,

Stress and worry had climbed by about four to five percentage points. Stress tends to hover around mid to upper 40s of the US population. Worry is kind of in the mid to upper 30s of the US population that's experiencing those a lot of the prior day.

You saw that jump of four to five points back in 2008, and then it kind of slowly drifts back down over the next two years to finally reach pre-Great Recession levels. Fast forward now to spring of 2020.

COVID arrives, everything shuts down, worry and stress both jump in ways that we'd never seen before. It completely redefined what I thought was even capable for these two metrics with a large population like the American public.

Worry had jumped from 38% to 59%. So that was a 21 percentage point increase. Stress went from 46 all the way up to 60, a 14 percentage point increase. Really shocking how they jumped. And then it kind of slowly come back down. By the spring of 21, again, we're kind of into the vaccine era now.

Both of those things had drifted down to pre-pandemic levels. So if you kind of get into like April of 21, stress is back down the mid-40s, worry is back down the mid-30s, and it's more or less been steady ever since. So

Knowing about the relationship between those things and loneliness, coupled with the fact that we pick up loneliness at 25% in the spring of 2020 and it's come down to 17% since then, it's, I think, very fair to postulate that loneliness

17 is probably more of a closer view of what it would have been around pre-pandemic, and 25 is a reflection of the big increase that happened as a result of it. Yeah, I'm curious, you know, if you, at least if you pay attention to

news reports, and also if you look at some of the longer-term trend lines, both in the U.S. and globally in Gallup's data, it looks like there is a longer-term trend towards dissatisfaction. You know, call it a mental health crisis, call it whatever you want, but is the data that you're looking at saying, like, no, everything is back to normal, people are feeling good, or, you know, there are still underlying problems here?

I think that there's still underlying problems. There's another real important metric that Gallup has trended as a part of the Well-Being Index going back to 2008, and that's life evaluation, the Life Evaluation Index. We use two question items. They're the first two questions of our survey every time to get at this.

One is, how satisfied are you with your current life? And the other is, how satisfied do you think you'll be five years from now? These questions are the famous Hadley Cantrell self-striving scale questions where we ask respondents to imagine a ladder.

and the ladder has 10 rungs. In the top possible, the best possible life for you, you're a 10 on that ladder. In the worst possible life, you're a zero. Where do you fall on that ladder today? Where do you think you're going to be on that ladder five years from now? For most, on average, for most Americans, at least if you're under the age of 65, future ladder is about one rung higher. And

than current ladder. So most of us are anticipating our life five years from now is going to be a little bit better than it is today. Well, we'll proportionalize our respondents into three categories. If you're a seven or higher to current ladder and an eight or higher to future ladder, so you're giving high ratings to both of them, we'll classify you as thriving.

And that thriving percentage is one that we've really tracked for a long time. And it's a fascinating thing to kind of look at and trend over time. Again, just a benchmark, if we go back to the Great Recession, November of 2008, Washington Mutual had gone belly up. Lehman Brothers had gone belly up. Everyone was seeing their 401ks disappear before their eyes. The labor market was hemorrhaging at half a million jobs a month.

The thriving percentage had gone from about 52% in January of 08 down to 46.4 in November of 08. And that was the lowest that we ever saw out of thriving for the next decade.

And it kind of slowly improved over time. By time the Obama era ended and the Trump era began, we were kind of sitting in the 55, 56% thriving range. So it had come back pretty well, pretty strongly over the course of that time.

Then COVID hits, and you see this big plunge from the mid-50s down to 46.4. That may sound familiar. That was the one that I was just noting from November 2008. So for the second time ever, and this was across several hundred measurement periods, we'd hit that all-time low of 46.4% of American adults who were thriving.

The overwhelming majority of that, this is a little bit of an aside, but it's a relevant one. The big reason for that 10-point drop wasn't about my anticipated life satisfaction. That actually got better than what it was pre-COVID. What dragged that thriving percentage down was current life satisfaction. How satisfied am I with my life right now?

As that one dropped down, then the thriving percentage drops because we had fewer and fewer people that were clearing that seven-rung ladder for current life. And we had that big plunge. Since then, it's had kind of mercurial movement, I would describe it as. It improved a lot that very first summer. And then Omicron hits, and we got to that second winter when cases were really off the charts with Omicron compared to the original coronavirus.

came back down again, and then vaccine started. And by time we hit June of 21, right on the cusp of President Biden's kind of mission accomplished moment on his 4th of July speech,

We were all the way up to 59.2% thriving. The U.S. public was an all-time high. And that's actually when we talked about this poll on the podcast as part of our Good Use or Bad Use of Polling segment. We were thinking, wow, 59% of Americans are thriving. What does that even mean? But unlike your metrics for worry or stress or loneliness, it doesn't seem like 60% of Americans are still thriving today.

They aren't. I mean, by last summer, which was the last time we published our estimate, it dropped to 51%. So it really had shed a lot of that and was kind of back down again below that pre-COVID level. And so, you know, it's like I said, it's been very mercurial in its movement. Since that time, it's edged back up. But I would say overall, it's lower. And

These things matter. We've published a while back a study of ours that we did examining 599 reportable counties in the U.S., looking at them from 2012 to the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. What we found in our analysis, this is myself and colleagues with Yale School of Medicine, that those counties that had high well-being, that has had high thriving levels, using both the latter questions,

Those that were high and stayed high over that time, where most people had good life evaluation in that county, if they were blue counties in 2012, so they voted for Obama over Romney, they remained blue counties in 2016 and voted for Hillary over Trump. But those counties that had the low well-being or worsening low well-being over that period of time,

were much more inclined to switch to being red counties. So they went from being blue Obama counties in 2012 to red Trump counties in 2016. So where well-being was high, it was much more pro-preserving the status quo. And where well-being was low or worsening, it was much more

regime change, throw the bums out and give me somebody new. And so that's, I think, a good illustration of how people's self-evaluation of their lives can really influence their behaviors in significant ways that affect all of us.

Thank you for priming the pump for me. I was going to ask, you know, this may not sound like a political topic, although in many ways, national satisfaction is like as political as it gets, right? You know, people are voting based on how they feel. And if they're dissatisfied, of course, they're going to vote against the status quo. I'm curious if you've picked up on other trends in terms of who, according to their self-reporting, is doing well in America and who isn't.

Well, that's, you know, these things are not written in stars and it'll move around. So, for example, if we go back to 2008, Bush 43 is kind of on his way out. There's an election. Barack Obama moves into the White House. If you analyze it, Gallup's old editor-in-chief, Frank Newport, and I did an article on this.

What you found is that when Obama was first elected, the thriving percentage, there was a kind of a national bump. It went up about five points just that very next month. But it was not the same, depending on what kind of human being you were. So if we looked at black Democrats, they jumped the most. They jumped by over 10 percentage points in their thriving percentage.

White Democrats also improved. I think it was about eight points, statistically significant, meaningfully large improvement for white Democrats. Black Republicans improved by about three percentage points, so still kind of inside the margins. And then white Republicans, the bigger of the two groups, of course, improved.

They lost ground. They came down. And that was in the, you know, economically, not a whole lot of change. We were, you know, there was the big rescue plan and stimulus money. Yeah, right. But there was a political regime change that you saw these things really move around. And that the just look, not peeled away from political identity, just looking at our major race and ethnic groups, that first term of the Obama era was

Galen, Black Americans had a higher thriving percentage than did whites or Hispanics. That started to erode his second four years and then eroded still further in Trump's four years. And now Black Americans are lowest out of the three. So, you know, these things can move around and they can move around based on real important events in people's lives. All that being noted, money is always good.

for thriving. It's pretty closely linked to income. So as your income goes up and up and up, the probabilities that you're going to be thriving get better and better and better.

It's a bit of a different story if you look at those emotional experiences, happiness, worry, stress. There we find that having more money improves your probability of success, of being happy, of experiencing enjoyment, and reducing the chances of experiencing worry or anger or stress or sadness. But that peaks out at around $90,000 a year.

And so at that point, the ever greater amounts of money does not increase or decrease your chances of experiencing those things. Whereas with the life ratings, it does continue to go up with money. Yeah. I mean, an important part of what we do on this podcast is not necessarily taking data at face value and questioning methods and possible pitfalls.

given how sometimes the fluctuations can be within a pretty small band. For example...

There was, you know, the number of Americans who said that they were suffering hit an all-time high last August. It was 5.6%. The lowest it's ever been is 2.4%. So you're kind of like, okay, what's the difference between 2.4% and 5.6% suffering? And, you know, this is all self-reported data anyway. How do we really try to tease out the signal from the noise in all of this? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. That's part of the validation work. And

These metrics can be validated in a lot of different ways, but common ways that you do it is you just ascribe certain outcomes that you're interested in, and then you look at the well-being of different groups.

You control for compositional differences in the model. So you level the playing field as far as how rich the groups are, the race and ethnic mix, the age, the gender. Marital status is an important one. And region of the country, education level, too. So you statistically level the playing field in your model, and you just isolate how people are evaluating their lives, how they're self-reporting their well-being.

And when you do that, you find really, really substantial differences in how people execute in life. If you're a worker, for example, and you have high well-being, again, we're controlling for all that other stuff in the background. Workers with high well-being are more likely to show up to work on time. They're less likely to have unplanned absenteeism from work. They're less likely to have accidents on the job that result in workers' comp claims.

We also find all kinds of very strong relationships at the community level.

Things like high school graduation rates, per capita property crime, per capita violent crime, and certainly employment and unemployment. But where well-being is higher, we see better outcomes as far as the community's health as a whole is concerned. And so this is where the rubber hits the road. This answers the question, well, does this even matter? Why do we even care if this rate is going up or down?

Yeah. So you answered one question, which is that up to $90,000 a year, money helps the situation. From a public policy perspective, how do you increase well-being amongst the public otherwise? Well, that's a good question. There are a lot of significant interventions that can be put in place.

Workplaces are the ideal place to do it because workers are more of a captive audience than are residents of a community. Although community level interventions are common as well, Gallup has partnered with the Blue Zones Project going back to 2010, and they're all about going in and improving well-being of people inside of a community. So what are some things that you can do? Gallup conceptualizes well-being more granularly around five elements.

There's career well-being, which is having the right career in life for you, wherever you are in your life's journey, your job, as a student, as a stay-at-home parent or house manager, as a retiree. Do you like what you do? Are you a good natural fit for it? Are you using your natural strengths every day? Are you setting and reaching goals? That's career well-being. There's social well-being, which is the love that you have in your life.

There's financial well-being, which isn't how much money you make, so much as how you live within your means and manage your wealth to build financial security. There's community well-being, which is your emotional attachment to the area where you live. Are you proud of it? Do you give back to it? Do you feel safe within it? And there's physical well-being, of course, which includes many aspects of emotional and mental health.

Financial well-being can be improved in lots of ways, including just offering fiscal fitness classes, basic budgeting, retirement planning, understanding your 401k. At the community level, you know, it's investing in the built structure, walking paths, bike paths, green space,

public transit, all of those things are strongly linked to well-being. And as you get the restaurants involved, you get the schools involved, you get the businesses involved, and you slowly transform the culture of the area where you live to increase the probability that people who live there are going to live a life well-lived with high well-being.

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You know, there are other important factors here in terms of well-being that I was looking at in terms of age and geography. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that. It seems like young people appear to be amongst the worst off in this research. So I'm curious, are young people actually doing worse right now than they usually are in terms of life satisfaction?

Right. I think the answer is no. With general life satisfaction, America is kind of mostly back to pre-pandemic levels. A little lower, probably, but that's more or less equally distributed across the various age groups. With current life satisfaction, that gets better.

with age. It's actually lowest among those 18 to 29. Then it gets better sort of in that 30 to 64 range, and then better still, a lot better once you're 65 plus. The future ladder goes the other way around. So when I'm thinking about what's my life going to be like five years from now, there's no better place to be than an 18 to 29-year-old because they average higher than an 8 on that 0 to 10 range.

ladder scale, that erodes down to 6.9 or thereabouts for those who are 65 plus. Once you kind of get to retirement age, that curve flips where you're not rating your future life better than your current life. You're rating your current life better than what you think your future life is going to be.

Same thing holds with those emotional experiences. Nothing better than being 65 plus when it comes to things like smiling and laughing and enjoyment and happiness. When it comes to those metrics, though, you do find that it's a little better with the 18 to 29-year-olds. But if you look at the negative affect, the stress, the sadness, the worry,

And the loneliness, right? The 18 to 29-year-olds have it by far the worst. They're experiencing more of that negative affect than anybody else. And it kind of slowly improves as you get older. Why? Well, I think there's some reasonable reasons why.

Low income is worse off too. The low income, as you know, Galen, we're also the highest in our loneliness group and young people are going to be more likely to be lower income. But I think a big piece of that is marital status. When we look at loneliness based on whether you're married or have a domestic partner compared to those who don't, what we find is that if you're married, your loneliness is far lower than if you have a partner.

Having kids at home, too, to a lesser degree, but not insignificant. If you have kids at home, you're going to be more likely to report that you weren't lonely a lot of the day yesterday. So those are things that can influence. The story gets more complex from there, especially when you're talking about COVID, when all these things took off.

Young people and low-income people and people of color really took it on the chops when COVID hit as far as those 22 million jobs that were lost economically. They were far more likely to be in jobs that discontinued being jobs, while professionals like me were a lot more likely to keep their jobs and just get sent home and work from home remotely.

Professionals like me are a lot more likely to be accustomed to doing calls like this on Teams or Zoom, where you're meeting and seeing and collaborating with your colleagues, whereas you don't get that nearly as much in these other kind of more entry-level positions. And

You know, you get sent home. I was still collaborating every single day with everybody just from my home office. Different deal for those folks. And so I think that that's part of it, too. Not just that they're higher, but as we've trended forward since the spring of 2020 to today, three years later.

America has gotten better in loneliness. All adults, as you noted, have come down from 25 to 17. But those young adults and the low-income folks, they've dropped down in their loneliness more. They're still higher than their older and richer counterparts in terms of their loneliness, but they've come down a lot more as they've gotten back into the workforce, as they've

You know, they're around friends and family more again. You've seen, you know, first I think they took a real disproportionate hit at the onset, and now they've disproportionately benefited coming around the corner on the other side.

Yeah, well, that's great news. Looking at the work that Gallup has done globally, it looks like, you know, Gallup has essentially labeled what's happened as a global rise of unhappiness. And Gallup does polling all around the world, is able to access, you know, 90 plus percent of the population by being in a large selection of countries around the world.

And the rise from 2006 to 2021 is, you know, 24% of people around the world, you know, rating their experience in life negatively, including things like anger, stress, sadness, physical pain, and worry. Up to 33% in 2021. And that wasn't just COVID, you know, it was 30% in 2018. So it seems like there is this upward trend. What's going on globally and how do we fit into that picture?

With these things, we're just kind of looking at annualized trends. And the annualized trend is that it's been substantially worsening. One of the real aspects of that, which kind of brings this conversation full circle, is global loneliness. The percentage of people that say that they don't have a single friend now projects to 300 million people.

worldwide. And I mean, just imagine what, you know, what that does as far as, you know, your emotional wellbeing. It's just debilitating. It's like depression. Depression is, it gets in the way of everything that's important in life. Depression does. And real close correlates to depression, Galen, are loneliness and sadness and anger.

And those things, they really dovetail together. And so as you see this thing kind of rising, that tide rising internationally, I think it's a real cause for concern.

Over the past 15 years or so, as you've been conducting the National Wellbeing Survey, you've changed some things sort of to react to COVID and get a better sense of how Americans are doing. You know, what questions do you have going forward? How might the survey continue to evolve to get a better read on where we are as a country? That's a good question. One thing that we're really curious about

is how people are evaluating their own self-care, how they're taking care of themselves. We'll have questions as a part of the well-being index like, "Did you eat healthy all day yesterday, yes or no?" Sounds very subjective, but that one question actually does a lot of good heavy lifting inside of our models because people have a pretty good idea of what healthy eating is and isn't. Different folks can have different definitions of it for sure.

But where we find populations that report at high levels that they ate healthy the day before, that's kind of one of those bell cow metrics. It's indicative of high well-being groups, high well-being places. So one thing that I'm curious about is getting down into the details of just how people define healthy eating.

Do they think that having a burger and fries through the McDonald's drive-thru constitutes a good meal? We know about the role that food deserts play in food choices. We also know the role that low income plays in terms of the food choices that people make. I think that there's opportunity there to really peel back a lot more layers of the onion to gain a more sophisticated understanding of

how consumers' perceptions of what healthy eating is actually manifests itself in the choices that they're making overlaid with the demographic realities of their life. Beyond that, though, we know this stuff matters. We've been validating the efficacy of these things against significant health and community outcomes for a long time. I think that measuring things like how...

out of a seven-day week, weather permitting, how many days per week are you walking to your local grocery to pick up your groceries? How many days a week are you getting out on the bike path?

How frequently do you have healthy food choices, not just in your own home, but in your favorite restaurant that you go to or your local grocery that you go to? These are all things that this is empirical. You know, we can measure these things and we can get a good read on them. And from that, I think it can inform smart policy choices.

And then it all comes back. I mean, the thing that really sticks out to me is ultimately all of these things come together to, in part, determine how people vote. Not because they're associated with being a Democrat or Republican, but that there are people who change their votes every four years. And if you aren't satisfied with the course of your life, you're liable to change your vote, it sounds like.

Sure. And it spills into our lives in all kinds of fascinating ways. Let me give you one more quick anecdote. Go back to the spring of 2020. I was talking about how stress and worry really shot up. And we are assuming that loneliness did too, along with some of those others. Two other emotional experiences, sadness and anger, didn't really change. They got a little worse because of the pandemic, but they were mostly flat.

Then in late May of 2020, something happened that grabbed national attention, and that was the murder of George Floyd. And the subsequent protests that came out of that, Black Lives Matter, all the national marches, we all remember all that stuff, a lot of upset people.

upset for Mr. Floyd, of course, but also for the broader context that his killing represented for a good portion of the American public. When you get into the first half of June, and remember Gallup was measuring daily still in these early stages of COVID. The fascinating thing was that when those protests broke out, and they lasted for a good month, by the end of June, when Mr. Floyd was laid to rest,

They didn't entirely go away. There was Portland and some others, but they mostly simmered down and kind of burned out. What we saw was stress and worry remained elevated. Got a little bit worse during that period, but most of the damage had been done in March and April from COVID.

Sadness and anger, in contrast, shot way up, over 10 percentage point pops, just as big a pops as we'd had a couple months earlier with stress and worry. By the end of June, then anger and sadness kind of drifted back down. And by the end of the summer, we're back down to pre-Floyd anxiety.

And so it was a fascinating experiment inside of an experiment where you change what's happening on the ground. And it can modify in disparate ways real important emotional experiences that we have. And so it teaches us something about human psychology, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been interesting. Thank you so much for taking the time and joining me today. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Dan Reuters is the director of the Gallup National Health and Wellbeing Index. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room and he's also on video editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.