Declining Life Satisfaction and Happiness Among Young Adults in Six English-speaking Countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report eleven studies that show declines in life satisfaction and happiness among young adults in the last decade or so, with less uniform trends among older adults.We found consistent evidence for this for the U.S. in the recent sweeps of several micro data sets including the Behavioral Risk Factor Survey, the General Social Survey, and the American National Election Survey.In the U. S. life satisfaction rises with age.This is broadly confirmed in several other datasets including four from the European Commission across five other English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland New Zealand and the UK.Declining wellbeing of the young was also found in the World Values Survey, the Global Flourishing Study and Global Minds.There is broad evidence across all of these English-speaking countries that happiness and life satisfaction since 2020 rise with age.In several of these surveys we also find that ill-being declines in age.The U-shape in wellbeing by age that used to exist in these countries is now gone, replaced by a crisis in wellbeing among the young.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".