Epilogue to the war: Afghanistan reports the lowest well-being in recorded history
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wars have profound effects on well-being, but what about the ending of war? This study investigates this topic using representative samples of 4127 Afghans living through the latter stages of the War in Afghanistan and its aftermath. We find that the life satisfaction of Afghans dropped significantly following the conclusion of the War in Afghanistan in 2022, with two-thirds reporting a life satisfaction rating of 0 or 1 on a 0-to-10–point scale. When compared to data from two international well-being datasets together covering more than 170 countries between 1946 and 2022, the mean life satisfaction score in Afghanistan following the Taliban regaining power ( M = 1.28) is the lowest ever recorded. The mean hope score in the country also dropped to a critically low level ( M = 1.02) in 2022. Wars are devastating, but the conclusion of war can appear worse from the perspectives of civilians despite the de-escalation of physical violence.
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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 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 0.009 |
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".