Recently, Lithuania topped the World Happiness Report ranking for under 30s, with the country’s young people rating themselves 7.76 out of 10 on the happiness scale. I completely understand why, especially as a young person living in Vilnius.
There is a positive association between the level of economic development and national levels of overall life satisfaction (OLS) in the adult population, with decreasing marginal returns. However, research shows no association in early adolescence and a negative association in middle adolescence. We hypothesize that this is due to the exclusion of low-income countries, where adolescent wellbeing is rarely collected. 2015–2019 Gallup World Poll data from 139 countries in middle adolescence (age 15–17; n 36,907) were analysed using linear regression to study the association between country levels of economic development and OLS, positive emotions (PE), and negative emotions (NE), and how this varies across economic development levels, and gender. Variations across economic development levels were compared with those observed in the adult population. Log per-capita GDP is positively associated with OLS and PE, although in high-income countries no association is observed for PE, and among females for OLS. For NE, a negative association is observed in lower-income countries and a positive association in higher-income countries. In this age group (age 15–17), the log per-capita GDP – OLS association is stronger in lower-income countries than in higher-income countries, but this pattern reverses with age in adulthood. A nuanced relationship exists between economic development and adolescent wellbeing, which varies across measures, levels of economic development, gender, and age -including notable differences compared to adults. Our study highlights the need for improving child and adolescent wellbeing data worldwide, especially in lower-income countries, to better understand how best to support wellbeing globally.
With the world’s largest economy and its highest GDP, you might think the United States would have the world’s happiest citizens. But you’d be wrong. This year, when the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its annual World Happiness Report, the U.S. had dropped out of the top 20, landing at 23rd on the list. The reason? America’s youth are deeply unhappy. What societal and cultural factors are at play here? Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre and a professor of economics and behavioral science, joins The Excerpt to share his insights into what truly makes people happy.
In many parts of the world, younger folks are happier than the old. But in the U.S. the opposite is true. Happiness has plummeted so much for the young over the recent past that they are now much less happy than the older generations.
The U.S. ranked number 10 in happiness for folks 60 or older but a startling number 62 for those under 30.
The US is sliding down the world happiness rankings – but it’s the unhappiness of young people that’s really dragging down the average. What has happened to make Gen Z so sad? And what can be done to turn the situation around?
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (director of Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre) has been analyzing the figures for the World Happiness Report. He offers advice to young people and parents, and looks at what happy young Lithuanians can teach the rest of the world.
The World Happiness Report of 2024 points to childhood and adolescence as periods of considerable importance and a unique window of opportunity for intervention to make strong and positive impacts worldwide to ensure higher global well-being.
“We had picked up in recent years from scattered sources of data that child and youth well-being, particularly so in the United States, had seen a drop,” said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics and behavioral science at Oxford, who is one of the editors of the report. “That has pushed us for the first time to really slice and dice the data by these age categories, which we normally don’t do.”
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Center and an editor of the report, said in an interview Wednesday that the findings are concerning “because youth well-being and mental health is highly predictive of a whole host of subjective and objective indicators of quality of life as people age and go through the course of life.”
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor and editor of the World Happiness Report, said the US falling out of the top 20 happiest countries was “quite astonishing.”
“The young are the ones that have fallen off a cliff in terms of their well-being, and that’s feeding through into the overall ranking score for the United States,” he told BI.
One of the key findings from the report is that happiness rankings differ between age groups with Americans under the age of 30 coming in 62nd out of 143 countries.
Editor of the report and director of the Wellbeing Research Centre, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, highlighted the ‘disconcerting drops in youth happiness, especially in North America and Western Europe’ as though it had ‘fallen off a cliff’.
“To think in some parts of the world children are already experiencing the equivalent of a midlife crisis demands immediate policy action,” he added.