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’
Source: Fortune ·
Brookings’ Carol Graham has spent decades measuring outcomes. Here's how her study of happiness led to work on despair — and what hope has to do with it.
From the source
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…