People expect happiness improvements that don’t quite arrive

Among the young, expectations for future well-being run far ahead of reported well-being today. The gap diminishes with age, and in the rich countries, the lines cross around age 65 after which the future is expected to be worse than the present. Except for this, people appear to be perpetually optimistic about their futures even though this optimism is perpetually frustrated by actual outcomes.

…This (unjustified) optimism seems to happen everywhere in the world…

That is from a new paper by Angus Deaton.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed