The Declining Well-being of the Young

Alex Bryson

“Across hundreds of studies subjective wellbeing follows a u-shape in age, declining until people reach middle-age, only to rebound subsequently. Ill-being follows a mirror-imaged hump-shape. But this empirical regularity has been replaced by a monotonic increase in wellbeing by age. The reason for the change is the decline in young people’s wellbeing which has exceeded the rate of decline in wellbeing in older people. We present evidence for this fundamental change in the link between wellbeing and age using data for the United States and the United Kingdom. We show that the change began in around 2010-2011. In the UK the recent COVID pandemic exacerbated the trends by impacting most heavily on the wellbeing of the young, but this was not the case in the United States.”

About the speaker:
Alex Bryson is Professor of Quantitative Social Science at the Social Research Institute, and a Research Fellow at IZA, NIESR and Rutgers. His research interests are labour economics, industrial relations, and programme evaluation.