The latest issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science contains an article by former Visiting Scholar Michael Hout (University of California, Berkeley), based on research partly funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. During his time at the Foundation, Hout studied trends in social mobility in the U.S. since the 1970s, looking in particular at the decline in upward social mobility and the rise of downward social mobility.

In his new report for the Annals, Hout examines the effects of the Great Recession, and of growing income inequality in general, on the psychological well-being of Americans. The abstract states:

Dozens of past studies document how affluent people feel somewhat better about life than middle-class people feel and much better than poor people do. New analyses of the General Social Surveys from 1974 to 2012 address questions in the literature regarding aggregate responses to hard times, whether the income-class relationship is linear or not, and whether inequality affects happiness. General happiness dropped significantly during the Great Recession, suggesting that the income-happiness relationship might also exist at the macro level. People with extremely low incomes are not as unhappy as a linear model expects, but there is no evidence of a threshold beyond which personal happiness stops increasing. Comparing happiness over the long term, the affluent were about as happy in 2012 as they were in the 1970s, but the poor were much less happy. Consequently, the gross happiness gap by income was about 30 percent bigger in 2012 than it was in the 1970s. A multivariate model shows that the net effect of income on happiness also increased significantly over time.

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