Why is America punching below its weight on happiness? | Steven Pinker | GZERO World

It's a good time to be alive in America. The wealthiest nation on earth, though, is full of unhappy people.

It's a good time to be alive in America. The wealthiest nation on earth, though, is full of unhappy people, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.

"The United States is the anomaly because it's rich. It's more or less democratic, but it has lower life expectancy. It has poor scores on math tests, has more obesity, more drug addiction, more violence...And you think we'd be fat and happy, but it turns out we're fat and unhappy," Pinker tells Ian Bremmer.

Compared to its wealthy counterparts, the United States punches well below its weight in terms of happiness and quality of life given its wealth. Pinker offers many reasons for that anomaly, seen through the lens of his approach to measuring the state of human progress.

Watch the full interview on GZERO World: Is life better than ever for the human race?

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[jmiller]

Americans may love “freedom” in the abstract, but are not an especially live-and-let-live people. It’s a fairly puritanical and judgmental society, so many Americans live in an adversarial atmosphere. It puts them on-edge and makes them angry and unhappy.