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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | Peltzman, Sam |
| Abstract: | I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half - the married adults - remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court. |
| Keywords: | Happiness, Covid, Demographics, Marriage, Race, Education, Income, Politics, Ideology |
| JEL: | D60 H00 I10 I31 J10 J12 J18 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cbscwp:339592 |
| By: | Anton Korinek; Joseph E. Stiglitz |
| Abstract: | Rapid progress in new technologies such as AI has led to widespread anxiety about adverse labor market impacts. This paper asks how to guide innovative efforts so as to increase labor demand and create better-paying jobs while also evaluating the limitations of such an approach. We develop a theoretical framework to identify the properties that make an innovation desirable from the perspective of workers, including its technological complementarity to labor, the relative income of the affected workers, and the factor share of labor in producing the goods involved. Applications include robot taxation, factor-augmenting progress, and task automation. In our framework, the welfare benefits of steering technology are greater the less efficient social safety nets are. As technological progress devalues labor, the welfare benefits of steering are at first increased but, but beyond a critical threshold, decline and optimal policy shifts toward greater redistribution. Moreover, as labor's economic value diminishes, steering progress focuses increasingly on enhancing human well-being rather than labor productivity. |
| JEL: | D63 E64 O3 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34994 |