Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Did you know I've had my podcast for 15 years? Do you know that it is the

most downloaded sports podcast of all time? Did you know I have guests from the sports world,

from the culture world, people who work for the ringer, people outside the ringer, celebrities,

experts? You name it. It's on my podcast three times a week, late Sunday night, late Tuesday night,

late Thursday night. The Bill Simmons podcast, check it out on Spotify.

Today's episode is about happiness in America, and evidence that Americans today are

significantly less happy than they used to be. So since the 1970s, the general social survey has

asked thousands of Americans the same question. And that question is, quote, take it all together.

How would you say things are these days? Would you say you are very happy, pretty happy, or not

too happy? End quote. And in the last decades of the 20th century, America's overall well-being

seemed to barely budge. We were just sort of bouncing along. But since 2000, happiness in America

took a clear and dramatic dive. There's a new paper by the University of Chicago economist Sam

Peltzmann that dug into this GSS data to pull out a couple of tantalizing threads, each of which I

think could be their own podcast episode in and of themselves. So for example, Peltzmann's found

that in the 1970s, women were significantly happier than men. But female happiness has declined

every decade since the 1970s, such that now both genders have for the first time on record

the same level of happiness. That alone could be its own extremely interesting episode. What happened

to female happiness in America? Here's another example from his paper. He found that income

plays a huge role in well-being. Every year, the richer happier in the middle class, the middle class

are happier than the poor. He also found that race matters, but not as much as it used to. White

Americans have consistently reported more happiness than black Americans. But since 1970, and especially

since 2000, happiness has dramatically increased among black Americans even as it's moderately declined

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