Interactive Data Essays
Hand-built, interactive data visualizations on human well-being — how people rate their lives against how their days actually feel, across surveys, countries, and five decades. Each essay draws on a single survey backbone and is fully self-contained.
The Scissors
Two ways of measuring a life are coming apart: the rating people give it holds or climbs while the daily feel of it sinks. Across the Gallup World Poll, the GSS, and the Values Surveys, the gap between the evaluative and experiential blades keeps widening.
Health & DespairThe Plateau Is in the Tail, Not the Mean
For more than a decade, social science fought over whether money stops buying happiness around $75,000. Re-run the question on 1.8 million Gallup interviews — the same survey the fight began on — and the answer is that everyone was staring at the wrong line.
IncomeMoney Buys Calm, Not Joy
Across the income ladder, how people rate their lives climbs steeply while daily enjoyment plateaus above poverty and stress barely moves — what money most clearly buys is freedom from worry.
IncomeHealth & DespairMoney Moves Your Life Rating More Than Your Mood
Inside almost every country, richer people both rate their lives higher and feel better day to day — but the life-rating slope is steeper than the mood slope in 96% of countries, and the gap widens with development.
IncomeHealth & DespairThe Great Convergence
Since 1981 national life satisfaction grew more alike: the post-communist world climbed ~2 points out of its mid-1990s trough (Albania +2.4, Ukraine +2.2) while some wealthy nations slipped, and the cross-country spread fell 49%.
GeographyThe Changing Recipe of a Good Life
Run the same model of life satisfaction in poor and rich countries and the ingredients shift: financial satisfaction’s grip eases, the sense of freedom nearly doubles in weight (0.14→0.27), and the pull of relative income rank fades to zero.
IncomeThe Freedom to Be Happy
Across 100+ countries and 40 years of the Values Surveys, the sense of freedom and control over one’s life predicts life satisfaction better than income or health — a within-country coefficient of 0.30, and r=0.77 across 107 national averages.
IncomeHealth & DespairDoes the Ring Still Matter?
For fifty years, married Americans have reported more happiness than everyone else — a gap that has barely budged, and that survives even after you account for who tends to marry.
Health & DespairThe Mood That Didn't Lift
From 2006 to 2025 the world's life-rating climbed back to a record high, but daily negative emotion stayed elevated — and peaked in 2022, not 2020. The recovery reached the ladder, not the day.
Health & Despair2020 Was Not the End
Re-examined across the full 2017–2025 arc, 2020's shock looks different: the world's life-rating recovered past its pre-pandemic baseline (+0.41 ladder points) while daily distress only half receded — and the worst year for negative emotion was 2022, not 2020.
Health & DespairDespair, Felt and Fatal
Deaths of despair gave America a mortality map. Buried in 1,769,079 Gallup interviews is the question that map raises: which feeling lives in the places where people die? Not sadness. Not worry. Pain — and a future that looks shorter than the present.
Health & DespairGeographyYoung and Less Happy
In the GSS, happiness has always risen gently with age. Over the past decade the youngest adults fell to a 50-year low — 1.80 in 2021, 1.91 in 2024 — pulling away from everyone else.
AgeThe U-Curve Inverts
The midlife dip and old-age rebound was a 20th-century pattern. In the rich world the young have lost their lead: the young-minus-old life-rating gap swung from +0.46 to −0.06 as the young fell and the old held.
IncomeAgeThe Two Clocks of Growing Old
As people age worldwide, the mind's agitations fall — stress peaks in midlife and anger hits a lifetime low by 65+ — while pain (18%→47%), sadness and health limits climb. Whether old-age worry eases or deepens is sorted by money: 0.31 in rich countries vs 0.47 in poor.
IncomeAgeHealth & DespairThe Long Retreat of Trust
The share of Americans who say most people can be trusted has nearly halved since 1972 — 47% to 25% — while the durable happiness gap between trusters and the wary held firm.
TrustFifty Years of American Evenings
Since 1974 the General Social Survey has asked the same four questions: how often do you spend an evening with relatives, with friends, with neighbors, at a bar? The company thinned. The glow stayed. And the people who still gather now look happier, relative to those who don’t, than they did when the asking began.
CommunitySomeone to Count On
Having someone to count on is worth about 1.5 ladder points — one of the largest gaps in well-being — and a generous welfare state, far from substituting for it, makes that private safety net matter more, not less.
TrustGeographyThe Pew, Not the Prayer
Religion is good for happiness — but it's the showing up, not the believing, that does the work: attendance carries roughly twice the happiness of private prayer or belief, and survives when both are entered together.
ReligionLosing My Religion
Americans leave the faith they were raised in at four times the rate they did fifty years ago — and what that costs in happiness depends less on where you started than on where you stand now.
ReligionGeographyDoes Generosity Pay — Everywhere?
Across 155 countries, people who give — money, time, or a hand to a stranger — rate their lives higher and feel better day to day; the link holds in rich countries and poor ones alike, and is strongest for giving money.
IncomeCommunityAlone
Half a century of GSS data traces a quiet, broad withdrawal from in-person life — neighbors most of all — and the steep happiness gap that separates the connected from the isolated.
CommunityOut of Reach — When the American Dream Stopped Feeling Possible
The belief that the system gives you a fair shot has quietly collapsed — agreement fell from 78% in 2000 to 45% in 2024 — and that belief is worth real happiness.
Health & DespairThe Optimism Gap
Americans disagree enormously about how much better their lives will get — and the least hopeful group is the white working class, not the poor of color.
IncomeRacePoliticsThe Satisfaction Treadmill
Real family incomes rose about a third from 1972 to 2022, but Americans' satisfaction with their finances never followed — the share 'pretty well satisfied' fell from 33% to 23%, and beneath the flat average the top and bottom thirds pulled apart from 0.43 to 0.62 points.
IncomeCommunityThe Flip Counties Felt It First
In the 223 counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016, people rated their day-to-day lives almost exactly like residents of similar counties that never flipped. What sagged, years before any ballots were cast, was the future.
PoliticsGeographyFeeling Behind
Financial satisfaction tracks where Americans think they rank more than the dollars they actually have: the perceived-rank gradient spans a full point and saturates at the top, and adding rank to a model collapses the income effect by about 61%.
IncomeGeographyKeeping Up With the County
Take two Americans on the same paycheck and drop one in a richer county — the comparison drags down the middle, barely touches the rich, and slightly lifts the poor.
IncomeGeographyThe Geography of American Thriving
Across 2.46 million interviews, the share of Americans 'thriving' in how they rate their lives spans about 19 points between states — and at the county level it tracks income, rurality, and deaths of despair.
IncomeHealth & DespairGeographyHappiness Moved Inside Borders
From 2006 to 2019 the world grew happier and nations grew more alike — but inside 39 of 42 countries, the distance between the happiest and unhappiest citizens widened.
GeographyLower on the Ladder, Lighter in the Day
Ask whether Black or white Americans are happier and the honest answer is: by which measure? They rate their current lives slightly lower, yet report calmer days — less worry and less stress — at every income level, and most among the affluent.
IncomeRaceHealth & DespairThe Gender Well-Being Paradox, Measured Two Ways
Across 155 countries, women rate their lives at least as high as men in nine of every ten places — yet report more daily worry, sadness, and stress. Two gender gaps, pointing opposite ways.
GenderHealth & DespairOut of Place — The Geography of the LGBT Well-Being Gap
Daily distress runs high for LGBT Americans everywhere, but how poorly they rate their lives widens where the county climate turns hostile — and in those same places, fewer people say they are LGBT at all, so the widening gap is a lower bound.
RaceHealth & DespairGeographyFeeling Rich Is Not the Same as Being Rich
Money buys the feeling of enough everywhere and never stops — but Central Asia feels richer than its GDP, southern Africa poorer, and the countries that rate their lives best are not the ones that feel paid.
IncomeFaith Pays Off Where Faith Is the Norm
Being religious lifts your life rating only a little — and no more in devout societies than secular ones — but faith's experiential dividends, less daily distress and more felt support, swell sharply where religion is the social norm.
ReligionHealth & DespairGeographyWhose America Is Thriving? Whoever Just Won
Across a decade of daily interviews, Americans rated their own lives higher when their party held the White House — and the partisan gap flipped sign at each handover. Both sides do it; it is the winning that moves the mood.
RacePoliticsHealth & DespairClosing the Scissors
What actually lifts a life? Run the horse race across the GSS, Gallup World, and the Values Surveys and the same answer recurs: perceived freedom, health, and connection rival or beat income — and income barely touches the daily-emotion blade at all.
IncomeRaceCommunityDoes Community Substitute for Connection?
Fifty years of social-capital theory promised that civic-rich places would matter most for people with the thinnest personal ties — or, in the rival telling, least. In 921,639 Gallup interviews, the answer is sharper than either story: the gap barely moves at all.
IncomeCommunityThe Paradox That Didn't Hold
In the 1970s American women called themselves happier than men. A famous study watched that lead vanish — extend the data eighteen more years and the decline doesn't continue, it dissolves into noise.
GenderReligion's Conditional Dividend
Across 143 countries, faith tracks higher life evaluation and better days — but mainly where life is hard. As nations grow richer and safer, the religious advantage bends toward zero.
ReligionGeographyThe Post-Communist Mood
After 1989, life satisfaction across the former Eastern bloc collapsed to a 1999 trough (~5.7), then recovered and converged toward the West — the cross-country spread shrank as Romania (+1.6) and the Baltics climbed.
Health & DespairLeft, Right, and Content
Across Europe, the further right people place themselves, the more satisfied with life they report — a clean gradient from 6.85 (far left) to 7.42 (far right), and it survives adjustment for who sits where.
PoliticsGeographyThe Autonomy Engine
The feeling of freedom and control over your own life is Europe's strongest correlate of life satisfaction — stronger than health — positive in almost every country, and it rose most in the post-communist East.
Health & DespairThe Family Premium in Secular Europe
In secular, low-fertility Europe marriage still carries a clear life-satisfaction premium (married 7.25 vs widowed 6.31) — but having children does not: the satisfaction line stays flat from zero kids to four.
CommunityThe Map of European Contentment
A 2017 map of European life satisfaction: a Nordic and Alpine peak (Switzerland 8.0, Norway 8.0, Finland 7.9) above a still-lagging East (Ukraine and Bulgaria 6.2) — and the same geography largely repeats for freedom and health.
Health & DespairGeographyFifty Years of a Partisan Happiness Gap
In the General Social Survey, U.S. conservatives have reported being very happy more often than liberals in 31 of 33 years since 1974 — a ~7-point gap that runs through happiness and mental health, but not physical health.
PoliticsHealth & DespairThree Ways to Rank a Continent
Rank Europe by how people rate their lives, by how their week felt, and by whether life feels worthwhile, and you draw three different maps. Meaning refuses to follow satisfaction — Kosovo is 21st of 29 on life-rating but first in Europe on meaning.
Health & DespairGeographyThe World Is a Little Happier on the Right
Across the Values Surveys, people who place themselves on the political right report higher life satisfaction than those on the left in 89 of 99 countries — a near-universal gap of about half a point, holding rich and poor, free and unfree.
IncomePoliticsGeographyThe Continent's Quiet Scissors
How Europeans rate their lives and how their week actually felt mostly agree (r=0.86) — but the calm-and-anxiety dimension pulls apart (r=0.50), and a few countries feel notably better or worse than their life-rating predicts.
Health & DespairGeographyCan Marriage and Church Explain It?
The conservative happiness advantage in the GSS is about 7 points. Adjust step by step for marriage, churchgoing, income and health and ~75% dissolves — religion does the most work, income almost none — but a stubborn quarter (1.8 points) survives every control.
IncomeReligionCommunityWhat Faith Pays For in Secular Europe
Adjusted within country for age, income and gender, religious attendance in Europe tracks more meaning (+0.36 SD never→daily), a worthwhile life and a higher life-rating — but not a calmer or less-depressed week. Faith buys purpose, not mood.
IncomeGenderReligion