Abstract
People’s ratings of life satisfaction, hope, and other dimensions of their well-being have become important metrics in disciplines such as economics and public health because they predict health, productivity, employment, and other social outcomes. Recent research suggests that hope, which can be measured with survey instruments, is the most important dimension of well-being for predicting future outcomes for individuals and society. Trends in hope have been tracked as a key factor in the rising numbers of U.S. deaths of despair—a term that encompasses suicide, overdoses, and alcohol-related mortality. Surveys of hope among low-income adolescents in Lima, Peru, and St. Louis, Missouri, have shown that those who have hope for the future—and who are often supported by a mentor—are more likely to invest effort in their education and avoid risky behaviors. By contrast, individuals in despair are unlikely to respond to incentives or opportunities and are vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories. This article provides evidence that hope influences social and economic outcomes and examples of policies that can help restore hope in populations that have lost it. Preventing another generation from falling into despair is essential to a society’s health and security.
Societies in the United States and many other countries have become increasingly polarized and unequal, not only in regard to income and opportunity but also in terms of how people feel about their lives. These sentiments matter to economists and other social scientists because feelings such as happiness, optimism, and hope—elements of what researchers refer to as “subjective well-being”—can, when properly measured, predict for both individuals and groups such important outcomes as physical and mental health, productivity, civic participation, longevity, and success in the labor market.
A growing body of evidence suggests that the single most consequential component of subjective well-being is hope. People usually think of hope as an emotion rather than something that can be measured and linked to behavioral, economic, and political outcomes. Economists who study hope—a small group that includes me—define it slightly differently. In social science, hope is not simply the belief or feeling that one’s circumstances will get better: That is optimism. Rather, hope is optimism combined with the belief that one has the agency to make things better.
Research suggests that hope, like happiness and other aspects of well-being, has a genetic component and is also shaped by environmental factors such as familial and community support, education, and opportunity. 1 This influence of environment means that policymakers and civic leaders have an opportunity to promote and nurture hope among citizens.
The stakes for doing so, or failing to do so, are high. My colleagues and I have tracked downward trends in hope in the United States and linked them to the rising numbers of deaths of despair, a term that encompasses suicide, overdoses, and alcohol-related mortality. Individuals in despair—a condition in which people do not care whether they live or die and therefore lack a narrative for their own future—are not likely to respond to incentives or nudges or take advantage of opportunities to get ahead. Research shows that they are more vulnerable to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and radicalization.
Conversely, in communities where hope is nurtured, people are more likely to thrive. With collaborators, I have conducted surveys of hope among low-income adolescents in Peru and Missouri and found that those who have hope for the future—many being the recipients of encouragement from a mentor in their family or community—are more likely to invest effort in their education and avoid risky behaviors that can jeopardize their health.
In this article, I provide empirical evidence and review lessons from well-being research and other disciplines that suggest possible policies for restoring hope in populations where it has been lost or diminished. I also recommend—as I argue in my recent book, The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us From Despair 2 —that social scientists and policymakers should both measure hope as a distinct constituent of well-being and develop interventions that cultivate it. In the United States, preventing another generation from falling into despair is essential to the population’s heath, well-being, cohesion, and even national security (see note A).
Sizing Up a Crisis of Despair
By several measures, the United States is experiencing a full-blown crisis of despair. Suicides, fatal drug overdoses, and deaths related to alcohol use are at unprecedented levels. For example, overdoses alone caused nearly 107,000 deaths in 2021, up from 52,400 in 2015.3,4 And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, surveys of high school students across the United States indicate that the rate of mental health problems in adolescents, especially young women, has consistently risen since the surveys began in 2011, a pattern exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. 5 In 2021, three in five teenage girls reported feeling persistent sadness, and one in three said they had contemplated suicide.3,5 And the malaise extends more broadly. When asked in a recent Gallup poll whether they were satisfied with the way things were going in the United States, only 19% of Americans said that they were. This percentage starkly contrasts with the high of 65% in 1986. 6
The crisis was brought to light in the seminal 2015 article by economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton that introduced the term “deaths of despair.” 7 Their 2017 follow-up paper showed that these preventable deaths among White people without a college degree were rising quickly enough to potentially reduce overall U.S. life expectancy. 8
At about the same time, Sergio Pinto and I found remarkable gaps in hope and optimism between African American and White people, which were widest for those at low levels of income. We found that low-income African Americans are 3 times as likely as Whites to score high in hope on an 11-point optimism scale. This advantage aligns with trends in mortality, in which low-income Whites, who have traditionally had lower mortality rates, are losing ground compared with low-income African Americans, who are making gradual progress. 9 In a more recent analysis published in a Brookings Global Working Paper in 2022, we showed that depression (a sign of despair and lack of hope) preceded deaths of despair among individuals and communities by 2 to 4 years, suggesting that well-being metrics could have served as a warning indicator had they been collected regularly. 3
Measuring hope in individuals and across populations is, however, a relatively new area of academic inquiry, especially in economics. Economic research into well-being generally concentrates on happiness and satisfaction with one’s life as key determinants of human welfare and quality of life. Happiness and satisfaction typically correlate with hope and are related to it, but hope differs in its emphasis on a belief in one’s ability to improve one’s situation. Researchers often measure hope by administering surveys, and they are becoming more skilled at verifying that participants’ self-reported hope is, indeed, hope. For instance, researchers may correlate the self-reports with biological or psychological markers, such as the level of the stress hormone cortisol in a saliva sample and the presence of Duchenne smiles—smiles that involve the eyes as well as the mouth and convey genuine happiness. 10
Health & Social Consequences of Hope and Despair
As already mentioned, research suggests that well-being traits such as happiness and hope have a genetic component yet hope, like many other traits and emotions, can be influenced by environmental factors like familial support, education, and opportunity, including opportunities created by shifting societal trends. 11 For example, in a 2019 study of respondents in the U.S. Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID), Kelsey J. O’Connor and I found that African Americans and women experienced increases in hope in the late 1970s, likely because of expanded civil rights and the woman’s movement, whereas men with less than a high school education experienced decreases in hope over the same time period. 12
In our PSID study, O’Connor and I found that a higher level of hope predicts better health and longevity. 12 Participants, who were born in the 1930s and 1940s, had been surveyed while in their 20s and asked whether they thought their lives would “work out.” Today I consider the question to be a proxy measure of hopefulness. Participants who said they thought their lives would work out, compared with members of their peer group (matched on age, race, and gender) who were not as hopeful (that is, they indicated that they did not think their lives would work out), were more likely to be alive in 2015.
My colleague Julia R. Pozuelo and I extended our analysis of the link between hope and long-term outcomes by following 400 low-income adolescents in Lima, Peru, over 3 years. 13 At the beginning of the study, 85% of the participants told us that they planned to go to college or seek postgraduate education even though none had parents educated beyond secondary school. This was a surprisingly high level of hope and aspiration. An interesting detail is that almost all of them had a mentor—a teacher, a relative, or another respected adult—who supported their aspirations. Three years later, 90% of those who planned to pursue higher education were still enrolled, and they were 15% to 20% less likely than their less hopeful peers to have engaged in risky health behaviors, such as smoking or having unsafe sex.
We repeated the survey in low-income neighborhoods in St. Louis, one primarily African American and one primarily White. Remarkably, the same differences in hope that our earlier work highlighted between low-income African American and White adults held consistently among our adolescent respondents. The African American adolescents were more hopeful and more likely to trust others and to aspire to advance beyond a high school education. The White teenagers showed a good deal of self-reliance but were less hopeful, were less likely to trust others, and did not plan to continue their education past high school. Another clear difference between the two groups was that the African American adolescents were much more likely to have a local mentor who encouraged their efforts in school, whereas the White adolescents much more often reported that their parents did not support any plans for education beyond high school. The implication, here and in the Peru study, is that having a mentor to rely on for support helps young people remain hopeful and on track with their dreams. 2
Although community well-being is difficult to measure, empirical evidence suggests that individual-level hope has positive spillover effects. When a community has many individuals with high levels of life satisfaction, their satisfaction seems to spill into the community, increasing the well-being of individuals in that community who have low levels of life satisfaction. 14 Hope may spill over into a community and raise its collective well-being in a similar manner. Whether, how, and why this works are matters that can and should be explored in future empirical research. Despair, meanwhile, has negative psychological spillover effects on community well-being.15,16
Other research establishes links between lack of hope and vulnerability to misinformation. Individuals experiencing despair lack a narrative for their future and the wherewithal to pursue purposeful activity; these deficits often coexist with the tendency to believe fake news and conspiracy theories, a correlation that is supported by recent neurological research.17,18
Promoting Hope: Lessons & Policies
In light of the growing body of evidence that hopelessness harms society in many measurable ways—constraining educational attainment and healthy habits among young people; driving addiction, suicide, and other deaths of despair; and impairing voters’ ability to discern truth—it would behoove community and political leaders to take steps to cultivate hope. As I noted in a 2021 Brookings report,
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an important first step would be to regularly track aspects of well-being in official government statistics just as countries such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada do.
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The United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics pioneered the regular inclusion of well-being metrics in its annual statistics, using the ONS 4. This is a set of four questions that capture distinct dimensions of well-being: two cognitive evaluations (one for life satisfaction and one for meaning and purpose in life) and two daily experience, or affect, measures (one that asks about yesterday’s level of happiness and one that asks about yesterday’s level of anxiousness). Responses to all four are made on a 0 to 10 scale, with 0 being the lowest score and 10 the highest. The United Kingdom is in the process of expanding its battery of well-being questions with several new ones intended to capture satisfaction with specific life domains, such as work and health, as well as a question related to hope. These are still in the testing phase but should be incorporated into the next round of the country’s Annual Population Survey.
If the United States had a standard indicator of well-being that could be tracked across populations and places over time, not unlike how the gross national product serves as an indicator of a country’s fiscal well-being, changes in that indicator could serve to alert policymakers that a population’s well-being was declining so they could intervene before a full-blown crisis arose. Life satisfaction is the most used metric of well-being and an obvious first measure to track. Yet adding a hope metric (as the United Kingdom has decided to do) would further enhance understanding of a critical dimension of the public’s well-being and provide a basis for directing interventions.
Federal agencies also can provide more support for hope cultivation efforts at the local and community levels. In my 2021 Brookings report, 19 I recommended creating a federal task force for combating despair that would serve primarily as an information clearinghouse to inform local practitioners about interventions from around the country that succeeded in reducing deaths of despair, keeping adolescents on track in school, and addressing other aspects of hopelessness. Such a task force could provide small grants for logistical support in low-resource settings. Here, too, the United Kingdom offers a useful model. The What Works Centre for Wellbeing was set up at the same time that the ONS 4 was rolled out. The center, funded by both government and private grants, collects reports of experiences with a variety of evidence-based interventions that have proven helpful at fighting despair. These interventions have applied a variety of strategies to counteract despair, such as promoting self-esteem and ways to engage in the community to reduce loneliness; enhancing autonomy and respect among workers to improve workplace satisfaction; and introducing soft skills such as stress reduction, relationship skills, and healthy diet and exercise habits into middle and high school curricula to promote self-esteem and resilience. Efforts like these are most likely to succeed when they include local input and participation, but they also benefit from external logistical advice and support. In the United States, a 10-year-old nonprofit called Results for America plays a somewhat similar role, providing guidance and grants supporting myriad local efforts to optimize opportunities and well-being around the country but without the benefit of government well-being data.
Research on well-being suggests that one straightforward way to cultivate hope in those who lack it is to provide opportunities for volunteering, engaging in the arts, or enjoying nature. Activities like these encourage isolated people, especially older ones, to leave their homes and actively engage with and contribute to their communities. For children and adolescents, teaching coping and resilience tools in school has been shown to have a lasting positive effect on academic performance and well-being scores. For example, students in the Greater Manchester area of England who participated in the #BeeWell program, which teaches soft skills to promote personal responsibility and resilience, continued to show improvements three years after participating. The program was complemented by neighborhood-based support groups. 20
The value of local support, in the form of family or community-based mentors, was also a key takeaway from surveys my collaborators and I conducted to measure hopefulness among low-income adolescents in Peru and St. Louis. 13 Such support is particularly important in underserved areas, where access to mental health care is limited. (For an example of an organization offering such support, read about the Visible Hands Collaborative at https://visiblehandscollaborative.org.)
For a summary of recommendations, see the sidebar Who Should Do What.
To spread hope in the United States and elsewhere, scholars must learn more about the factors that underpin well-being and develop interventions that communities and political leaders can apply to nurture hope’s growth where it is lacking and support it where it exists. Policies based on the scientific study of hope could be critical to sparing future generations from lives of despair.
Key Points
Hope is an aspect of well-being that is increasingly recognized by economists and other social scientists as having important effects on health, employment, productivity, and longevity.
Like other dimensions of subjective well-being, hope can be measured with survey instruments that are validated by biological and psychological markers. Hope is distinct from happiness and other dimensions of well-being in that it entails a sense of agency in finding a positive pathway forward.
The United States is in the grip of a hopelessness crisis. This crisis is most clearly reflected by the rising numbers of deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, alcohol-related illness) but also by labor force drop-out, dismal academic achievement, and increases in political polarization and beliefs in conspiracy theories.
Research suggests that hope can be bolstered with interventions and policies aimed at improving resilience among adolescents, reducing isolation among older people, and directing resources to communities in despair. Successful interventions typically involve community leaders creating opportunities for community members to participate in the arts, volunteer, or engage in school-based group activities. Yet more work is needed both in measuring hope and in determining the best ways to promote hope in a given context. (See the Who Should Do What sidebar for detailed policy recommendations.)
Who Should Do What
Following are steps that federal policymakers can take to better understand the scope of despair in the United States and identify programs that can address it:
Create a federal task force that coordinates efforts to combat despair around the country. It could also serve as an information clearinghouse where people launching new local initiatives can get information about successful strategies and tools, and it could provide logistical assistance and seed grants.
Track and measure hope and despair along with other well-being statistics with instruments such as those used by the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics. When surveys are consistent across countries, learning and the generation of an international well-being monitor are facilitated.
Invest in research that aims to better understand, measure, and facilitate hope, and coordinate with other funders of such research. Programs that rely on a range of public and nongovernmental sources are typically more cost-effective and productive than those funded solely by government grants.
Although government officials are probably best positioned to measure and track national data on hope and despair, they should make use of the expertise of scholars, statisticians, and others who can advise on survey design and other measurement questions and identify successful community experiences that can be replicated.
Following are steps that community leaders can take to promote and cultivate hope:
To help children and adolescents, school leaders, civic organizations, and local policymakers can expand efforts to teach self-esteem, resilience, and coping skills in school and community programs, as the United Kingdom’s #BeeWell program does. Media literacy programs can be instituted to teach young people how to identify and reject misinformation.
To help young adults, local governments and civic groups can invest in mentoring programs and expand access to mental health care and to skills training for the jobs of the future.
To help older and isolated adults, local governments and civic organizations can implement programs that promote community involvement, such as volunteering, access to the arts, and walks in nature, as the What Works Centre for Wellbeing does in the United Kingdom.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.