While college education is expensive and not always the solution, the labor force of the future will increasingly require socio-emotional and cognitive skills that are not usually acquired in high school. Young adults entering the labor market face new and unknown challenges. If these trends remain unaddressed, we are likely to see another generation in despair. The Peruvian adolescents, like the minorities in Missouri, tend to have very high education aspirations and report support from their families or communities. In addition, they tend to have a mentor or family member who supports those aspirations, in contrast to the white youth. In contrast, even though more materially deprived, low-income Black adolescents are much more likely to trust others and to aspire to some form of higher education. The least optimistic adolescents are low-income whites, who have no aspirations for education beyond high school. Louis, Missouri, I found the same differences in hope that we see across cultures and races more generally. In surveys of low-income adolescents in Lima, Peru and St. Hope also has racial and cultural determinants and can be influenced by the community in which people live. There are, however, some examples from wellbeing science that can serve as a starting point. Like many personality traits, hope is malleable much later in life than is IQ, which does not change much after the twenties, providing us with opportunities to increase it but not with lessons for doing so. Hope, like IQ, has genetic properties but is also influenced by the environment that people live in. In my new book, The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair (Princeton University Press, 2023), I explore what we know and do not know about hope and how it can be used to help solve this crisis. Hope, while in the title of many books and in countless poems and conversations, is an understudied concept in the social sciences. Psychiatrists often note that restoring hope is a first step to recovering from mental illness, but there is no guidepost for doing so. Suicides increased significantly among younger minorities in 2021, meanwhile, after a two-year decline, while they continued to decline (from higher rates) among whites and older people. My Brookings Institution research, as well as that of many others, has found a steady increase in depression and anxiety among the young, also beginning in 2011. A recent CDC study, for example, found a major rise in sadness and vulnerability to suicide, with 57% of girls reporting sadness in the previous two weeks, a four-fold increase since 2011. Sadly, the young, who seem to have suffered disproportionately from the uncertainty and distress that COVID and many other trends, such as unpredictable labor markets and rising inequality, are also newly represented in these deaths in the past few years. Individuals in despair- defined as having no hope and being ambivalent about life versus death- are prone to believe fake news and related conspiracy theories. Despair is not only linked with premature mortality, but with the vulnerability to misinformation that is plaguing our society, our health systems, and our democracy. Mental health problems are on the rise and deaths from self-inflicted causes such as suicide and drug overdose- deaths of despair as defined by Anne Case and Angus Deaton- ( Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century | PNAS ) are at unprecedented levels, with over 100,000 U.S. is experiencing a nationwide crisis of despair. In contrast, people without hope tend to have miserable life outcomes. Hope is distinct from optimism, which is the belief that things will get better, as it is based on individuals believing that they can make things better, and reflects agency. Over time, I have found increasing evidence that the most important dimension of wellbeing to future outcomes is not happiness, although of course it matters, but hope. While at first wellbeing was not considered the domain of economists, it is now a subfield in economics and includes collaboration with scholars in other disciplines, such as psychology, psychiatry, and the biological sciences as well. I have spent much of my career as an economist studying the determinants of happiness in people in different countries and cultures around the world and, in turn, exploring how happiness affects important life outcomes such as work, health, longevity, and social life.
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