Rekindling Hope With Economic and Social Policies
The Economists Turn To Hope
Across the globe, hope maybe a tricky emotion to summon. After all, we’re inundated with warnings about impending disasters: accelerating climate change, layoffs triggered by AI, new pandemics, nuclear wars. It might feel like a time for the pessimists to chest thump.
Even if optimists or positive thinkers can seem out-of-synch, surely wallowing in the opposite – in numbing despair or cynical withdrawal – can’t be salutary. Not for the planet, and especially not for the people in thrall to such emotions. At such a juncture, it makes sense to push back on the tidal sweep of negative emotions.
Though well-being has typically been the terrain of psychologists or philosophers, fortunately for the planet, a few economists are directing their academic sights toward “hope.” To defining it, measuring it and then recommending policy interventions to tweak it. Carol Graham, who is currently the Interim Vice President and Director of Economic Studies at The Brookings Institution, belongs to this uncommon minority.
About the Author
Graham, born in Peru and raised between two countries, Peru and the United States, always wielded a multicultural outlook on human flourishing. Moreover, her father had founded the Instituto de Investigacion Nutricional, an organization that addressed childhood malnutrition. With poverty and its pernicious spinoffs stitched into family discussions, Graham grew up with an unusual sensitization to the impact of disparate beginnings.
Drawing Well-being Into Economist Discussions
Graham has, even in previous works, been trying to champion the significance of well-being – particularly in the design or rollout of economic policies, into the study of communities, or the shaping of interventions that can result in positive long-term outcomes. After all, she has watched ballooning despair in the United States, reflected across several dimensions: spiking mental health concerns, suicides, alarming levels of substance abuse, and hardening divisions across socioeconomic and political identities.
In her previous book, Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream, Carol showed how income inequality was an inadequate measure. Instead, she pointed to gaps in “hope” – between the rich and poor, between low-income African Americans and low-income whites, between the United States and Latin America. For instance, hope gaps were wider in the U.S. than in countries like Peru, despite similar gaps in affluence.
Dissecting Hope and Why It Matters
Hope is defined differently in economist studies, sifting them specifically from similar forays by psychologists. As Graham puts it (Atlantic, April 2023), “[hope] is the belief that an individual can make things better.” As an emotion or trait, it’s deeper than optimism. The latter might seem blithe and even misplaced, but hope is agentic. It acknowledges the difficulties surrounding one’s personal circumstances, accompanied by a belief that one can overcome them with specific actions. “What we do know is that hope matters to future outcomes,” writes Graham. Its significance matters most to those in disadvantaged communities or groups.
In the past few decades, economists have increasingly paid attention to other positive and overarching emotions like life satisfaction and happiness. The UK has regularly been measuring well-being since 2012. New Zealand incorporates well-being into budgetary allocations. While these feelings and life conditions are linked, they do not capture the sense of human agency embodied in hope. Which, as it turns out, is also a strong predictor of health and longevity.
For instance, in 2019, Graham and another economist, Kelsey O’Connor, analyzed a survey that had been conducted with a cohort born in the 1930s and 40s. The respondents had been questioned in their early adult years – in their 20s and 30s. They had been asked about whether “they thought their lives would work out.”
Those who had answered in the affirmative were more likely to be around in 2015 than others with bleaker responses. Interestingly, in the 1970s, when women and African Americans showed rising levels of optimism, poor whites started displaying declines in that period. This was also driven by the reduction in manufacturing jobs in those decades.
Graham was also involved in a three-year study of adolescents from low-income households in Peru. Those who had been more hopeful about their futures were more likely to have garnered credentials or enrolled themselves in full-time education.
In another study, they found more optimism among low-income African Americans and more despair among low-income whites (Graham and Pinto, 2019). “There is also the question of why there is more hope among poor minorities – who have traditionally faced discrimination and injustice – than among poor whites.”
In a 2002 study, Graham found that some disadvantaged communities in Peru were more hopeful than better-off ones. This led her to coin the phrase, “happy peasants and frustrated achievers” (Graham and Pettinato, 2002).
Paradoxically, people in Latin America have more hope than many in the United States.
Reasons for Rising Despair Among Poor Whites
As an economist, Graham depicts well-being as a spectrum, with hope and despair occupying the extreme ends. Rising despair in the U.S. is confounding to those who assumed that prosperity would inevitably usher happiness: “How and why does the wealthiest country in the world have so much despair? What are we missing?”
Specifically, the decline of the white working class has been fueled by several factors:
– Joblessness
– Drug overdoses
– Poor safety nets
Moreover, people often seem stuck between two worlds: “one in which the old ways that held meaning are disappearing and the other in which the changes needed to succeed seem impossible in the absence of support.”
Despite its Silicon Valley glitz and its techno-muscles, the US is not really forgiving of failure. You lose your job, you lose your health coverage, you’re sunk by a health crisis. Naturally, such hard landings drive feelings of “helplessness” among “[entire] communities.”
But this is the more ‘hopeful’ part of Graham’s postulation: she suggests that hope can be cultivated with community interventions, including for the many at the bottom of the pyramid. Policies have to be reoriented to elevate hope rather than merely focus on economic growth.
Instilling Hope Where It’s Absent
Like other human traits, hope is partially determined by biology. Low-income African Americans show more optimism and resilience than whites. This is partly genetic. They have “higher levels of the functional polymorphism on the serotonin transmitter gene (5-HTTLPR) than whites, Hispanics, or Asians.”
Yet, economists James Heckman and Tim Kantz have demonstrated that socioemotional traits have more malleability over a person’s lifetime, unlike IQ, which more or less gets fixed by the late 20s. Graham writes: “This suggests that one’s level of hope can differ over time.” Some immediate ways to cultivate hope include reducing isolation by engaging in the arts or volunteering.
The low-income adolescents in Peru did not have college-educated parents. But many said that they had a mentor from the community or family who championed their goals. Assigning mentors to other communities where hope might be languishing can help redeem it.
Among low-income African Americans, genes do not completely account for their higher-than-expected cheer. “Baptist churches – which tend to emphasize the collective rather than the individual – are an essential part of many African American communities.”
In the US, some private foundations are funding research on hope and well-being. In addition, the National Endowment for the Arts is studying how the arts can enhance these attributes in various communities.
References
Carol Graham, The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair, Princeton University Press, 2023
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/economics-hope-optimism-despair/673835/