(DailyVantage.com) – An overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe their children will have better lives than they’ve had, according to a new poll, which also showed few Americans consider themselves very happy.
According to the survey conducted by NORC and The Wall Street Journal in early March — and published on March 24 — a whopping 78 percent of Americans said they were not confident that their children would live better lives than they had. That number is up 11 percent from 2019, when 67 percent of Americans said the same, and is the highest since the question started to be asked in 1990.
The last time that the majority of Americans felt confident their children would live better lives than them was in 2001, when just 42 percent expressed pessimism about the quality of life for future generations.
The recent poll also showed that 44 percent of Americans are in a worse financial position than they expected to be. 39 percent said they were where they expected, while 17 percent said their finances were in a better position than expected.
As for happiness, the number of Americans who said they were “very happy,” in 2023 plummeted by nearly 7.5 percent since 2021 and more than 19.5 percent since 2018. Just 12 percent of those polled in 2023 said they were very happy — the lowest since polling started in 1972. 30 percent said they were not very happy — the highest on record — while 56 percent said they were “pretty happy.”
On the state of the US economy, 80 percent of Americans said the economy was in a poor position — up 23 percent since 2021. The majority of the polling took place before the back-to-back March collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, which sparked further concerns of an imminent recession.
A separate poll published by CBS News and YouGov on March 23 found that 36 percent of Americans were expecting a recession in the near future, with just 7 percent believing that the US economy was in a very good state.
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