In my opinion, this is a graph of the downfall of journalism rather than some larger indicator of the attitudes of Americans. Journalism now is primarily ragebait and self-gratifying garbage.
I can think of a few reasons for this besides the reason that life has genuinely become worse:<p>1. Profit-seeking news orgs: it's no secret that negative and controversial news sells significantly more. With all the destruction of locally run papers in favor of the national consolidation of news by a lot of private equity investors, there are increased expectations to make a profit and therefore increase the amount of negative-sentiment news over the recent years.<p>2. 24-7 news cycle: people are also much more aware of all the bad news around them with smartphones and social networks. Readers' sentiment will just bleed into the papers over time. Ignorance is bliss.<p>3. Sampling bias: which kind of papers did they measure sentiment for back then versus now? There could be a divergence in the sources they use and different sources could have different sentiment tendencies. (I don't have access to the actual paper)<p>4. Rising expectations: humans are many orders of magnitude more powerful than our ancestors. We live like gods compared to them. Yet there are so many people who still aren't happy. Why? It's because our expectations also rise endlessly. Things may be better than before, but maybe <i>it's not better relative to our expectations</i>.<p>Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse. There could be other plausible explanations.
This is more about economic news specifically (well, it is an NBER paper being reported in the FT after all) but is quite interesting.<p>Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling. Does that mean things <i>aren’t</i> getting better or does it mean expectations are rising? Only the second of those two is brought up in this brief article.
This seems to map pretty well to that famous graph showing the divergence between productivity and wage gains [1]. It also at least correlates with the start of a relative predominance of China and other third-world countries in economic growth, which kept wage growth lower in the West than it could have been - empowered, of course, by the policies of people like Reagan and Thatcher.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate/" rel="nofollow">https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...</a>
Financial sentiment has collapsed over the last 50 years? No shit...<p>Real wages have stagnated or declined. Barriers to entry for good careers have increases. Entire industries have been outsourced, mainly effecting lower skilled workers. Workforce participation is extremely low. Multiple financial crises. A system built on consumerism that is dependent on almost free money not to crumble.<p>If the system doesn't look like a house of cards, then I don't know what does...
Did it take into account the feedback loop of journalism and sentiment? Recent example: the TV show that finally compelled action in the British Post Office scandal by increasing awareness and altering sentiment?
I can't access the NBER paper so I can't see the methodology - how did they choose which papers to include? I'm always wary of studies that tout the size of their data set. Did they dedupe wire stories? Control for which newspapers were included? I feel like more often than not, it turns out these effects are mostly due to mix shift / selection bias / other methodological artifacts.