Posted on: June 15, 2009

On May 21 in the Op-ed Page of New York Times I read an extremely interesting article by Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard which had the title “What you don’t know makes you nervous”. The article essentially probed the prevailing state of happiness among Americans, particularly as it relates to the current economic downturn. The article mentioned that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up and that they are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes. The author commented, however, that light wallets are not the cause of heavy hearts, because after all most persons in that country have more inflation-adjusted dollars than their grandparents had and that they weren’t living in a state of unrelieved scare presumably as they did during the 2nd World War or even the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. He also noted that middle class Americans still enjoy more luxury than upper-class Americans en...