Udall Foundation Reauthorization Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, we have had a lot of good news in the last several months, over the last year. Unemployment remains at its lowest level ever. For the last 2 years, the unemployment rate has been under 4 percent. That is the longest stretch that we have had less than 4 percent of Americans without a job in 50 years. Inflation has cooled to the lowest level since the start of the pandemic. The U.S. economy is booming. We have seen it grow faster than any other large, advanced economy in the world. Crime is down. We saw a 12-percent reduction in urban gun violence in 2023. That is the biggest reduction in the history of the country in 1 year. That is a lot of good news if you look at the metrics that we normally look to when we assess the quality of our public policy.

But here is some other striking data: In a report released this week, we come to find that despite unemployment going down, despite inflation going down, despite GDP going up, Americans are more unhappy than anytime before. This year in the global happiness rating survey, the United States, for the first time since they started doing this survey, fell out of the top 20. We are now No. 23 in the world.

Even more worrying, amongst young people, the United States ranks 62nd in the world. This is reflected by other surveys that show over the last 10 years the rate of happiness and contentment and fulfillment self-reported by Americans dropped despite the fact that the economy is growing, more people have jobs, and crime is plummeting.

So I am on the floor for just a few minutes to ask this simple question: Should we care about this disconnect between the quality-of- life indicators that we normally look to to assess the measure of our public policy and self-reported rates of happiness? My answer is pretty simple: We should care because we are in the business of happiness.

I know that doesn't sound right, because your happiness comes from your personal decisions, the priorities that guide your day. America isn't--our government isn't in the business of delivering the last mile of happiness, but we absolutely are in the business of delivering the first mile of happiness. Why do we know that? Because that charge, that mission, is in our founding document. The Declaration of Independence says that amongst the inalienable rights enjoyed by all human beings is the right to pursue happiness. So that means that our job, charged to us by our Founders, is to set up rules of the economy, rules of society, rules of culture, that give people the best shot at achieving happiness.

So it is time that we take a big step back as policymakers and ask, if a job or rising GDP or a safe neighborhood isn't bringing people happiness, what does? And all I am suggesting today is that we engage in a conversation together--an apolitical, nonpartisan conversation--to try to discover the roots of American unhappiness, because it doesn't appear that just dialing the knobs of public policy to the right, as happened under Trump's Presidency, or to the left, under Biden's Presidency, is changing this long-term dynamic of more Americans reporting being unsatisfied with their lives.

Let me just tease this conversation with two routes to happiness that we don't talk enough about. The first is connection. In fact, if you look at longitudinal surveys of Americans' happiness, there is a seminal study done by Harvard where they study, over the course of 75 years, Americans of every income bracket, of every race and ask them questions every year: Are you happy, and, if so, why are you happy?

What they found and what many other surveys found is that it is not a job or career or how much money you make but your relationships--your connections to other human beings--that actually is most indicative, most predictive of whether you will report being happy and fulfilled in your life. And so it shouldn't be surprising or shocking to us that during a moment where more Americans are reporting feeling deeply lonely, we are also seeing more people reporting being unhappy.

There has been a sea change in this country, over the last 20 years, when it comes to the amount of time that we spend with other human beings, and the data is particularly acute for young people, but it is true of adults as well. We spend nearly half as much time today with other human beings in personal connection than we did just 30 years ago. That is a catastrophic decline in socialization.

There are lots of reasons for that, but many of them are connected to public policy choices that we have made. We decided not to regulate this transformative new technology called smartphones, nor the apps that dominate those smartphones, social media. That technology has facilitated this withdrawal from socialization, from connection, from conversation.

We haven't meaningfully adjusted wages in this country. So people are being forced to work 70 hours now to enjoy the same quality of life that 40 hours of work would have 40 years ago. What does that mean? People are robbed of leisure time. So they can't connect with friends and neighbors through socialization in the evenings or on the weekends.

We have undermined the places where people often find connection, like downtowns, which are less healthy, less vibrant than ever before, as we created an economy where everybody just buys stuff from a set of big monopolistic, internationalized companies.

And so what we know is that feeling connected to other human beings, having strong relationships, is maybe most predictive of whether or not you are going to be happy, but we make public policy choices consistently to make connections harder, not easier. But we don't measure it. We don't measure it. Instead, we just measure things like unemployment and GDP, which are important, but not most predictive of whether people are going to be happy.

Let me give you a second way that people find a route to happiness, and that is living a life of purpose--knowing what your role is in the world and living a life that fulfills that role.

Well, let's be honest. Many of the ways in which people found purpose 50 years ago are not available to them today. One purpose, for instance, was passing along a better life to your kids, making sacrifices as an adult--tough, difficult sacrifices--but knowing that those sacrifices were going to allow for your child to be better off than you. Well, that purpose feels further away than ever before today because we have made it so hard for parents to be able to pass on that better life.

College is 400 percent less affordable today than it was in 1980. Economic mobility is more difficult than before, in part because we favor legacy admissions in colleges, in part because we allow for so much massive transfer of inherited wealth. Economic mobility is further away.

So we have robbed from individuals that sense of meaning and purpose, passing along a better life to your children. Other people found purpose in serving God, living a life in accordance with religious tradition, securing a place in the afterlife. But in a very short period of time, we went from 70 percent of people belonging to church to 50 percent of people belonging to church.

Now, I don't think there is a government solution to reverse that trend, but we need to admit that it is another example of how very quickly people have become unmoored from a place where they previously found all sorts of purpose and meaning. And if we are not talking about trying to create alternative places where people can find that purpose or, perhaps, working together to find a way to make those institutions, like churches, healthier places, then we are not connecting in to the roadways, to the pathways to happiness, connection, meaning, purpose.

I get it. These are hard topics for policymakers to talk about. They feel more natural for philosophers or academics or theologians. But our Founders told us in the Declaration of Independence that we need to be in the happiness business, and we have made some likely wrong assumptions about what leads people to happiness. We have become such a materialistic world, and we have become such a materially focused institution that we make an incorrect assumption that, by changing the rules of the economy, we are automatically providing people a route to happiness. But it is not always economic change. It is not always economic policy that provides people meaning, provides people purpose, makes people feel happy.

So these are the questions that I think we should be answering. I think it is a really lovely way for us to set aside some of the policy fights that have worn this place out.

What brings meaning? What brings purpose? What makes you feel happy? Ask those questions, and then let's let those answers guide the policies that we can work on together. I frankly think that we would be surprised to find out that inquiry and the policies that inquiry commends us to pursue might not divide us as much as policy arguments that currently dominate this business.

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