Carol Graham: the power of hope, 200 pages. Princeton University Press, 2023. $ 30.00

Over the past decades, two significant developments, suggesting that Western societies are grappling with profound pressures, have emerged.First, the so-called "deaths of despair" -deaths caused by suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol abuse -have risen dramatically in the United States.In 2023, more than 200,000 people died from these causes in the U.S., about three times as many as twenty years earlier.While such deaths of despair were initially particularly prevalent among middle-aged White Americans without a college degree, they have also recently spread to other demographic groups.Second, right-wing populism has gained strength in both the U.S. and Europe, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the rise of populist parties such as the AfD in Germany and the Rassemblement National in France.These developments reflect a deep personal discontent many people in these countries are experiencing.Of course, there was no dearth of crises in the last two decades.The global financial crises of 2007/2008, the European sovereign debt crisis after 2010, the Covid pandemic as well as high energy costs and inflation following the Russian invasion of Ukraine all posed or still pose economic challenges.Yet, economic factors cannot easily explain the aforementioned adverse developments on their own.The actual economic situation is objectively not as bad as widely perceived.Unemployment rates in the U.S. and the EU remain on historically low levels, whilst real GDP per capita is higher than ever in these regions.To understand the divergence between individual well-being and economic progress, one has to look "beyond GDP." Correspondingly, a new field of research has emerged that aims at complementing economic indicators with other measures of well-being.Interdisciplinary research has shown that measures of subjective wellbeing, such as life satisfaction or emotional experiences, can be reliably measured and contain economically meaningful information.Subjective well-being is now reg