People in rich countries are unhappy. In the US they're truly miserable. Sentiment fell more in the US since 2019 than any other country. US sentiment at the 0th percentile of pre-COVID history, others generally around 25th percentile. And our economy doing better than most!

I would love it if some economists wrote a clear general-audience-accessible piece on how to think about 2pp (or growth) in units and abstractions, or even one just specifically aimed at AI researchers and computer scientists. I don't just mean something like "here is the long-run trend in GDP and the trend in child mortality and they correlate" or something one would see at a progress conference. That is good but not enough. What I mean is something that will help to deeply calibrate a sophisticated (quantitative yet non-economist) reasoner on why 2pp matters. In my experience as one of the extremely few computer scientists working on the economics of frontier AI, most computer scientists (who generally have no economic training) do not think 2pp over the next decade can coincide with much progress in society/improved welfare. Not to be unkind to my fellow computer scientists, but I honestly think the first-order reason is 2 is a small number, fairly close to 0. So if one believes that AI will improve society dramatically, then that suggests they need to reject "2pp" and, often, to throw out trust in economists with it altogether (baby with the bathwater). But I think a lot could be fixed if economists can help reconcile "2pp" and with "materially better". (And maybe this already exists and I am unaware.)