To Chairman Himes and Members of the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity & Fairness in Growth:

I thank you for the opportunity to testify today on how our social crisis of despair affects the sustainability and equity of our economic growth in general and the ongoing economic recovery from COVID-19 specifically.

My name is Carol Graham, and I am a long time Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a professor at the University of Maryland, and a Senior Scientist at Gallup. Almost two decades ago, I helped pioneer the inclusion of well-being metrics in economic analysis as a method to measure the non-income dimensions of human welfare. The approach has gone from the fringes of economics in the early 2000’s to the mainstream today; it is used by governments around the world in statistics collection and in policy design and evaluation; and most recently has proven a critical tool for in assessments of the welfare and mental health effects of the COVID pandemic.

As a result, the approach has gradually found its way into many U.S. surveys, such as the Fed Shed, CDC and HHS, and the Census Pulse, among others. Well prior to COVID, the stark patterns of ill-being in these data—which my research finds match robustly with the trends in deaths of despair and the exacerbation of the trends in 2020—highlight the urgent need to address our crisis of despair as part and parcel of our economic recovery efforts. We cannot have a sustainable or equitable recovery and future growth process with significant proportions of our prime-aged population out of the labor force due to despair—and the damage these trends have had on already disadvantaged and declining communities.

Read the full article about despair and economic recovery by Carol Graham at Brookings.