Our happiness is slipping. According to Gallup, the U.S. has dropped out of the cohort of 20 happiest countries. What gives? Guest host Matt Levin joins Kimberly Adams to discuss some of the possible economic explanations. Plus, the Joe Biden administration’s efforts to expand women’s health research, and menopause might need more looking into. And, our growing obsession with houseplants.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “What’s the Happiest Country on Earth?” from Gallup
- “The U.S. is falling in global happiness and this time it’s young people’s fault” from Quartz
- “Biden just signed the largest executive order focused on women’s health” from The 19th
- “Bayer to seek approval for menopausal relief drug after third trial win” from Reuters
- “Is menopause getting worse? Scientists say it is.” from The Washington Post
- “Parkinson’s Disease Can Now Be Detected Through the Skin” from The Wall Street Journal
- “Gardening bloomed during the pandemic. Garden centers hope would-be green thumbs stay interested” from The Associated Press
We love to hear from you. Send your questions and comments to makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Make Me Smart March 20, 2024 Transcript
Note: Marketplace podcasts are meant to be heard, with emphasis, tone and audio elements a transcript can’t capture. Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it.
Kimberly Adams
That’s all my trash talking Hello everyone, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense. Kai is out today, so Matt Levin is here with me. Hey Matt.
Matt Levin
Hey, Kimberly. Good to be here. Thanks you all for joining us this Wednesday, March 20.
Kimberly Adams
Yes, today we are going to do some news and some smiles., Get you in and out of here with the best conversation you will have heard on a Wednesday. So, what you got Matt?
Matt Levin
That is a high promise to our listeners, Kimberly.
Kimberly Adams
I believe in you, Matt. I believe in you.
Matt Levin
It’s a lot of pressure. Okay, you know, I like to start off my news fixes with an annoyingly personal question. You’re ready for this, Kimberly?
Kimberly Adams
Go for it.
Matt Levin
Alright, scale of one to 10, how happy are you, Kimberly?
Kimberly Adams
Today or in general?
Matt Levin
Today. Or let’s put today aside because you got roped into some unexpected work today. So, in general. In general.
Kimberly Adams
I am an extraordinarily fortunate person. I have my health. I have great friends and family. Good job. I’m going to give myself a solid eight. I’m a very fortunate individual. How about you?
Matt Levin
Well, Kimberly. Oh man, that’s far too personal question. I think, I think I’m right there with you. You know, depends on. I’ll tell you what, if I have an edible, I’m a 10 out of 10. But even without, yeah, even without. When I’m with you, an eight out of 10. My news picks. The relevance here. I think we are slightly above average, in terms of the overall happiness of Americans. Gallup put out their global world happiness rankings. This was yesterday, I believe. And for the first time, the US slipped out of the top 20 countries in terms of personal happiness. We are 23rd now, not so great. The Marketplace part of this, which now my brain only thinks in those terms, is this, you know, it’s survey data. They ask people basically a version of the question I asked you, you know, scale of zero to 10 how happy are you with your life. And the data was from, it’s a three-year average of 2021 to 2023. And we are behind the following countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, and Costa Rica. The top is always those Scandinavian countries that are at the top of like, every Quality-of-Life Index ever made. And what stood out to me is our economy over that period, much better than each of those three countries by most measures, right? Our inflation is less bad than what the UK had. Our economic growth was better than those countries. And unemployment for the most part was better here as well. And yet, we do not seem to be as happy as people in those countries. And I know, aren’t you working on a series that touches on this?
Kimberly Adams
I am. I’m looking into sort of how people’s economic beliefs line up with economic realities with the, you know, big caveat that everybody has a different economic reality. But yeah, I’m working on some stories on that as well because it influences a lot of voting behavior, which is why it’s particularly relevant in this election. But I mean, I do think there might be a reason that you and I are kind of outliers in the happiness index cause this is a conversation I have with my best friend quite a bit because I’ve been a journalist since I was 16 years old, which means I am actively on a daily basis, seeking out information much of which is terrible, right? And I have had to over the course of my career, actively consume large volumes of really horrible information with no real option to turn it off. Most people, when the news is depressing, you turn it off, and you do something else, or you walk away, and you do something else. When it’s your job, you have to find a way to compartmentalize that stuff and figure out a way to live your life and not be like, crushed by depression on a regular basis, or you self-medicate, which most of the people in our industry do.
Matt Levin
Thus, the edible comment from earlier in the show, but go ahead.
Kimberly Adams
There we go. Hey, we have cocktails every Friday. But in all seriousness, I think as journalists, you have to kind of develop a coping mechanism to all the bad news and figure out a way to live your life and take what happiness you can. I think what’s happening for everyone else is that the volume of bad news and how much it’s thrown at you because of social media, and all of the different screens we’re staring at all the time, has become overwhelming for people who have not built up a resiliency to it. And so, I do think that we are kind of in this space, where everybody is overwhelmed by all the climate change, the wars, you know, economy and what you choose to believe about it, you know, and what you’re feeling. Because even if the macroeconomic numbers are good, some of the indicators that we kind of feel deeply in our bones still don’t feel very good. Like, can you afford a house? Could you ever retire? You know, and so I think that that factors into it. And I mean, this is what the data was showing. It’s the younger folks who are skewing this data who really don’t feel like there’s hope for the future. And I’m just going to say, you know, you can change the future. Well, some of it. Climate change, some of the effects of climate change is a little bit too late. But we can mitigate things. Let me just stop before I make it worse.
Matt Levin
No, I think there’s definitely something to that. And you mentioned young people driving this, so what was really interesting is that young people in the US ranked sick 62nd out of all countries where they did this survey. And the others super interesting thing about this is when they looked at this data from 2006 to 2008, back when I would qualify as a younger person under 30, people were happier. They were, and I think. I’m of two minds about this. One is like, it’s hard to look at that in and not say, smartphones and exposure to all this information, as you were just laying out. The other part, though, is that it does seem to be kind of a uniquely American, and I guess, North American based on how they do this data, experience where other parts of the world, young people, we haven’t seen a dramatic drop in happiness levels, you know, between over the last decade or so, which it’s, you know, they have smartphones and social media in East Asia. They have smartphones and social media in Sub-Saharan Africa. Right? It’s all over.
Kimberly Adams
Not to the same penetration that we have at here.
Matt Levin
East Asia, though, I mean, Japan.
Kimberly Adams
So, if you’re talking about a country like Japan, yes. Or South Korea. But I mean, I think that they have better social safety nets there than we do.
Matt Levin
Yes, I think that’s a big part of this, too. All right. That’s it for my news fix. What do you got, Kimberly?
Kimberly Adams
Mine is something that Marissa and Courtney were flagging for me earlier. And there’s so much interesting research about, you know, sort of changing opinions and new research when it comes to women and women’s health. Like it’s been all over social media that they are like, just now starting to test period products with actual blood instead of other fluids, which apparently, forever research has been terrible in that regard. And that’s why tampons and maxi pads had been terrible for decades because they weren’t actually using blood to test them. But all of this builds up to the fact that on Monday, President Biden signed an executive order with this comprehensive set of actions to improve and expand research on women’s health. I’m going to read here from The 19th news. They “announced more than 20 new actions and commitments by a wide range of federal agencies for research on issues that emerge across a woman’s lifespan, from maternal health outcomes and mental health challenges to autoimmune diseases and menopause. Scrolling down. “The announcement contains four major components: prioritizing women’s health research and research innovation; strengthening research and data standards related to women’s health; galvanizing new research on women’s midlife health, with a focus on conditions that occur after menopause like heart attacks, Alzheimer’s disease and osteoporosis; and an assessment from the Office of Management and Budget to better understand the unmet funding needs when it comes to women’s health research.” And I think that we’re already starting to see changing conversations around menopause, for example, and a lot more emphasis and investment on treatments for some of the symptoms associated with menopause. Like I just saw the story in Reuters, about Bayer slash buyer, whatever you want to call it, that it’s requesting, the pharmaceutical companies requesting regulatory approval for a menopause drug quote after the daily pill was shown to ease hot flashes in a third late-stage trial providing some relief for the pharmaceuticals unit. But this is something that has been you know, kind of a famously unavoidable symptom of menopause that women really suffer with these hot flashes and other symptoms. And so, in this article, it says: “In the race for non-hormonal menopausal symptoms relief drugs, Bayer is behind Japan’s Astellas, which last year won US and European approval for similar treatment.” And there is Acer Therapeutics, had one but it’s not doing so well in the trials. There was an injection that I saw a university in Florida is working on something. And there’s also new research coming out of Europe, showing that there may actually be some evidence that menopause has been getting worse over the generations for women. It’s not clear yet.
Matt Levin
Yeah, this is super interesting.
Kimberly Adams
Right. So that previous generations of women reported fewer hot flashes and newer generations of women entering menopause. Now why that is? Is it environmental conditions? Is it what we’re eating? Is it all the hormones in our food? It could also be because we are more willing to talk about it and treat it seriously that women are reporting it more. Who knows. So, there’s a lot of interesting research here. There’s a lot of money going into this industry now because as women age with a bit more agency and a lot more money than previous generations of women, they’re like, we’re not going to take it. We want treatment. So, I think it’s interesting.
Matt Levin
Do you with your knowledge of how DC works. Let’s say, Trump is the next president. Is this one of the executive orders you think he rolls back?
Kimberly Adams
Let me think about that for a second. No. No, I think it’ll be just like, it’d be a lower priority thing. There’s doesn’t seem to be much in there on abortion. And that would be the thing that would flag it for rollback. But I need to read a little bit more into the executive order, but I doubt it. At least it wouldn’t be top priority.
Matt Levin
Yeah, I would tend to agree with that, too.
Kimberly Adams
Yeah.
Matt Levin
All right. Time for happier topics.
Kimberly Adams
Ready to move onto smiles. Yes. Yours is health related. Why don’t you go first. You would just talking about health things.
Matt Levin
Yeah, little natural segue there. Okay. There is a new skin biopsy test for Parkinson’s disease. So, with Parkinson’s, conventionally you could pretty much only diagnose it with the presentation of symptoms. And I actually, you know, I’ve had relatives who have, you know, obviously, the classic symptom is that, you know, shaking. And I’ve had relatives who have gone to neurologists, and you know, they basically asked them a series of questions and like, ask them to take a walk and watch how they walk. But there wasn’t any, like specific medical diagnostic that they did to determine whether they had Parkinson’s or not, which kind of, I didn’t know this until I had a couple of relatives actually experienced this. But that may be changing. There is a skin biopsy that you can take around the ankle, knee, and shoulder that would detect a protein that’s associated with Parkinson’s disease. This is a good thing. It’s a good thing. You might be able to detect Parkinson’s earlier, which, you know. There’s no cure for Parkinson’s yet, but the earlier you catch it, the better the therapeutics actually work. So, there’s a story about this in the Wall Street Journal, which we’ll link to in the show notes.
Kimberly Adams
That’s great news. Love medical advancements that can help people live better. You know, as terrifying as a lot of this AI stuff is, I’m really excited at all of the medical advancements that seem to be coming down the pipeline with this additional computing power. And that is exciting to me. So, also exciting to me is that in my patio garden, my little sprouts are starting to come up. And I am, I overdid it last year when it came to my garden. I planted way too many things, and I could not maintain them all. And it got too hot. And it was too much. I enjoy gardening. I like my fruits and vegetables and herbs and all my plants. So, this year, instead of planting like 68 different varieties of things in my little container garden, I only planted like 40 something. So, I scaled a bit. But my sprouts are starting to come up, and my bok choy is coming up. I’ve got a couple little carrot, sprouts. My swiss chard lasted from last year, like it hung on, and so it’s going coming back. My peas are coming up. This all makes me happy. It makes me smile. Good luck to all the gardeners out there. I believe in you; we can do it. But this made me notice this article in the AP today about garden centers trying to convince all these people who started gardening during the pandemic to keep gardening. And you know, every all these people became like plant parents and spending all this money on indoor and outdoor plants during the lockdown for the people who were able to stay at home. And so, now that people can do other things, these garden centers are very concerned. So, I’m reading here it says: “The spring season is crucial, because garden centers can make about 60% of sales during the 12 weeks of spring. That’s particularly true for centers in the North since there are fewer months to plant.” And so, “to regain sales momentum, garden centers must navigate a number of challenges as another spring season kicks in. Chief among them are volatile weather and higher costs for labor and plant materials, which in turn has forced the companies to raise the prices for consumers. One positive development: Younger households, particularly the 18-34-year-old-age group and the 35-44 year old age group, have seen larger increases in spending than older households.” Therefore, basically, that means we’re going to be continuing to buy more plants because plants make people happy.
Matt Levin
And maybe a cure there for the happiness malaise that we were talking about earlier for younger folks. You just need more plants.
Kimberly Adams
You just need more plants. Exactly. Peak millennial, buy another plant.
Matt Levin
I have one quick question for you, Kimberly.
Yeah. When you and Sabri, probably the most famous green thumb amongst the Marketplace reporters, yourself notwithstanding. When you get together, do you guys just talk plants? Like 90% of the time?
Kimberly Adams
We talk quite a bit about plants, but Sabri does like indoor tropical, very like, you have to be super careful and give them special water and special light and special humidity plants. My plant strategy is like, if you survive, you can continue to grow and maybe be planted again in the future. If not, tough luck. It’s survival of the fittest indoors and outdoors. Like there’s a reason I don’t grow spinach. Why? Because spinach never is happy with me. I grow chigi maasai instead because it’s a plant that seems to like my patio. Done. I’ve tried to grow ferns in my house multiple times like, and they just always die. Fine. Screw the ferns. I have different bala, dumb canes. They’re very happy. I’m happy with them. We get along great. The end. It’s not that deep. I’m not spending a lot of money on plants. Although apparently I’m like one of the de-facto plant people in my building, so people will just like leave abandoned plants outside my door.
Matt Levin
Oh wow.
Kimberly Adams
I’ll come home, and there’s like a spider plant just hanging out and I’m like, “Oh okay, here we go.” We’ll see if it lives.
Matt Levin
It’s a powerful position.
Kimberly Adams
I guess. Anyway, I would love to hear from everybody about your plant scapes, and how your gardens are going if you have one, indoors or out. And also, what people’s plant strategies are. Are you a Sabra gardener or a survival of the fittest Kimberly gardener? You can let us know your thoughts on that because that is it for us today. Kai and I are going to be back tomorrow, so until then you can send your thoughts, questions, comments, also any audio you think we should talk about to makemesmart@marketplace.org. Or you can leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program was engineered by Charlton Thorp, and Thalia Menchaca is our intern.
Matt Levin
Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.
Kimberly Adams
Look at you getting the timing down.
Matt Levin
Oh, thank you. It was totally by accident.
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