The decline in wellbeing among young people is an all-too-familiar trend. Less understood is that the situation is significantly worse in the Anglosphere — Britain, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — than in Western Europe. The contrast is documented, chart by chart, in a new report for the Financial Times. Drawing on data from the World Happiness Report, John Burn-Murdoch argues that the “worsening in young adult mental health over the past decade is primarily, if not exclusively, an Anglosphere phenomenon”.

It’s easy to point the finger at screen addiction for this disparity, given the coincidence between the decline in wellbeing and the rise of the smartphone. But if this is the main driver of the historical trend, how does it explain the geographic disparity between the Anglosphere and Western Europe? While a 2024 survey from More in Common does suggest that the Brits and Americans are somewhat more habitual in their screen use than the French or Germans, it’s not as if smartphones aren’t an everyday part of life across the Continent.

As an alternative explanation for the unhappiness of the English-speaking nations, Burn-Murdoch looks at the housing crisis. Across most of the Anglosphere, house prices have surged well ahead of those in Western Europe. This is reflected in home ownership rates, which have fallen much more steeply among young people in those countries. Crucially, there’s been a corresponding collapse in the belief that hard work will be rewarded with success.

So, is this the main reason why the Anglosphere is making its young people miserable? A large hole in that explanation comes from America, by far the biggest Anglosphere nation, which doesn’t fit the housing theory at all. The US has experienced much lower levels of house price inflation than, say, the UK or Canada. What’s more, Burn-Murdoch’s charts show that young Americans have more faith that hard work pays off than young Europeans do. And yet America is typical of the Anglosphere pattern of youthful unhappiness.

Clearly, something else is going on. One factor missing from the FT analysis is the role of family life. As the World Happiness Report notes, “people living alone are much less happy than people who live with others.” It adds: “Trends towards increased loneliness are most evident among young people. In 2023, 19% of young adults across the world reported having no one they could count on for social support, a 39% increase compared to 2006.”

The question, therefore, is whether family support structures are especially weak in the Anglosphere. The World Happiness Report observes that “the increasing number of people who eat alone is one reason for declining wellbeing in the United States”. In 2019, Pew Research found that the US has “the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent homes”. In the UK, the 2022 Family Review from the Children’s Commissioner reported that “44% of children born at the start of the century were not in a nuclear family for their full childhood, compared to 21% of children born in 1970”, and that “the rate of lone-parent households is higher than in [almost] all European countries.”

It’s a testament to the liberal individualism of the Anglosphere that such facts, if acknowledged at all, are presented non-judgementally. That may be kind, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have consequences for happiness.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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