“The juvenile sea squirt,” writes philosopher Daniel Dennett, “wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life… When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it!” “It’s rather like getting tenure,” Dennett adds unkindly. The older sea squirt (or academic) may enjoy a form of mindless happiness, but it is the younger one, adrift and seeking a secure future, who needs hope.
In her new book, The Power of Hope, Carol Graham, a noted economist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that hope is a dimension of wellbeing that is too often neglected. The economics of wellbeing — a growing specialisation that aims to expand the scope of the discipline and make its science less dismal — usually examines feelings of life satisfaction or levels of positive and negative emotion. But whereas both those metrics evaluate past happiness from the standpoint of the present, hope looks forward. For Graham, believing we can realise a better future is crucial to thriving.
Hope is a staple of American political rhetoric and has been a reliable feature of its presidential campaigns. It runs from Jesse Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive” to Bill Clinton’s The Man from Hope biopic, from George W. Bush’s “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America,” through Obama’s The Audacity of Hope and iconic campaign poster, Bernie Sanders’s “A Future to Believe In” and Joe Biden’s “Our Best Days Still Lie Ahead.” As optimistic slogans go, these examples certainly outshine “Make Your Wet Dreams Come True” (a reference to ending Prohibition) from Al Smith’s 1928 run.
Campaigners everywhere are selling a future, of course, but the prominence of the American hope trope can be striking to foreigners. In recent times it is almost as if hope is proclaimed so loudly precisely because the need to restore it seems so desperate.
Graham wouldn’t disagree with that. “Deaths of despair” in the United States — suicides, overdoses, alcohol poisonings — have risen to astonishing levels and life expectancy is tracking backwards, unlike in any other rich country: American exceptionalism in reverse. To Graham, these grim trends reflect a growing wellbeing inequality that is every bit as troubling and socially toxic as more familiar inequalities of income and wealth.
Loss of hope is regionalised and racialised, disproportionately affecting the white working class in the heartland, fuelling disengagement from work and education, and promoting political radicalisation and resentment of coastal elites. Restoring hope is urgent not only to stem general misery and the opioid epidemic, but also to overcome threats to civil society, national security and liberal democracy itself.
The Power of Hope reviews some of the accumulating evidence on the economics of happiness and despair, and presents two new research studies in separate chapters. These studies exemplify Graham’s focus on the racial and cross-national dimensions of hope, and her interest in the fate of young people who, like larval sea squirts, must navigate the currents of life in search of a solid footing.
The first follows late adolescents from a poor district in Lima over a three-year period, assessing their aspirations for education, occupation and migration. These aspirations are strikingly high and stable over time, and they predict what Graham calls “human capital outcomes.” Higher educational aspirations at eighteen, for example, were associated with greater educational involvement and less risk-taking at twenty-one.
The second study was intended to replicate the first with adolescents in St Louis, Missouri, but was disrupted by Covid. Graham finds a stark racial difference: white participants had lower and less parentally supported educational aspirations and less social trust than their African-American peers, despite being materially better off. These findings chime with other research Graham reviews on the greater resilience of African Americans, who are buffered by “communities of empathy” more than low-income Whites, who retain a culture of “stubborn individualism” but have lost the belief that hard work pays off. Unfortunately, the study’s tiny sample of thirty-two provides a flimsy platform for generalisations and makes it a questionable inclusion in the book, although vignette descriptions of individual participants help to personalise the findings.
Before and after these empirical studies, Graham makes a compelling theoretical case for why economists and psychologists should view hope as a unique explanatory factor rather than submerge it within other concepts of wellbeing. Its definition, and how it differs from optimism, aspirations and goals, is left somewhat open, but Graham presents it as a combination of positive expectations for the future and a sense of personal agency in bringing them about.
It is entirely credible that a specific lack of hope in this sense, more than present-focused unhappiness, should undermine motivation to act and emotional investment in the future. It has been well established in clinical psychology that hopelessness is more strongly associated with suicide than is depression, for example.
Despite hope’s plausibility as a driver of positive life outcomes and resilience, though, the evidence mustered by Graham’s studies falls short of demonstrating that it plays a causal role. Having high aspirations may be associated with doing better in life, but other factors, such as realistic assessment of one’s prospects, may give rise to both hope and positive life outcomes without the former influencing the latter. It is important to remember cautionary tales of oversold psychological concepts like self-esteem, which was once seen by advocates as a panacea for all manner of social and psychological pathologies and later shown to be primarily an effect rather than a cause of doing well in life.
A similar point can be made about proposed interventions to restore hope. Graham reviews a range of options, including community-based wellbeing initiatives, scaled-up mental health programs and private–public partnerships. But none of these directly target hope — many focus on building social connection and belonging rather than cultivating optimism — and there are few grounds to infer that a revival of hope is the main active ingredient in any benefits they may have.
Graham makes a strong theoretical case that hope matters and a strong methodological case that it should be measured, but current evidence is yet to justify any claim that hope is the key to unlocking social misery. Hope remains a promissory concept. This is not to criticise Graham’s championing of hope but simply to recognise the need for more definitive research. I suspect researchers who take up that challenge are backing a winner.
Although the book is generally accessible and engagingly written, it has a few imperfections. Statistical jargon (“endogeneity,” “fixed effects”) creeps in occasionally and tables of regression coefficients will glaze many readers’ eyes. Some points become repetitive, and it was an editorial oversight to allow four paragraphs to be repeated with minimal alteration in consecutive chapters.
Even so, The Power of Hope delivers its hopeful message with the passion and gravity the topic deserves. The book will interest academic readers from across the behavioural and social sciences, and anyone curious about the wider social and political relevance of the science of wellbeing. •
The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair
By Carol Graham | Princeton University Press | US$35 | 200 pages
