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income inequality
Social Democracies Keep Top Spots on World Happiness Report as US Falls to Record Low
In the U.S., "the downward trend in life satisfaction is particularly steep among young people under 30, especially women."
Mar 21, 2025
For the eighth consecutive year, the World Happiness Report on Thursday found that the countries with the happiest people are those that use their resources to invest in social welfare—and documented a precipitous drop in satisfaction among people in the United States, where President Donald Trump is pushing to destroy public services in the interest of further enriching the country's wealthiest people and corporations.
The top four happiest countries in the world were the same this year as in 2024, with Finland taking the top spot followed by Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden.
The report, compiled by the Wellbeing Research Center at University of Oxford along with Gallup and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, found that the U.S. is continuing to fall down the list—ranking at 24, one spot lower than in 2024. In 2012, when the World Happiness Report was first published, the U.S. held the 11th spot.
The researchers measured several variables that contribute to people's happiness, including social supports, freedom to make life choices, and perceptions of corruption within their country.
Across the world, researchers recorded a drop in "deaths of despair"—preventable deaths from substance use disorders, alcohol abuse, and suicide. But the U.S. was one of two countries—the other being South Korea—where these deaths "rapidly rose," with an average yearly increase of 1.3 deaths per 100,000.
This year's World Happiness Report focuses largely on "the impact of caring and sharing" on people's happiness, noting that the prevalence of volunteering and helping strangers was high in some of the happiest countries, while social isolation in the U.S. was tied to high levels of unhappiness.
"In the United States, using data from the American Time Use Survey, the authors find clear evidence that Americans are spending more and more time dining alone," reads the report's executive summary. "In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day—an increase of 53% since 2003."
But the Costa Rican ambassador to the U.S., Catalina Crespo Sancho, noted at an event hosted by Semafor presenting the annual report, that the way the Costa Rican government invests public funds has helped push it into the top 10 happiest countries for the first time, with Costa Rica ranking sixth in the world.
"We're one of the few countries in the world that does not have an army," said Crespo Sancho. "All that money, they invested in things that our Nordic countries here have been doing for many, many years... Education, social services, health access."
Residents of the happiest countries named in the report benefit from significant public investment in healthcare, education, childcare, and other public services, and live in societies where the divide between the richest households and working people is far smaller than in the United States.
Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and the Netherlands all score below 30 on the World Bank's Gini Index, which measures income inequality, while the U.S. has a score of 41.3, indicating a wider gap between the rich and poor.
The report was released two months into Trump's second term in the White House, which has already been characterized by efforts by Trump and his billionaire ally, tech mogul Elon Musk, to gut public spending on healthcare, education, and the environment in order to fund tax cuts for the richest households. The Republican Party is also aggressively pushing attacks on bodily autonomy in the U.S., passing abortion bans and so-called "fetal personhood" measures as well as laws barring transgender and gender nonconforming people from accessing affirming healthcare.
According to the report, in the U.S., "the downward trend in life satisfaction is particularly steep among young people under 30, especially women."
The report also contextualized the victory of Trump and rise of far-right movements like the president's nationalist, anti-immigration MAGA movement, noting that far-right supporters of "anti-system" political leaders like Trump "have a very low level of social trust."
For the populist right, this low trust is not limited to strangers, but also extends to others in general, from homosexuals to their own neighbors. The xenophobic inclination of the populist right, well-documented worldwide, seems to be a particular case of a broader distrust towards the rest of society. Right-wing populists throughout the world share xenophobic and anti-immigration inclinations. The Sweden Democrats, the Danish People's Party, the Finns Party, the Freedom Party of Austria, Greece's Golden Dawn, the Northern League and Fratelli in Italy, the National Rally in France, and a fraction of the Republican Party in the U.S. are all built on strong anti-immigration foundations.
Meanwhile, "far-left voters have a higher level of social trust," leading them to support "pro-redistribution, pro-immigrant" political groups that offer an alternative to the political establishment with "more universalist values."
In the United States' two-party system, citizens "with low life satisfaction and low social trust" tend to "abstain" from political engagement, according to the report.
"The fall in life satisfaction cannot be explained by economic growth," reads the report. "Rather, it could be blamed on the feelings of financial insecurity and loneliness experienced by Americans and Europeans—two symptoms of a damaged social fabric. It is driven by almost all social categories, but in particular, by the rural, the less-educated, and, quite strikingly, by the younger generation. This low level of life satisfaction is a breeding ground for populism and the lack of social trust is behind the political success of the far right."
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Why Do Wealthy CEOs Love Trump? He’s Distracting From Their Own Grift
Corporate CEO paychecks continuing to go gangbusters while the corporations these execs run are—at best—just treading water.
Mar 20, 2025
Every day’s headlines now seem to bombard us with ever more outrageous Trumpian antics. Who could have possibly imagined, for instance, that a president of the United States would turn the White House lawn into a Tesla auto showroom?
But these antics actually do serve a useful social and political purpose—for President Donald Trump’s fellow deep pockets and the corporations they run. Trump’s kleptocratic arrogance and audacity have shoved the institutionalized thievery of Corporate America’s ever-grasping top execs off into the shadows.
Those shadows could hardly be more welcome. American corporate executive compensation, as the business journal Fortune has just detailed, is now “surging amid a roaring bonus rebound.”
Heads CEOs win, in other words, tails they never lose.
One example: Tyson Foods CEO Donnie King has seen his annual executive rewards leap from $13 million in 2023 to $22.7 million in 2024. To keep King smiling, Tyson’s board of directors has also extended his CEO contract into 2027 and guaranteed him “a post-employment perk that includes 75 hours of personal use of the company jet as long as he sticks around on the board.”
And what in the way of wonders has Tyson’s King been working to earn all this? Not much, concludes a new Compensation Advisory Partners analysis. Anyone who had $100 invested in Tyson shares at the end of fiscal 2019 today holds a nest egg worth just $80.54. Tyson’s most typical workers aren’t doing particularly well either. They took home $43,417 in 2024, 525 times less than the annual compensation that CEO Donnie King pocketed.
Over at Moderna, Big Pharma’s newest big kid on the corporate block, chief exec Stéphane Bancel saw his 2024 annual pay jump 16.4% over his 2023 compensation despite a 53% drop in Moderna’s annual revenue.
Back in 2022, at Covid-19’s height, Bancel personally collected over $392 million exercising stacks of the stock options he had been sitting upon. Between that year’s start and 2024’s close, Moderna shares plummeted from just under $254 each to under $42.
Moderna’s transition to our post-Covid world, the Moderna board acknowledges, has been “more complex than anticipated.” That complexity, the board apparently believes, in no way justifies denying Bancel his rightful place among Big Pharma’s top-earning CEOs. Bancel’s near $20-million 2024 payday is keeping him well within hailing distance of all his Big Pharma peers.
How can corporate CEO paychecks be continuing to go gangbusters while the corporations these execs run are—at best—just treading water? Lauren Peek, a partner at Compensation Advisory Partners and a co-author of the firm’s latest CEO pay analysis, has an explanation.
Corporate board compensation committees, Peek observes, want to keep their top execs adequately incentivized. These board panels simply cannot bear the sight of their CEOs getting down in the dumps. So what do these panels do? They exclude from their final CEO pay decisions any negative economic factors that CEOs can’t directly determine. But these same corporate panels never take into account unexpected positive economic factors that their CEOs had no hand in creating.
Heads CEOs win, in other words, tails they never lose.
Among those winners: Disney chief exec Robert Iger. His 2024 total pay jumped to $41 million, up nearly $10 million from his 2023 compensation. Disney’s total shareholder return, over that same year, didn’t even reach halfway up the total return that Disney’s peer companies recorded.
Disney hardly rates as an outlier among the 50 major publicly traded corporations that the recently released Compensation Advisory Partners report puts under the microscope. The median revenue growth of these 50 firms dropped to 1.6% in 2024, less than half their 2023 rate. Their earnings remained virtually flat as well. But their CEO compensation climbed an average 9%.
“With financial performance largely flat across these early Fortune 500 filers,” notes an HR Grapevine analysis of the Compensation Advisory Partners findings, “board-level decisions to maintain or raise executive bonuses may prompt further scrutiny from investors and stakeholders alike.”
“For ‘shop-floor’ employees,” adds the HR Grapevine, “news of CEO wage hikes despite average financial performances will undoubtedly prompt a good deal of rumination about their own levels of compensation.”
Equilar, an information services firm specializing in corporate pay, has also been busy analyzing the latest trends in CEO remuneration. Equilar’s latest look at corner-office compensation has found that median CEO pay within the corporations that make up the Equilar 500 jumped up from $12 million in 2020 to $16.5 million last year.
CEO-worker pay gaps have increased even more significantly. At the median Equilar 500 corporation, CEOs pocketed 186.5 times the pay of their most typical workers in 2020 and 306 times that pay in 2024. At America’s larger corporations—those companies sitting at the 75th percentile of the Equilar 500—CEOs made 307.5 times their typical worker pay in 2020 and last year collected 527 times more.
A key driver of this ever-widening CEO-worker pay gap? The sinking compensation going to typical corporate workers, as Equilar’s Joyce Chen concluded last week in an analysis for the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. These median workers took home $66,321 in 2020, but just $57,299 last year.
But top execs aren’t just shortchanging workers at pay-time. They’re also pressuring those workers to squeeze and defraud clients and customers at every opportunity, as former Wells Fargo bank manager and investigator Kieran Cuadras has just vividly detailed.
Nearly a decade ago, Cuadras relates, a mammoth phony accounts scandal at Wells Fargo led to fines totaling $20 million against the bank’s then-CEO John Stumpf. But those fines, she points out, hardly made a dent in the estimated $130 million that Stumpf “walked away with in compensation when he resigned.”
Wells Fargo’s current CEO, Charles Scharf, appears to be doing his best to follow in Stumpf’s footsteps. Scharf’s gutted risk and complaint departments are cutting corners “to create the illusion of fewer complaints.” The reality: Those departments are closing complaint cases prematurely. In 2024, these and other sneaky moves helped Scharf pocket a sweet $31.2 million .
Our nation’s political leaders, says Wells Fargo employee and customer advocate Kieran Cuadras, need “to step up and do something about a CEO pay system that rewards executives with obscenely large paychecks for practices that harm workers and the broader economy.”
Where to start that stepping up? Lawmakers ought to be levying new taxes on corporations “with huge gaps between their CEO and worker pay,” Cuadras posits, and increasing an already existing tax on stock buybacks.
Moves like these, she astutely sums up, “would encourage companies to focus on long-term prosperity and stability rather than simply making wealthy executives and shareholders even richer.”
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'National Disgrace': Sanders and Senate Dems Call Out Trump Attack on Education Dept
"Our nation's public schools, colleges, and universities are preparing the next generation of America's leaders—we must take steps to strengthen education in this country, not take a wrecking ball to the agency that exists to do so."
Mar 17, 2025
In a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders led more than three dozen of his Democratic colleagues in dismissing the Trump administration's "false claims of financial savings" from slashing more than 1,000 jobs at the Education Department, emphasizing that the wealthy people leading federal policy "will not be harmed by these egregious attacks" on public schools.
"Wealthy families sending their children to elite, private schools will still be able to get a quality education even if every public school disappears in this country," reads the letter spearheaded by Sanders (I-Vt.), the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. "But for working-class families, high-quality public education is an opportunity they rely on for their children to have a path to do well in life."
The decision by President Donald Trump and his unelected billionaire ally, Elon Musk of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE), to slash the Department of Education (DOE) workforce by 50%—or 1,300 people—and take steps to illegally close the agency has already had an impact on students, noted the senators, pointing to a glitch in the Free Application for Federal Financial Aid (FAFSA) that preventing families from accessing the applications "not even 24 hours after the staff reductions were announced."
"The staff normally responsible for fixing those errors had reportedly been cut," reads the letter, which was also signed by lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
"Without the Department of Education, there is no guarantee that states would uphold students' civil and educational rights."
The letter was sent as The Associated Pressreported that cuts within the DOE's Office of Civil Rights have placed new barriers in front of families with children who have disabilities. Families who can't afford to take legal action against schools or districts that are not providing accommodations or services for students with disabilities have long been able to rely on on the office to open an investigation into their cases, but the AP reported that "more than 20,000 pending cases—including those related to kids with disabilities, historically the largest share of the office's work—largely sat idle for weeks after Trump took office."
"A freeze on processing the cases was lifted early this month, but advocates question whether the department can make progress on them with a smaller staff," reported the outlet.
The reduction in force has been compounded by the fact that the remaining staff has been directed to prioritize antisemitism cases, as the Trump administration places significant attention on allegations that pro-Palestinian organizers, particularly on college campuses, have endangered Jewish students by speaking out in favor of Palestinian rights and against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza and the West Bank.
An analysis of more than 550 campus protests found that 97% of the demonstrations last year remained non-violent, contrary to repeated claims by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers that they placed Jewish students in danger. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, pro-Israel advocates, and Republicans have dismissed outcry over Musk's display of a Nazi salute at an inaugural event in January.
"Special needs kids [are] now suffering because of a manufactured hysteria aimed [at] silencing dissent against genocide," said writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer. "Utter depravity."
In their letter, Sanders and his Democratic colleagues noted that "several regional offices responsible for investigating potential violations of students' civil rights in local schools" have also been shuttered, expressing alarm that many cases will likely "go uninvestigated and that students will be left in unsafe learning environments as a result."
They noted that at a time of "massive income and wealth inequality, when 60% of people live paycheck to paycheck," the federal government's defunding of public education "would result in either higher property taxes or decreased funding for public schools, including in rural areas."
"It is a national disgrace that the Trump administration is attempting to illegally abolish the Department of Education and thus, undermine a high-quality education for our students," wrote the lawmakers. "These reductions will have devastating impacts on our nation's students and we are deeply concerned that without staff, the department will be unable to fulfill critical functions, such as ensuring students can access federal financial aid, upholding students' civil rights, and guaranteeing that federal funding reaches communities promptly and is well-spent."
Trump, they noted, has expressed a desire "to return education back to the states" despite the fact that state governments and local school boards already make education policy, with just 11% of public education funding coming from the DOE.
However, "the Department of Education has a necessary and irreplaceable responsibility to implement federal laws that ensure equal opportunity for all children in this country," they wrote. "These laws guarantee fundamental protections, such as ensuring that children with disabilities receive a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment, that students from low-income backgrounds and students of color will not be disproportionately taught by less experienced and qualified teachers, and that parents will receive information about their child's academic achievement."
"Without the Department of Education, there is no guarantee that states would uphold students' civil and educational rights," said the lawmakers. "We will not stand by as you attempt to turn back the clock on education in this country through gutting the Department of Education. Our nation's public schools, colleges, and universities are preparing the next generation of America's leaders—we must take steps to strengthen education in this country, not take a wrecking ball to the agency that exists to do so."
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