IS LIFE BETTER TODAY THAN 50 YRS AGO?

It is nice to know that youth of the world are not as depressed as their parents and grandparents.  Below is a ranking given by CNBC* (source given at the bottom of the table and www.pewglobal.org) in order of the difference between the optimism of youth verses their seniors.  On this scale, youth scores 51% think life is better now than it was 50 yrs ago compared the their parents and grandparents.  But among the 8 countries listed, the youth of America are actually 6th in optimism after Sweden (most optimistic), Germany, UK,  Australia, and South Africa.

Not listed in the table below is Vietnam which Pew lists as the most optimistic of nations with 88% of the people saying life is better now than 50 yrs ago and more than 90% saying the economy is good.*  The U.S. does not rank among the most optimistic nations considering all people where only 37% of the people say Life is better and 41% say Life is worse now than it was 50 yrs ago.*

By the way, the worst country for views on Life is Venezuela where only 10% of the people think Life is better than it was 50 yrs ago and  72% think Life is worse.  Globally the figures are 43% better and 38% worse.  Note the figures do not total 100% so I suppose a group is not counted who say they do not know.*

(Click on figure to enlarge)
Highly educated are more optimisitic:
In about more than half the countries he surveyed, most prominently in places like Poland, Peru, the Netherlands and Spain, people with higher levels of education were more likely to say that life is currently better than 50 years, Poushter noted*.

Populists tend to be depressed:
For example, Germans who support the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) are 28 percentage points more likely to say that life is worse off for people like them than those who have an unfavorable view of the anti-immigrant party. This pattern also holds in Sweden among supporters of the Swedish Democrats, in France among those with a favorable view of National Front, in the Netherlands among PVV supporters and in the UK among fans of the UK Independence Party (UKIP).**

* https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/08/the-top-8-countries-where-millennials-are-most-optimistic.html
** http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/12/05/worldwide-people-divided-on-whether-life-today-is-better-than-in-the-past/