U.S. hits new low in World Happiness Report

Would be interesting to see happiness segmented by Democrats/ Republicans.

I would speculate Republicans are wildly happier when "their team is 'winning'" and Democrats would have a boost in happiness with Democrats in power, but nowhere near the swing of Republicans. Democrats, IMO, are more aware of the *real* current and longterm problems the US faces while Republicans listen to whatever Republicans say the "problems" are - "problems" that are too often very outlandish and not based in reality.

As someone who leans left. I doubt too many Democrats were excited about Biden. He was just “not Trump”. People actually liked Obama and Clinton.

Taking political constraints into account, the Biden Administration was just about the most successful and effective, in policy terms, of the past 50 years. Unfortunately the political landscape is pretty unfavorable, with GOP-supportive media, a GOP-aligned Supreme Court and super wealthy people, increasingly extremist state governments in many parts of the country, decades of corporate consolidation, weakening civic institutions, and an electorate that largely ignores the details. Biden himself was never a great orator and his public charisma suffered further with age, but as far as governing goes, he did a great job. Harris would also have been an excellent president.

Unfortunately building and fixing things (or just keeping things working, negotiating compromises, and so on) takes a lot of time and effort, and doesn't make for great pithy slogans or rile people up.

The term was "excited", not "successful and effective". The excitement for Obama vs. Biden was not even close. ("Yes we can!" vs. "Let's elect our doddering but normal 80ish white guy, not the crazy 80ish white guy!")

I can't disagree with that. I was initially excited (and later pretty disappointed) with Obama, especially with the amount of time he wasted trying to engage with people obviously acting in bad faith, with the way he let himself be pushed around by folks who were aligned against his ideals, and with the extent to which he disengaged after leaving office. Clinton was sadly an even bigger disappointment. I had initially very low expectations of Biden, didn't vote for him in the 2020 primary, and was quite impressed with his actual governing.

What did he accomplish?

What topic areas specifically are you interested in? I'm assuming you don't want a list of hundreds of bullet points of small legislative or administrative changes. The most newsworthy things are stuff like getting us out of the forever wars in the Middle East, standing up to Putin and rallying NATO and other allies to support Ukraine, making big investments in American manufacturing and alternative energy, working to reign in large corporations and protect consumers and the public in a wide variety of ways big and small, protecting workers' salaries and fair treatment, improving access to healthcare and keeping costs down, protecting women's access to healthcare despite a hostile misogynist Supreme Court, working to relieve punishing student loans (again with opposition from the Court), ...

The FTC and his war on corporations was a failure none of the lawsuits went anywhere and it made the environment worse for startups. Now VC funding is nowhere near the level it use to be outside of large AI companies because large tech companies are squeamish of acquisitions - lLimiting the path to successful exits.

What they are doing now is hiring out all of the people they want from startups and leaving the undesirables in a lurch and decimating VCs investments - Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all used this playbook.

The problem with “administrative changes” is that they can easily be undone.

And he didn’t “protect women’s healthcare” at all. The red states are still seeing women die because doctors are afraid to perform abortions when the life of the mother is in danger and blue states aren’t - the status quo.

The very reason that Biden is an inconsequential President was because everything he did was easily undone between his lack of willingness to step aside even though he and everyone else knew he should and trying to do things through executive orders.

The Supreme Court is another symptom of old people not retiring when they should, dying on the bench allowing a Republican President to nominate replacements.

You seem to be singularly focused on VC funding for startups and decision-making by managers inside large tech companies as your metric of how the US economy is doing. In my opinion this is a poor criterion for analyzing the success of national political parties, since political changes have only limited influence on these, and they are in conflict with improving many other parts of the economy affecting much larger numbers of people.

By a wide range of economic metrics, the US economy during the Biden administration was incredibly successful. We somehow managed to reign in inflation caused by the follow-on disruptions coming from Covid pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war, while maintaining full employment and avoiding negative economic effects expected by most economists. Real wages went up. Federal investments set up long-term gains for US manufacturing. The US economy did better than just about every other industrialized economy in the world during the same time period.

Blaming Biden for the following administration doing everything it can to trash the economy and reverse every bit of progress he made is ridiculous. It's like blaming the fire department for the actions of an arsonist. Again, if you want sweeping legislation and long-term commitment to policy changes, you need to elect (and keep electing) enough votes in Congress.