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The authors claim that \u201csupport for the purported U shape is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed\u201d and \u201cwe believe the conclusion that happiness declines from late adolescence to midlife (the first half of the U shape) is premature, and possibly wrong.\u201d We respectfully disagree. The authors\u2019 main evidence is based on summaries of 33 articles; they find 12 to have U shapes, seven to have none, and 14 to be mixed. We found that most of these articles are misclassified: Four of them are ineligible for inclusion, 25 find a U, and four are mixed. We then identified a further 353 articles, including 329 in peer-reviewed journals, that all found U shapes that were not identified in the literature review. This is a major omission. We also present our own evidence of midlife nadirs in well-being using around eight and a half million individual observations from nationally representative surveys for the United States and Europe. The midlife low occurs in the mid-40s and its drop is equivalent to roughly three quarters of the unprecedented drop observed in well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/1745691620984393","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,7,26]],"date-time":"2021-07-26T11:37:14Z","timestamp":1627299434000},"page":"1435-1446","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":29,"title":["The U Shape of Happiness: A Response"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"16","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2856-7039","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"David G.","family":"Blanchflower","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Economics, Dartmouth College"},{"name":"Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow"},{"name":"Global Labor Organization"},{"name":"Bloomberg, New York, New York"},{"name":"National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Carol L.","family":"Graham","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C."},{"name":"School of Public Policy, University of Maryland College Park"},{"name":"Gallup Organization, Washington, D.C."}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,7,26]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_5_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Baetschmann G. 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