Money, the saying goes, cannot buy happiness, although it can help chase the blues away. These days, not having enough of it helps explain a sour mood that is spreading across the world.
As the global economy falters - weighed down by the mortgage crisis in the United States and Europe, inflation in Asia, and high commodity prices everywhere - people have less money, but the sense of foreboding seems to go beyond mere economic concerns.
China and India have been the engines of affluence, but now they are slipping. China’s growth rate will fall from 11 percent to around 9 percent, economists say, a blistering pace almost anywhere else, but not fast enough for China to absorb the millions of workers moving into the cities in search of work. In India it is double-digit inflation that is darkening the mood, mostly due to sharp rises in food and fuel prices.
Suddenly, the good old days are being missed. In Vietnam, as in India, inflation is causing the discomfort, affecting spirits both literally and figuratively. Rising prices for offerings to burn for dead ancestors are frustrating the Vietnamese, who until now have seen only the upside of market cycles, Seth Mydans of The Times recently wrote.
The mood is tense these days, said Kim N. B. Ninh, the Asia Foundation’s representative in Vietnam. “I think people are pessimistic,” she told Mr. Mydans. “You sense a tougher environment, a more restricted environment.”
Steve Erlanger of The Times’s Paris bureau reported that the French, too, are in a bad mood as they return from their August vacations. Though this period, called “rentree,” is the season for new films, operas, plays and books, not many people appear to be looking forward to it.
“The French have the blues,” Alix Girod de l’Ain, a columnist at Elle magazine, told him.
In Italy, the “malessere,” or malaise, has lasted months. Ian Fisher’s article from Rome late last year described a “collective funk - economic, social and political.” Public opinion surveys showed that Italians were the least happy people in Europe.
“It’s a country that has lost a little of its will for the future,” said Walter Veltroni, the center-left mayor of Rome. “There is more fear than hope.”
“Hope” and “change” are two of the messages underlying Senator Barack Obama’s success so far in his United States presidential campaign . In keeping with the worldwide sense of gloom, nearly 80 percent of Americans tell pollsters that America is “going in the wrong direction.”
“Obama got one thing right,” James Stanford, a retired steelworker from Pennsylvania, told Michael Powell in a recent article. “We are bitter here.”
Mr. Stanford, who has seen his pension disappear, was referring to Mr. Obama’s description of rural Americans as clinging to their guns and religion out of bitterness.
Nobody wants to stay pessimistic, feel the blues, suffer from a malaise or end up bitter, so change sounds attractive. And eventually, of course, it is inevitable. But hastening it is not so simple.
As Beppe Severnigni, a columnist for Corriere della Sera, told Mr. Fisher: “The malaise is: ‘I can see all that. But there is nothing I can do to change it.’ ”