When we say Americans are caught in the Despair Economy, we mean people touched by at least one of eleven documented conditions that reduce their economic participation. No federal survey counts all eight together, so this page gives a range: a floor that counts unique people and a ceiling that adds the categories and includes overlap.
The floor is 106 million. In 2024, 31% of U.S. residents received benefits from at least one means-tested program, according to the Census Bureau. That count includes each person once. At about 342 million residents, it comes to about 106 million people, nearly one in three. Anyone in the other categories who is not already in this group raises the number above the floor.
The ceiling is 295 million. Adding the eleven categories below gives about 295 million cases, or 86% of residents. A person in poverty who receives Medicaid and has a substance use disorder appears in three categories, so the ceiling counts that person three times. The number of unique people is lower than the ceiling.
The true figure sits between the two. No federal dataset links all eleven categories at the person level, so we do not publish a single point estimate. Where a source offers a choice between figures, we use the government figure and name the alternative.
Between 31% and 86% of Americans live with at least one of these conditions.
The infrastructure points the same direction. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates $9.1 trillion is needed to bring America's infrastructure to a state of good repair. A nation with a large share of its people unable to participate fully in the economy defers things like that. The argument underneath this page is Prosperitism: people, given the right tools and environment, are assets. This page shows the work so that anyone can check it. Nullius in Verba applies to us too.
Each category below has a published government figure, except where a source is named otherwise. Data years differ, from 2022 to 2025, because agencies publish on different schedules. Categories overlap in reality, so the ceiling is a count of cases and not of people. Resident population of about 342 million is from the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates.
In 2024, 31% of U.S. residents received benefits from at least one means-tested program, from the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation. Among recipients, 73% received Medicaid or CHIP, 60% received nutrition assistance, 19% rental or energy assistance, and 10% cash assistance. Just over half received one program, 26% two, and 21% three or more. This is a count of people, so each person appears once. At about 342 million residents, 31% is about 106 million. Receiving a benefit measures reliance on the safety net, and it includes children and older adults.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Survey of Income and Program Participation fact sheet (2026)
The official poverty rate was 10.2% in 2025, about 34.5 million people. The Supplemental Poverty Measure, which counts benefits and expenses, put the rate at 13.1%. We use the official measure because it is the one with a published headcount. Most people in poverty also receive means-tested benefits, so categories 1 and 2 overlap heavily.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Poverty in the United States: 2025 (P60-290)
Adults 18 and older with any mental illness in the past year, from SAMHSA's National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Any mental illness includes cases that do not limit daily functioning. Serious mental illness, which does, was 5.6% of adults. The headcount is as reported in the National Association of Counties summary of SAMHSA's release; we have not yet checked it against the full SAMHSA tables.
Source: SAMHSA, 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health
People 12 and older with a substance use disorder in the past year, including alcohol and drug use disorders, from the same SAMHSA survey. The headcount is as reported in the National Association of Counties summary. Many people in this group also appear in category 3.
Source: SAMHSA, 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health
The Department of Homeland Security estimates 11.0 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the United States on January 1, 2022, up from 10.5 million in 2020. Pew Research Center, which is not a government source, estimated 14 million for 2023. We use the DHS figure and show Pew's as the upper estimate.
Source: DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics, January 2018 to January 2022 estimates
HUD's 2025 point-in-time count found 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2025, down 3% from 2024, the first overall decline since 2016. Over a full year, more people experience homelessness than the single-night count shows, but we have not found a federal annual total, so we use the point-in-time count.
Source: HUD, 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (press release)
About 1.85 million people were held in state or federal prisons or local jails at yearend 2023. At yearend 2024, a further 3.68 million adults were on probation or parole (BJS, Probation and Parole in the United States, 2024). We count only those currently incarcerated.
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Correctional Populations in the United States, 2023
The CDC reported 48,824 suicide deaths in the United States in 2024, down from 49,316 in 2023. This is a count of deaths, not of people affected. Veterans are included in this total: the VA reported 6,398 veteran suicide deaths in 2023, a rate of 35.2 per 100,000 veterans, the highest since 2018. We count the CDC figure once and do not add the veteran figure.
Sources: CDC, Suicide Data and Statistics; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report (via Military.com, Feb. 2026)
Adults 25 and older with less than a high school diploma, from the Current Population Survey: 19.0 million of 233.9 million adults in 2025 (11-month average). The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the table by age group; the total is our sum of the age rows. Their unemployment rate was 6.1% in 2025, compared with 2.6% for those with a bachelor's degree or higher.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey Table 7
The National Crime Victimization Survey estimated that 4,152,060 people 12 and older experienced violent crime in 2024, 1.45% of that population. The survey also found 9,823,900 households (7.34%) with a property crime, which we show in the notes below and do not add, because a household is not a person.
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization, 2024
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 7.4 million workers displaced from their jobs in 2023 to 2025, of whom 3.3 million had held their jobs three or more years. Displacement means losing a job because the employer closed, moved, or cut positions. This covers three years, so it is the largest of the multi-year figures on this page. The BLS does not attribute displacement to technology or AI.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Worker Displacement: 2023-25
The lost economic contribution is the estimated annual gap between what the people in these categories earn and what they would earn at full participation. It is the cost of underactivated human potential and not a government program cost. The estimate is $10.3 trillion per year, within a range of $8.9 trillion to $12.6 trillion.
For each category the gap is the number of people times the difference between a benchmark income of $64,611 and the average annual income associated with that category. The benchmark is the 2025 median earnings of full-time wage and salary workers ($1,204 per week, or $62,608 per year, Bureau of Labor Statistics), raised 3.2% to 2026 dollars using the Employment Cost Index for wages and salaries (June 2026). The estimate uses the current published count for each category. The range runs from the lowest to the highest published count.
| Category | People | Avg. annual income | Estimate ($B) | Range ($B) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homelessness | 746K | $3,000 | 46 | 46–154 |
| Poverty | 34.5M | $18,933 | 1,576 | 1,576–2,010 |
| Unauthorized immigrants | 11.0M | $28,000 | 403 | 403–809 |
| Mental illness | 61.5M | $30,000 | 2,129 | 1,782–2,129 |
| Substance use and abuse | 48.4M | $36,000 | 1,385 | 1,385–1,431 |
| Single mothers | 10.57M | $45,678 | 200 | 197–200 |
| Crime victims | 4.15M | $23,000 | 173 | 173–1,309 |
| Means-tested program recipients | 106M | $31,000 | 3,563 | 2,450–3,563 |
| Incarceration | 1.85M | $31,000 | 62 | 62–188 |
| No high school credential | 19.0M | $23,000 | 791 | 791 |
| Total, cases | 10,328 | 8,865–12,584 |
Sources for the counts: Census (poverty, 2024 and 2025 reports), SAMHSA NSDUH 2024, Department of Homeland Security and the 2018 PLOS ONE study by Fazel-Zarandi, Feinstein and Kaplan (immigrants), the American Institutes for Research (children experiencing homelessness), HUD, Bureau of Justice Statistics (violent crime, stalking and identity theft), CMS and the Census Bureau SIPP (program recipients), Prison Policy Initiative (correctional control), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (education). Categories overlap, so the total is a sum of cases and not a count of people.
If these conditions persist, the annual figure rises with earnings even when the counts stay the same. At 3.2% annual growth in earnings, in line with the latest Employment Cost Index, the estimate passes $12 trillion in about five years, in nominal dollars. Higher counts bring that date closer.
For comparison, the federal budget in 2023 was approximately $6.1 trillion.
The floor and ceiling above describe one year. Over a lifetime the share is larger, because many people live through a hard stretch that a one-year count misses. The most direct evidence is a published study that measures the share of people with at least one such experience, counting each person once.
About 268 million Americans, roughly four in five, experience at least one year of economic insecurity during adult life.
Mark Rank of Washington University and Thomas Hirschl of Cornell, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, found that 79% of Americans between 25 and 60 experience a year of economic insecurity, defined as using a social welfare program, falling into poverty, or having a household head who is unemployed (Chasing the American Dream, Oxford University Press, 2014, as cited in Hirschl and Rank, PLOS ONE, 2015). The same data show 61.8% fall into the bottom fifth of the income distribution in at least one year and 42.1% into the bottom tenth. Because the definition includes the household head, children in those households are part of the experience. Applied to the 342 million residents on that household basis, the share is roughly 268 million to 270 million people (78% to 79%). This is an estimate: the study covers ages 25 to 60, uses a long-running panel survey, and counts an event at any point in adult life, not a single year.
Other conditions add to this figure. They cannot be added together, because they overlap, but each is a lifetime measure from a federal or peer-reviewed source.
About 46% of U.S. adults, from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (Kessler and colleagues, 9,282 adults, 2001 to 2003, Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005), reported by California Healthline.
About 30% of U.S. adults, from the 2001 to 2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (Vergés, Littlefield and Sher, 2011). The authors note that an earlier survey, scored differently, gave about 18%.
45% of Americans have had an immediate family member incarcerated, from the 2018 Family History of Incarceration Survey (Enns and colleagues, Socius, 2019).
63.9% of U.S. adults reported at least one, from the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2011 to 2020 (CDC MMWR).
In the Federal Reserve's survey of end-of-2025 household finances, 34% of adults said they were living comfortably, 39% doing okay, 19% just getting by, and 8% finding it difficult. Two-thirds are below "living comfortably" (Federal Reserve, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025).
The Department of Education counted 1,548,191 students experiencing homelessness in public schools in 2023-24 (National Center for Homeless Education). In 2024 the USDA found children food insecure in 3.3 million households, 9.1% of households with children (USDA ERS).
These conditions have published figures, but each one overlaps a counted category or measures something other than people, so adding it would overstate the range. They are shown so the research is complete.
In 2025, 10.57 million people lived in poverty in families headed by a woman with no spouse present (Census Bureau, via FRED). These people are already inside category 2.
The EEOC received 16,223 age discrimination charges in fiscal year 2024, which counts filings and not people (reported by JobCannon from EEOC data). In a 2024 AARP survey by NORC at the University of Chicago of 2,002 adults 50 and older, six in 10 workers said they had seen or experienced age discrimination at work (AARP). AARP is an advocacy organization, so we show this as context. No agency counts the people affected.
The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas recorded 54,694 announced layoffs in 2025 where employers cited AI (reported by States Newsroom). This is a private-sector tally of announcements and not a federal count. These workers are partly inside category 11.
9,823,900 households experienced property crime in 2024 (BJS). The unit is households.
A 2018 study of 1,736 U.S. adults by Cerel and colleagues, published in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, estimated that about 135 people knew each person who died by suicide (PubMed). That figure measures acquaintance, not a diagnosable condition, so we do not multiply it into the range. Separately, the VA reported more than 2 million contacts to the Veterans Crisis Line over two years; contacts are not unique people.
We are an outdoor products company. We make hardware that lets people work, live, and adventure outside the walls of conventional life, and we tell the stories that make people want to. We believe that time in the outdoors restores something in people that the Despair Economy drains out of them.
We are not a nonprofit or a government program. We are Prosperitists: we believe profit is the fuel of human flourishing and not the destination of it. Our products give people the tools of a self-sufficient life. Our content gives them the belief that such a life is possible. Our community gives them the people who are living proof of it.
The people in this range are the market we are building for. We want them to buy gear because they are living and not merely surviving.
— Mike Isaacs
Founder & CEO, Tymmber Outdoor Products
Sierra County, New Mexico · Nullius in Verba
The data above is the research. What follows is the pathway out. Each of the fifteen clusters has its own page — its own story, its own evidence base, its own outdoor pathway, its own organizations, and its own legislative ask. Select the cluster that describes your situation and find the door that leads to the Prosperity Program.