Moving Beyond Divide in America: Insights from well-being metrics, teenagers, and Sister Sledge Julie Rusk, Chief of Civic Well-being - City Manager’s Office, City of Santa Monica and Carol Graham, Leo Pasvolsky, Senior Fellow and Research Director - Global Economy and Development Julie Rusk, Chief of Civic Well-being - City Manager’s Office, City of Santa Monica We are in a moment that America seems more divided than ever—in politics, in incomes and opportunities, and in health, happiness, and hope, as highlighted in Happiness For All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream. The starkest markers of this divide are the increase in U.S. mortality rates, driven by “deaths of despair”—suicide, opioid and other drug overdoses, and alcohol related diseases—among less than college-educated whites. This tragic phenomenon is described in Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s ‘Mortality and morbidity in the 21