Which states are the happiest? New study.

[Liberty]

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents ... finds_the/

New research by the UK’s University of Warwick and Hamilton College in the US has used the happiness levels of a million individual US citizens to discover which are the best and worst states in which to live in the United States. New York and Connecticut come bottom of a life-satisfaction league table, and Hawaii and Louisiana are at the top. The analysis reveals also that happiness levels closely correlate with objective factors such as congestion and air quality across the US’s 50 states.

The new research published in the elite journal Science on 17th December 2009 is by Professor Andrew Oswald of the UK’s University of Warwick and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in the US. It provides the first external validation of people’s self-reported levels of happiness. “We would like to think this is a breakthrough. It provides an justification for the use of subjective well-being surveys in the design of government policies, and will be of value to future economic and clinical researchers across a variety of fields in science and social science” said Professor Oswald.

The researchers examined a 2005- 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System random sample of 1.3 million United States citizens in which life-satisfaction in each U.S. state was measured. This provided a league table of happiness by US State reproduced below. The researchers decided to use the data to try to resolve one of the most significant issues facing economists and clinical scientists carrying out research into human well-being.

Researchers have to rely on people’s self declared levels of happiness – but how can one trust those self declarations? There have been studies that try to match declared levels of happiness to clinical signs of stress such as blood pressure. That has been useful, but one cannot know for sure whether those physiological signs are driving happiness or whether the reverse is true. Researchers have, for decades, longed for a more clearly external scientific check on, and corroboration of, well-being survey answers.

The two researchers stumbled on a parallel approach that allowed them to do such a check. They discovered research by Stuart Gabriel and colleagues from UCLA published in 2003 which considered objective indicators for each individual State of the USA such as: precipitation; temperature; wind speed; sunshine; coastal land; inland water; public land; National Parks; hazardous waste sites; environmental ‘greenness’; commuting time; violent crime; air quality; student-teacher ratio; local taxes; local spending on education and highways; cost of living. This allowed the creation of a rank order of US states showing which should provide the happiest living experience. This was a truly external data source that could be used to check the self declared levels of happiness; Gabriel’s team had no happiness data in 2003 that could allow the check to be completed.

But Professors Oswald and Wu were able to do the first state-by-state USA happiness calculations. They then obtained Gabriel’s numbers. When the two rankings were compared, they found a close correlation between people’s subjective life-satisfaction scores and objectively estimated quality of life.

The lead author on the study, Professor Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick, said:

"The beauty of this statistical method is that we are able to look below the surface of American life -- to identify the deep patterns in people's underlying life satisfaction and happiness from Alabama to Wyoming. The type of study is new to the United States. We are the first to be able to do this calculation -- partly because we are fortunate enough to have a random anonymized sample of 1.3 million Americans. But we could not have done it without the early painstaking work by Gabriel’s team."

“The state-by-state pattern is of interest in itself. But it also matters scientifically. We wanted to study whether people's feelings of satisfaction with their own lives are reliable, that is, whether they match up to reality -- of sunshine hours, congestion, air quality, etc -- in their own state. And they do match. When human beings give you an answer on a numerical scale about how satisfied they are with their lives, you should pay attention.

People’s happiness answers are true, you might say. This suggests that life-satisfaction survey data might be tremendously useful for governments to use in the design of economic and social policies.” said Oswald.

Professor Oswald expressed caution in how some of the exact results should be interpreted – for example, for the state of Louisiana in the survey following the disruption in caused by Hurricane Katrina, but was confident that the data on most states was a true reflection of well-being levels saying:

“We have been asked a lot whether we expected that states like New York and California would do so badly in the happiness ranking. Having visited and lived in various parts of the US, I am only a little surprised. Many people think these states would be marvellous places to live in. The problem is that if too many individuals think that way, they move into those states, and the resulting congestion and house prices make it a non-fulfilling prophecy. In a way, it is like the stock market. If everyone thinks it would be great to buy stock X, that stock is generally already overvalued. Bargains in life are usually found outside the spotlight. It seems that exactly the same is true of the best places to live."
1 Louisiana
2 Hawaii
3 Florida
4 Tennessee
5 Arizona
6 Mississippi
7 Montana
8 South Carolina
9 Alabama
10 Maine
11 Alaska
12 North Carolina
13 Wyoming
14 Idaho
15 South Dakota
16 Texas
17 Arkansas
18 Vermont
19 Georgia
20 Oklahoma
21 Colorado
22 Delaware
23 Utah
24 New Mexico
25 North Dakota
26 Minnesota
27 New Hampshire
28 Virginia
29 Wisconsin
30 Oregon
31 Iowa
32 Kansas
33 Nebraska
34 West Virginia
35 Kentucky
36 Washington
37 District of Columbia
38 Missouri
39 Nevada
40 Maryland
41 Pennsylvania
42 Rhode Island
43 Massachusetts
44 Ohio
45 Illinois
46 California
47 Indiana
48 Michigan
49 New Jersey
50 Connecticut
51 New York

[Darth Wong]

It seems difficult to imagine that some of the country's most impoverished states would rank so highly. I can understand why researchers are excited about the correlation between the survey results and a number of objective factors which are purported to indicate happiness, but that is by no means bulletproof. It indicates only that those objective measurements correlate well to peoples' self-declaration of happiness.

Just for one example of a potential roadblock, take a look at divorce rates by state at http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsUS2.shtml and the ranking looks a lot different. It seems to me that if the divorce rate is twice as high in state B as it is in state A, the people in state B probably aren't happier with their lives.

[General Zod]

I'm rather amazed to see Oregon so low. I mean it's not doing that great economically but it's not a redneck wasteland with nothing but potatoes and skinheads like Idaho is. And Louisiana at number 1, even after the hurricanes? Really?

[aerius]

Looking at the order of the states I'm tempted to say "ignorance is bliss".

[Shroom Man 777]

I'm rather amazed to see Oregon so low. I mean it's not doing that great economically but it's not a redneck wasteland with nothing but potatoes and skinheads like Idaho is. And Louisiana at number 1, even after the hurricanes? Really?

I think the study was done before New Orleans was turned into a wasteland.

[Alferd Packer]

Looking at the order of the states I'm tempted to say "ignorance is bliss".

I thought the same. Places like Hawaii and Florida I understand--tropical climates tend to elevate one's mood, and I could even see the same with other southern states, as their winters are brief and mild. But Montana? Ain't nothing mild about a Montana winter, I'm sure.

And on the flip side, I'm completely unsurprised that the three states composing the NYC tri-state area are the most unhappy. I could've told you that. Everyone in Manhattan is a miserable fuck.

[Simon_Jester]

I thought the same. Places like Hawaii and Florida I understand--tropical climates tend to elevate one's mood, and I could even see the same with other southern states, as their winters are brief and mild. But Montana? Ain't nothing mild about a Montana winter, I'm sure.

Yeah, but if you're the kind of guy who's willing to live in Montana at all, you don't hate snow. And Montana has a few things going for it: really big wide open spaces, beautiful scenery in at least part of the state, and a rural economy.*

*Which isn't always a great thing objectively, but it does seem to lead to higher job satisfaction, at least in a place like the US. At a guess, probably because you get out in the fresh air more and don't have to put up with idiot officemates if you don't want to.

So while people in Montana may be poor and have the problems of poverty, they also have nonquantifiable stuff that's likely to make them feel happy, even if by certain metrics they don't look happy.

[Gil Hamilton]

I can actually see Arizona ranking highly depending on where they interviewed. For example, if they interviewed in Sedona, I'd expect they'd got nothing but intensely satisfied with their lives, because Sedona is filled with very wealthy bliss bunny hippies who live in a terrifically gorgeous environment. I also imagine people who've actually got very little but managing wouldn't express that much disatisfaction with life. It's funny how people with a blackberry, an office job, and a mortgage have alot more complaints about life than a mechanic in el barrio. The mechanic will probably say he's that things are hard but he's doing alright, while the office manager will be pissed about a dozen little things. Arizona's population is made up with ALOT of older aging hippies and poor latinos managing to get by, and neither are inclined to bitch while on surveys.

People in places like New York City, however, have turned bitching to whomever asked into a fine art; a cab ride in the City will convince you of this, where the cabbie will likely give you his opinions on everything from politics to that singer "Britney Stars? Uh, Spears? Yeah, that's it, the blonde slut with that white trash boyfriend of hers". I say this and I love New York City, but people in East Coast States with alot of cities are expertly trained in expressing woe over things that don't matter.

[aerius]

It's funny how people with a blackberry, an office job, and a mortgage have alot more complaints about life than a mechanic in el barrio. The mechanic will probably say he's that things are hard but he's doing alright, while the office manager will be pissed about a dozen little things.

I used to be a bicycle mechanic and now I'm a white collar manager type. It's so true it's not even funny, being a mechanic is hard work but it's got satisfaction and at the end of the day I'm done my job and every day is a new & fresh start. I fix stuff, it's done, that's the end of my responsibility. As a manager, hell, I pretty much spend the entire day dealing with other people's shit. The shitstream is endless and goes on day after day, month after month, and if I actually cared about my job I'd go mental and gun down my co-workers. Fortunately I'm a government employee and my give-a-shitometer doesn't budge on anything short of a lightning strike so I'm actually reasonably content at my job.

[Hawkwings]

I'm rather amazed to see Oregon so low. I mean it's not doing that great economically but it's not a redneck wasteland with nothing but potatoes and skinheads like Idaho is. And Louisiana at number 1, even after the hurricanes? Really?

I was surprised too. Then I realized that we rated ourselves this low so nobody would want to move here. But not outrageously low so that people would take closer looks. Not that it's stopping all those damn californians from trying to move here...

[Karrick]

I can see a lot of disparity depending on who they ask in the tri-state area. If they were to ask some poor shmuck from Camden or Newark, NJ I think there would be lots of legitimate concerns, like gang violence, other crime, and general poverty. On the other hand, they could interview someone from upper-middle class white suburbia, NJ and get some pretty satisfied people. Not all of Jersey is a giant shit hole, is my point. Then again, those inner city regions would have higher population density, so I guess they'd skew the results. Also, permission to sig that last line, aerius?

[Mayabird]

So what? Nigerians are supposedly the happiest people on Earth, and Nigeria is, at best, a fucking shithole maybe a step and a half up from the festering wound on humanity that is the Congo, in that they're not actively cannibalizing each other, though they are murdering children accused of witchcraft.

[K. A. Pital]

Yeah, all these "self-proclaimed happiness" studies are worth shit. People in hellholes of the Earth report themselves "more happy" (due to mentality issues, cultural norms or the like) and then people run around with "See, people in Africa are happier than you, stupid lazy industrial world citizens!"

[Commander 598]

Theory: It's because we're too busy being poor to give a shit about how depressingly awful everything is and also we have good food.

[The Yosemite Bear]

yes but that good food kills you young so you don't have to worry about that social security stuff...

[RedImperator]

I can see a lot of disparity depending on who they ask in the tri-state area. If they were to ask some poor shmuck from Camden or Newark, NJ I think there would be lots of legitimate concerns, like gang violence, other crime, and general poverty. On the other hand, they could interview someone from upper-middle class white suburbia, NJ and get some pretty satisfied people. Not all of Jersey is a giant shit hole, is my point. Then again, those inner city regions would have higher population density, so I guess they'd skew the results. Also, permission to sig that last line, aerius?

I grew up in middle-class New Jersey suburbia, and I can absolutely understand how people would be miserable there. If you're an adult, you spend your entire life in a car, much of it stuck in traffic, unless you're at work, which probably means some paper-shuffling job where you spend 60 hours a week in the office dealing with bullshit and still take work home, which you'll do when you're done shuttling the kids from one activity to the other. Meanwhile, if you're too young to drive, you sit and stew in your subdivision surrounded by uncrossable arterial roads, begging for rides and snorting daddy's Vicodin for fun. I've worked with and around poor ghetto kids and their parents, and frankly, for the ones who aren't dealing with incredibly fucked up shit, life's hard, but the times when they're actually, genuinely happy seem more frequent than a lot of my neighbors when I was growing up (my dad was lucky enough to have a job where he actually fixed things with his hands, and so life was OK until he got promoted to the office).

[Gil Hamilton]

I wonder if you could correllate the amount of suburbia a state has with general happiness?

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, all these "self-proclaimed happiness" studies are worth shit. People in hellholes of the Earth report themselves "more happy" (due to mentality issues, cultural norms or the like) and then people run around with "See, people in Africa are happier than you, stupid lazy industrial world citizens!"

Right.

Though there may be at least some shred of relevance to be extracted from the studies: happiness in the sense of "I, personally, am satisfied with my situation" requires something more than just taking all the obvious problems with being a pre-industrial subsistence farmer and making them go away. If the studies were absolutely worthless, then the results should be effectively random: as it is there seems to be a negative correlation between your wealth (and the wealth of the area you live in) and your sense of how happy you are. That can be waved away as "poor people are too dumb to know they're miserable," but I'm not sure that's a good enough explanation.

There's something flawed with the way post-industrial society has people working, or if not flawed, inhuman. People aren't mentally adapted to function that way, and it makes them feel like their life sucks even when their material standard of living would look like a fable about the palaces of the gods to their distant ancestors.

That's a problem, and I think it would be worth exploring and trying to fix... if we could figure out where to begin.

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe rich people just have so much shit bothering them? I mean, lower socioeconomic status people have the benefit of - as aerius says - just working simply and at the day's end, going home without much pressing concerns to be had from their workplaces. Whereas for richer people, their work might not be as relenting and might be more bothersome with higher responsibilities, higher expectations, and higher pressure overall?

That's one of the reasons why I'd rather be an employee than go and take up my father's business, because right now he's a fat bald person and sure he sells stuff like cars and other big pieces of hardware and mingles with lots of high-class people in the government, but he also spends his days screaming at his subordinates (i.e. his family) and is pressured to make ends meet. A not-so-highly paid employee might not have enough money to buy pointless luxuries like a crapload of firearms, but at least he'd come home at night without shit to bother him in his home.

[Yona]

Maybe it's a correlation involving how much "weed" is grown and consumed in the state.

Shit, we're 29th. Milwaukee must be dragging us down. Can't be Madison, that's a college party central town.

[ArmorPierce]

I think a big part making people unhappy are having high goals and expectations rather than just living day-by-day. Poorer people will have lower goals and live day-by-day. Richer people will have higher goals set for themselves and higher expectations.

[Karrick]

I grew up in middle-class New Jersey suburbia, and I can absolutely understand how people would be miserable there. If you're an adult, you spend your entire life in a car, much of it stuck in traffic, unless you're at work, which probably means some paper-shuffling job where you spend 60 hours a week in the office dealing with bullshit and still take work home, which you'll do when you're done shuttling the kids from one activity to the other. Meanwhile, if you're too young to drive, you sit and stew in your subdivision surrounded by uncrossable arterial roads, begging for rides and snorting daddy's Vicodin for fun. I've worked with and around poor ghetto kids and their parents, and frankly, for the ones who aren't dealing with incredibly fucked up shit, life's hard, but the times when they're actually, genuinely happy seem more frequent than a lot of my neighbors when I was growing up (my dad was lucky enough to have a job where he actually fixed things with his hands, and so life was OK until he got promoted to the office).

This doesn't quite jive with my own experience growing up in suburbia. I can certainly see how it's soul-crushing in a mindless office drone sort of way, but I was never the kind to turn to drugs and binge drinking for escape (like the vast majority of other kids I knew and knew of). That never had any appeal to me, so I was... pretty damn 'unhappy'. I never got the impression the others were, though. Other kids seemed happy with their escapism, and their parents did nothing to disabuse them. My town suffered (suffers?) from an overabundance of "my child would never do that" ignorance, too.

I think the chemically induced escape and the willing blindness converged in such a manner that the majority of the adult population was either retiring in a very low crime and otherwise comfortable area (and thus not caring), or making sure their kids lived an accountability free lifestyle in the stereotypically idyllic American suburb. If you live there, you're not worrying about getting enough food to survive. You're worried about how the football team is going to do this year and arguing about not selling a park to the county so someone else can clean it up (and maybe let 'those people' in).

I think what I’m trying to articulate is that yes, suburban life is petty, meaningless, and dull, but the people living it refuse to look below the surface and are ‘happy’ despite that. Contrast with lower income areas where you're worried about getting enough so your kids can eat. I guess the question is whether or not happiness is genuine really matters. If it does, is happiness through willful ignorance not genuine?

All that aside, I'm not a sociologist/anthropologist running an in depth study on suburban cultures, so my observations are pretty much moot. I don’t have enough information to generalize beyond my own town and two or three of the neighboring ones, so I’ll stop before I’ve put my foot so far into my mouth that I’m crapping it out.

[raptor3x]

This doesn't seem to jive with the suicide rates:

State Ranking on Suicide Rates

Suicides per 100,000 residents**

1. District of Columbia: 5.3

2. New York: 6

3. Massachusetts: 6.4

4. New Jersey: 6.8

5. Rhode Island: 7.5

6. Illinois: 8

7. Connecticut: 8.2

8. Maryland: 8.9

9. Hawaii: 8.9

10. Nebraska: 9.5

11. California: 9.6

12. New Hampshire: 9.8

13. Minnesota: 10.1

14. Texas: 10.6

15. Michigan: 10.8

16. Virginia: 10.9

17. Delaware: 11.0

18. Pennsylvania: 11.1

19. Georgia: 11.1

20. North Dakota: 11.2

21. Indiana: 11.3

22. Ohio: 11.3

23. South Carolina: 11.3

24. Iowa: 11.5

25. Alabama: 11.8

26. Wisconsin: 11.9

27. North Carolina: 11.9

28. Louisiana (pre-Katrina): 12.1

29. Mississippi: 12.2

30. Missouri: 12.4

31. Maine: 12.4

32. Arkansas: 13

33. Florida: 13

34. Kentucky: 13.2

35. Tennessee: 13.2

36. Washington: 13.2

37. Kansas: 13.5

38. Vermont: 14.2

39. Oklahoma: 14.4

40. South Dakota: 14.9

41. Oregon: 14.9

42. West Virginia: 15.4

43. Arizona: 15.6

44. Colorado: 17.1

45. Utah: 17.1

46. Idaho: 17.5

47. Wyoming: 17.6

48. Montana: 18.7

49. New Mexico: 18.8

50. Nevada: 19

51. Alaska: 23.1

[The Grim Squeaker]

Suicide is strongly affected by culture - there are tropical islands where suicide incidents are exceptionally high, and most of the scandinavian socialistic states with their high standards of life and equality that people love ot wank over so much have incredibly high suicide rates as well (it's also strongly affected by the weather).

[Simon_Jester]

On top of that, the people who commit suicide in a given year are such a small fraction of the population that they don't even show up in an "are you happy?" survey. You might think that for every suicide there are ten or a hundred horribly depressed people, of course... but even then you're talking about a few percent of the population as a whole being horribly depressed. Which still doesn't shift the poll results all that much.