Comments on: What Makes Happy Cities Happy

By: Leslie M. Saunders

Leslie M. Saunders — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:56:51 +0000

I’m sure there will be many who debate whether or not it is possible to measure happiness. I’m not one of them because I appreciate the fact that the effort is being made. Measuring the happiness quota of a geographical region may begin with satisfaction regarding income and work fulfillment. Nevertheless, in years to come it may also include following trends related to people’s willingness to move into more diverse community settings; the volunteer contribution people make to the communities-at-large in which they choose to live; measuring random acts of kindness and inclusion compared with random criminal activities, the decrease of stress-related illnesses, etc. Granted, this will sound incredibly hokey to some but measuring the dimensions that indicate whether a city’s spiraling dynamics are moving up, down or not at all seems worthy of further scientific investigation.

By: Daniel Carins

Daniel Carins — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:11:56 +0000

Very interesting…

I’d be suspicious of any self-assessed metric of “well-being” or “happiness”, and also suspicious of any that used referrals to psychiatrists or some other measure of mental health, simply because contemporary, western society seems to place a lot of kudos on being “instable” as a perverse indicator of “being interesting”.

Happiness as a concept is also fundamentally bogus – as the article points out indirectly, it’s relative and ephemeral by definition. Can you imagine being permanently happy? No, because then it would be ordinary, so you’d need even greater enjoyment to register the difference. I imagine this explains the diminishing returns over a certain income level.

Fulfilment is a far better aim, but how do you measure that? It may be that indicators of fulfilment – low churn in neighbourhoods and jobs to think of two possible ones – may actually work against existing economic growth models based on mobility of capital and labour.

By: Colin

Colin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:37:27 +0000

Interesting analysis! Really shouldn’t be done as a bunch of separate regressions though. Have you tried putting them all into one regression to see what the relative effects are and which are significant? Multicollinearity might be an issue but still worth trying.

If you want me to run it let me know.

Col

By: Mike L.

Mike L. — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:05:12 +0000

Great work, RF! Mentally stimulating!
The Human Capital plot suggests there are 3 parallel trend lines. Upper, Middle (drawn) and Lower. They are about 2.00 Well-being points or .05 Human Capital points apart.
Do you have a theory about what distinguishes these three groups substantively?