Comments on: What Makes Happy States

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:29:24 +0000

The correlation between money and happiness, and the issue of dropping out the lowest income levels (after which there is no good correlation) is consistent with very early work done by Hertzberg in his Motivation-Hygiene theory: essentially, money works only up to a point.

But even more debunking of Florida’s Creative Class cheerleading: “a new study, Poverty In The Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community issued by the Williams Institute at UCLA, concludes that gay men and lesbians “at least as likely – and perhaps more likely – to experience poverty as are heterosexual people.” Among the reasons cited for the phenomenon: employment discrimination, lack of access to marriage, higher rates of being uninsured, and less family support. The study debunks the popular misconception that gays and lesbians represent an affluent, highly educated elite.”

But, you know, whatever gets you lots of money and makes you happy, eh, Dr. Florida?

By: SLC Resident

SLC Resident — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:56:59 +0000

Utah has a very large gay population (probably due to the highest birthrate in the nation) and SLC metro not only has a large gay demographic but is also quite gay friendly. Oh, the dichotomies and contradictions of life in Mormondom!

By: Tom in BA

Tom in BA — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:56:54 +0000

Gay states are happy states!

By: Richard Florida

Richard Florida — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:43:21 +0000

JWS – I tended and probably tend to agree with the school of happiness research you mention. But there is a very important paper by Justin Wolfers (who blogs at Freakonomics) and Betsy Stevenson which shows a great deal of evidence (including re-analyzing data series from a host of the seminal studies)that income is indeed associated with happiness. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/the-economics-of-happiness-part-1-reassessing-the-easterlin-paradox/
In fact, in his post, Will Wilkinson makes just this point about the state level data.

Stevenson and Wolfers also have a paper on happiness inequality: http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers/Papers/HappinessInequality.pdf

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:30:56 +0000

Swordsman,

Once you get to the congressional district maps there’s a pulldown menu that has not only the well being indicators but a lot of census data like age ranges, ethnicity, etc.

By: Swordsman

Swordsman — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:59:44 +0000

Michael, thank you. I’d looked at the well-being map, but didn’t see the 25-44 year olds map. Fascinating stuff.

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:59:14 +0000

Swordsman,

Graphing it would be horrendous, but if you go to the post Happy States 1 and click on “map fun” it gives a lot of data by congressional district. Two general meta-categories, lifestyle questions and census data. Most urban areas are large enough to have a few congressional districts, so you can find metros if not cities.

The advantage of congressional districts instead of cities is it lets you look at rural areas. For example check out 18 to 25 year olds and compare it to 25 to 44 year olds and you can just see prime child-bearing age people, also prime career age, abandoning the hinterlands.

By: Swordsman

Swordsman — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:33:56 +0000

It’s probably wayyyy too much data to try this, but looking at this by city instead of by state would be interesting. I bet Austin looks significantly different on these charts than Dallas, even though both are in Texas. Likewise, Buffalo vs. NYC, even though both are in New York.

By: Swordsman

Swordsman — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:30:18 +0000

Oh, boy, have I heard that canard before: you’ll accept less money because you live in a wonderful area. Yeah, funny how the people usually saying that are the people who would otherwise have to pay higher wages.

By: KIRSTI

KIRSTI — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:37:40 +0000

My graduate students were recently discussing this research in line with our own discussions of ‘good work’ recently = as it is founded on some of the ideas of ‘flow’ from Csikszentmihalyi….. as a Colorado resident group we were discussing how it was that we could be ranked 49th in state funding for education but really high on these indexes and we chatted about the ‘mountain factor’. That is, we get the compensation of living in the mountains which makes up for the lack of hard cash in our hands….. that may also explain Utah…..I thought the graphs on super creatives and bohemians were really interesting though because then you got to see the influence of conservative values (see how far Co dropped then!!).