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Jeanna Bryner
Managing Editor
LiveScience.com jeanna Bryner
managing Editor
livescience.com Thu Dec 17, 2:05 pm ET
Ever wondered if you'd be happier in sunny Florida or snow-covered Minnesota?
New research on state-level happiness could answer that question.
Florida and two other sunshine states made it to the Top 5, while Minnesota
doesn't show up until number 26 on the list of happiest states. In addition to
rating the smile factor of U.S. states, the research also proved for the first
time that a person's self-reported happiness matches up with objective measures
of well-being.
Essentially, if an individual says they're happy, they are.
"When human beings give you an answer on a numerical scale about how satisfied
they are with their lives, it is best to pay attention. Their answers are
reliable," said Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England. "This
suggests that life-satisfaction survey data might be very useful for
governments to use in the design of economic and social policies," Oswald said.
The happy-states list, however, doesn't match up with a similar ranking
reported last month, which found that the most tolerant and wealthiest states
were, on average, the happiest. Oswald says this past is based on raw averages
of people's happiness in a state, and so doesn't provide meaningful results.
"That study cannot control for individual characteristics," Oswald told
LiveScience. "In other words, all anyone has been able to do is to report the
averages state-by-state, and the problem with doing that is you're not
comparing apples with apples because the people who live in New York City are
nothing like the individuals living in Montana."
Rather, Oswald and Stephen Wu, an economist at Hamilton College in New York,
statistically created a representative American. That way they could take, for
example, a 38-year-old woman with a high-school diploma and making medium-wage
who is living anywhere and transplant her to another state and get a rough
estimate of her happiness level.
"Not much point in looking at the happiness of a Texas rancher compared to a
nurse in Ohio," Oswald said.
The happiest states:
1. Louisiana
2. Hawaii
3. Florida
4. Tennessee
5. Arizona
6. Mississippi
7. Montana
8. South Carolina
9. Alabama
10. Maine
The scientists caution, however, that the top spot, Louisiana, might not
reflect current levels of well-being since the data were collected before the
disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina. They are confident that data for the
other states does accurately reflect happiness levels.
See the full list of 50 states (and the District of Columbia) here.
Happiness measures
Their results come from a comparison of two data sets of happiness levels in
each state, one that relied on participants' self-reported well-being and the
other an objective measure that took into account a state's weather, home
prices and other factors that are known reasons to frown (or smile).
The self-reported information came from 1.3 million U.S. citizens who took part
in a survey between 2005 and 2008.
"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," Oswald said.
The results showed the two measures matched up. "We were stunned when it first
came up on our screens, because no one has ever managed to produce a clear
validation before of subjective well-being, or happiness, data," Oswald said.
They were also surprised at the least happy states, such as New York and
Connecticut, which landed at the bottom two spots on the list.
"We were struck by the states that come at the bottom, because a lot of them
are on the East Coast, highly prosperous and industrialized," Oswald said.
"That's another way of saying they have a lot of congestion, high house prices,
bad air quality."
He added, "Many people think these states would be marvelous 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."
Would you be happier in another state?
Using both the subjective well-being results, which included individual
characteristics like demographics and income, and the objective findings, the
team could figure out how an individual would fare in a particular state.
"We can create a like-to-like comparison, because we know the characteristics
of people in every state," Oswald said. "So we can adjust statistically to
compare a representative person hypothetically put down in any state."
This new research will be published online on Dec. 17 by the journal Science.