Ben Schiller is a New
York-based staff writer for Co.Exist, and also contributes to the FT and Yale
e360. He used to edit a European management magazine, and worked as a reporter
in San Francisco, Prague and Brussels
Sorry, city dwellers. Suburban
counties tend to be happiest (as long as you don't have to get in your car to
go to work).
The United States was founded
so people could pursue happiness, but some places seem to do a better job of it
than others. There's a big difference between the happiest and least happy
places in the country, according to new research.
Led by Stephan Goetz, a
professor at Penn State, the study looks at the number of "poor mental
health days" reported per county—that is, the number of days people said
they were in a negative mood. The "least happy" communities reported
up to 8.3 days a month, compared to less than half-a-day for the happiest. (See
the results plotted on the map here, with the highest number of mental health days
in red and the lowest in green).
What's behind the variation?
Goetz says suburban counties tend to be happier than urban or rural ones, and
that non-white counties tend to be happier than whiter ones. People were also
happier when they commuted less, moved homes less often, and lived in places
deemed to have more closely-knit communities (higher levels of "social
capital").
For example, a 1% increase in
the share of non-whites in a county reduced the average number of poor mental
health days by 0.08%—which is actually a larger number than it might seem, when
you consider the whole country. "After controlling for other factors
including income, educational attainment, place of residence, commuting time,
social capital, there is still a residual, unexplained factor that leaves
whites a little bit less happy than non-whites," Goetz says via email.
"One possible factor that may explain this difference could be religious
adherence, to the extent that it varies between whites and non-whites."
Goetz says suburbanites can
have the best of both worlds. They can be close to their jobs but also near
enough to activities downtown. They can avoid being around a lot of other
people, but then they're not too far away either. However, the effect is dulled
by commute times: The research found the longer people spend traveling, the
less happy they feel.
The results are based on a
large-scale phone survey (using the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System)
and come from a six-year average of data from 2002 to 2008. The researchers
deliberately chose a period before the recent recession, fearing that might
skew the results. The study is the first to look at the factors behind mental
health at a county level, the researchers say.
Interestingly, Goetz says
poverty is a bigger factor in making people unhappy than inequality, despite
the prominence of the latter issue recently. "Recently, inequality has
received considerable attention from the public. As a result, the issue of
poverty has received less attention," he says. "Our work suggests
that policies directed at reducing poverty will go further in terms of reducing
poor mental health than will policies directed at reducing income
inequality."
Goetz argues that the level of
down-days is an important economic indicator as unhappy counties tend to be
less productive. The real benefit of the study is that we now know where people
are unhappy and what might be driving that.