[Map]The Happiest States In America

[Serious]

Which way to happy? Geographically speaking, it's the route to Hawaii, Maine or one of the clusters of blissful cities in California and Colorado.

The map below is based on results from a study of geotagged tweets published earlier this year in PLoS ONE by researchers at the University of Vermont. The team scored more than 10,000 words on a positive-negative scale and measured their frequency in millions of tweets across the country, deliberately ignoring context to eliminate experimental bias. What emerged was significant regional variation in happiness by this calculation, which correlates with other lifestyle measures such as gun violence, obesity and Gallup's traditional wellbeing survey. A sadness belt across the South includes states that have high levels of poverty and the shortest life expectancies.

Geography is, of course, just one predictor of moods expressed on Twitter. The researchers also used their "hedometer" to look at daily happiness averages over the past few years — and the peaks (holidays, especially Christmas) and valleys (tragedies including the Newtown shooting and Boston Marathon bombing) are not surprising.

Until there's a hedometer that can analyze tweets in every language, we have to look at other wellbeing measures to see how happy the U.S. is compared to other countries. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life Index, Switzerland scores highest on life satisfaction with the U.S. coming in behind New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Canada, Israel and some Western European countries. And a recent Ipsos poll spells global good news: more people describe themselves as "happy" now than before the financial crisis of 2008 began.

 

[Type Username Here]

Look at all the happiness in those socialist countries.

It's as almost if reinvesting into social programs for the working middle class improves living conditions and overall well-being.

 

[Serious]

At the end of the day, despite how high taxes rise or incomes potentially shrink, the only issue which truly matters is the quality life everyone is able to live.

Call me a socialist, Marxist or w/e, because I believe in socialized medicine, free education(post secondary included), and bunch of other programs, which might viewed as "government handouts", saving a couple dollars and living an unhealthy, angry existence is no way to live.

I commonly use Denmark as my poster child for this subject.

The Danish pay an extraordinary amount taxes for everything, yet they are always ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world.

 

[No1]

At the end of the day, despite how high taxes rise or incomes potentially shrink, the only issue which truly matters is the quality life everyone is able to live.

I didn't expect to get a sermon online today In all seriousness though all those countries are a blend of capitalism and socialism. The outlier there is Mexico, that's the first time I've seen it up there and don't know why it's up there . All the rest of it is basically the same, but again, those countries are much more homogenous than the United States. With that level of homogeneity you're less prone to have cultural clashes or many of the out-group vs. in-group social issues that emerge. 90% of Denmark's population has Danish ancestry. 85% of Switzerland's foreign residents are from Europe. You could invest in the same social programs in the United States and it would probably still be less happy than all of those countries because of everything that comes with doing that here given history and social composition. Some group will always feel that they're losing even when they're not. I don't know how you reformat an entire national psyche...

Our philosophy professor used to basically breakdown the differences in our brand of capitalism simply for the sake of posing a hypothetical (taking into where the taxes went and all that).

She would ask people if they would rather a society where the most you could make was 250k but the least you could make was like 50k vs. falling as low as like 15k but being able to make millions if you were successful. It was a 50-50 split. Our politics and politicians are almost always a reflection of our times and what we're willing to allow, and accept. We don't have enough people that prefer the former yet to make a change, or enough that think it's possible. Who would've thought the pitch of the American dream would become a negative.

 

[The_King_of_Everything]

West coast stay winning

 

[babylon1]

told you so. socialism.

 

[Fmju]

Damnnn, cacs in DC are pissed off

 

[Momentum]

at the entire East coast and South.

 

[Xtraz2]

 

[Kalik]

Florida

 

[88m3]

fukking pot heads




Hungary

 

[Slaimon Khan Shah]

Muslim countries happiness versus non-Muslim countries happiness.

 

[ProfessionallyTrill]

From looking at the "green belt" I'm finding a correlation:

Sometimes I'm mad I moved to the South cuz of the fukkin slowness and racism in some folks. Plus GA is gonna be the very last state to legalize it.

 

[Serious]

@Sensitive Blake Griffin

 

[Blackking]

US happier than brazil??