Minnesota, as a state, is happier than California?
I don’t quite trust these things. They always have to juggle a whole bunch of parameters to come up with a single composite score like “happiness,” and you can get any answer you want with the right weights. They mention a few inputs but don’t tell us how they manipulate them.
OK, they include weather, but it must be scaled way down for us to beat California.
True story: last week I checked the weather before I went on a walk, and the computer told me it was -3°. No problem, I thought, that was almost balmy. Unfortunately, the weather site was telling me the temperature in °F — my wife prefers Fahrenheit, while I think in Celsius — and that meant it was actually -20°C. I went on my walk, all bundled up, but 20 minutes later noticed that I couldn’t feel my toes.
But sure, Minnesota is much happier than California. At least we’re not in Lose-iana.
Umeå (north Sweden) would be way north of the Canadian border, but we have -6° C.
Our happiness is based on the “benefits from Gulf Stream” parameter.
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BTW a century ago Swedes envied relatives that had moved to ‘Amerika’. Then we elected good politicians and went to work exporting stuff. I am happy corruption is low.
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I am happy our big predators sleep through the winter. My small predators poop in a litter box and vomit on my bed. Somehow, I am still happy about them.
I think they should adjust their definition of “ideal weather” if Arizona has a favorable score.
Phoenix reaches 100 straight days of 100 degrees
An amusing survey, but largely opaque. I live in Maryland, the 2nd happiest state (the most happy in the continental U.S.) and would attribute any such score to the populations around D.C. and in Baltimore, while the rest of the state is rural, often red neck Trump supporters, who strike me as the antithesis of happy. I spent 4 years in Minnesota way back when, and always found people “Minnesota Nice” as we used to say, with a good attitude about the weather, and here again I wonder about the impact of a population center such as the Twin Cities versus the more rural regions. I also note that there are major differences between states that I would have considered virtually indistinguishable, so perhaps a degree of skepticism is warranted….
Minnesota is Canada-adjacent, so a lot of people may follow the advice of Dave Chapelle and use a fake Canadian ID when they need expensive health care. I do not know if this demographic is large enough to affect the survey.
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Maybe people in Missisippi are happy that Arkansans and Louisianans are miserable? That would bring up their score (we are talking about mostly Republicans, so scadenfreude is a parameter).
Both Louisiana and Hawaii have a hot, humid climate. So people there should be equally happy, right? On second thoughts Louisiana has oil, so the wealth generated by the oil industry has surely generated widespread high standards of living?
@1. birgerjohansson : “My small predators poop in a litter box and vomit on my bed. Somehow, I am still happy about them.”
Sure is a lot better than them doing that the other way around!
StevoR @ 6
Yes, but you never know for sure!
The happiness algorithm should include a factor for the people of some state being happier than another specifically because they aren’t that state. Let’s call it the Louisiana factor. We here in California, while apparently already happy, would see an increase in our score because we’re happier than clams that we are not, in fact, Louisiana. Or Arkansas. Even Arkansas would show an increased score simply because they are not Louisiana, either.
Idaho is happier than Oregon? Yeah, clear signs that this graph is nonsense.
Reginald Selkirk@2
It’s just further proof that the Phoenicians suffer from The Cremation of Sam McGee syndrome. They come from other places that are damp, cold, and snowy, looking for new places to get warm. Since steam boilers in derelict ships frozen in lakes are hard to come by these days, their next best bet is to move someplace already hot.
microraptor@9
In Idaho it’s the illegal private armies masquerading as militias that are so happy that the state doesn’t suppress (exterminate?) them as it should.
birgerjohansson@4
I always heard that Arkansas and Louisiana were glad that Mississippi exists so they can have someone, anyone, to look down on.
Utah’s score is so high because they are dim.
Is Texas so low because of all the Californians who moved there to get away from taxes and the “libruls”, then found out that the “Texas Miracle” was largely a fraud? And also what it’s like to live 24/7 in a sea of gun-stroking rednecks.
-20 sounds wonderful. We’re sucking down rain at 5 degrees here in Montreal.
At least the weather doesn’t suck like in California. Alternating flood and wildfire seasons gets old pretty quick.
They use 30 different metrics to measure happiness, but they only reveal five of them?
These people have the secret to happiness, and they’re holding out on us. Time to get the pitchforks out, I’d say.
Arizona: meh.
And of course Randall Monroe has an xkcd comic to highlight that such state maps can be tuned to say anything you want anyway:
https://www.xkcd.com/1845/
That’s things that should make people happy; not that the people actually are. (“Happy” really is not an adjective I’d use to describe me or any of my fellow Californians. We’re a … high strung lot.)
“At least the weather doesn’t suck like in California. Alternating flood and wildfire seasons gets old pretty quick.”
I once casually mentioned to a Michiganian friend (now purely anecdotally those seem like the happiest people on average.. of people I know… where I actually think about their geography) that the wildfire weather of the hot dry Octobers always puts me on edge and she was startled “You have a specific weather for wildfires“. Well, yeah, that seemed a really blase and common expression to me. If we have wildfire seasons, doesn’t it make sense we have wildfire weather.
I was going to speculate that the large homeless population in California might skew their happiness index, but then I realized that nobody seems to give a shit about the homeless, so that’s probably not a factor that was considered.
No matter how popular the song was, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ always struck me as catering to the brain-dead drooling sheople that ignore reality. I would much rather focus on working to help people and solve problems than wallow in that empty sentiment.