We spend a lot of time wishing each other happiness at this time of year — happy holidays, happy new year, merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah.
So this recent NY Times article about who’s most happy and least happy seems especially well timed.

a study by two economics professors, newly published in Science magazine. The academics — Andrew J. Oswald, of the University of Warwick in Britain, and Stephen Wu, of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. — examined piles of data, tossed them into a research Cuisinart and came up with a guide to American happiness, ranked by state.
On the smiley scale, New York landed on the bottom.

I found this fascinating as a transplanted New Yorker. When I tell people where we live, they often swoon as they talk about the music, the art, the food, the architecture, public transportation, multicultural population … but they often also say “it’s a great place but I don’t think I could live there.”
Are they on to something? Is New York a better place to visit than to live?
The article goes on:

It falls to a New Yorker to ask how it is, if this is such an unhappy place, that more people are living in the city than ever before: an estimated 8.4 million. “That’s a very sensible point,” Professor Oswald said. Many people, he said, do indeed think of states like New York and California as “marvelous places to live in.”
“The problem,” he said, “is that if too many individuals think that way, they move into those states, and the resulting congestion and house prices make it a nonfulfilling prophecy.”

The study isn’t just looking at New York City — it’s a state by state look so the data include Albany, Poughkeepsie, Syracuse, Schenectady and points all around. But since Connecticut and New Jersey are the next two worst on the happiness scale, maybe proximity to NYC is enough to bring you down?
I would have expected my home state of Michigan, beaten down by the recession and the struggling auto industry, to be more unhappy than New York.
I’m really curious about this. Does the high cost of living, the crowds and the noise make people unhappy? The hurried lifestyle? Is it seeing and envying the super rich who always seem to have it better than you, no matter how well you’re doing?
Or is it reversed? That people who are less prone to happiness move to the New York area — the sensitive artists, musicians and actors, the cynical journalists, the always-striving bankers — and thus bring the score down.
I’ve written before about choosing a home wisely because of the influence it has on your lifestyle. Click here to read that post. How do you think lifestyle and culture influences happiness data?
What role does your hometown and home state play in your happiness? Is it chicken or egg to you?
And happy new year to you, wherever you live.