Loading ...A new study shows there is something to be said for southern hospitality and sunshine, as it seems the Southern states are the happiest, while New York and California, their coastal rivals come out at the bottom of the list.
Ranking the states, including the District of Columbia on self-reported measures of happiness, researchers using objective measures also like sunshine, congestion, and housing affordability reveal, 6 out of the 10-happiest states are to be found in the South.
Topping the list was Louisiana, and round out the top five were Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona, while California came in at no. 46, with New York coming in last at no. 51.
One would have expected states like New York and California to fare better in the happiness ranking, says researcher Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick, Coventry, England in a news release, however, because many people think these states to be marvellous places to live in, too many of them move into those states, resulting in congestion and house prices that mess up things.
For the study that has been published in the journal Science, researchers tried a different approach, instead of relying only on happiness surveys or economists’ measures of quality-of-life data, Rather, researchers believed it better to combine the two methods for comparing how the states measured up.
Information from a 2005-2008 nationwide life satisfaction survey of 1.3-million Americans and a 2003-objective happiness indicator study for each state i. e. how much rain and sunshine each state received, the number of hazardous waste sites, commuting time, violent crime, air quality, spending on education and highways and cost of living, were all taken into account.
Comparing the tables, they found a close correlation between happiness and objective quality-of-life measures.
Following is the list of US states ranked by happiness levels:
1. Louisiana, 2. Hawaii, 3. Florida, 4. Tennessee, 5. Arizona, 6. Mississippi, 7. Montana, 8. South Carolina, 9. Alabama, 10. Maine, 11. Alaska, 12. North Carolina, 13. Wyoming, 14. Idaho, 15. South Dakota, 16. Texas, 17. Arkansas, 18. Vermont, 19. Georgia, 20. Oklahoma, 21. Colorado, 22. Delaware, 23. Utah, 24. New Mexico, 25. North Dakota, 26. Minnesota, 27. New Hampshire,
28. Virginia, 29. Wisconsin, 30. Oregon, 31. Iowa, 32. Kansas, 33. Nebraska, 34. West Virginia, 35. Kentucky, 36. Washington, 37. District of Columbia, 38. Missouri, 39. Nevada, 40. Maryland, 41. Pennsylvania, 42. Rhode Island, 43. Massachusetts, 44. Ohio, 45. Illinois, 46. California, 47. Indiana, 48. Michigan, 49. New Jersey, 50. Connecticut, 51. New York.
Article by: Henry Aaron
Posted under Ark-LA-Tex News
This post was written by admin on December 19, 2009
