Oh great, now I live in a sourpuss state…

The Associated Press reports that a recent study on personal happiness found that those who live in sunny, outdoorsy states - Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida - say they're the happiest Americans.
The study published in the journal Science was based on two data sets: one on personal reports of happiness for 1.3 million Americans and the other that included quality of life measures such as population density, air quality, home prices and crime rates.

The study was conducted by economists Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in England and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.
The top five state for happiness were:
1. Louisiana
2. Hawaii
3. Florida
4. Tennessee
5. Arizona

At the other end of the scale, last in happiness - is New York state. And just guess were we here in Michigan came in. At least we weren’t the worst state. We were the third from the bottom of the list. The bottom five are:

47. New Jersey
48. Indiana
49. Michigan
50. Connecticut
51. New York

Oswald suggested the long commutes, congestion and high prices around New York City account for some of the unhappiness.

He said he has been asked if the researchers expected that states like New York and California, which ranked 46th, would do so badly in the happiness ranking.
“I am only a little surprised," he said. "Many people think these states would be marvelous places to live in. The problem is that if too many individuals think that way, they move into those states, and the resulting congestion and house prices make it a non-fulfilling prophecy."

Besides being interesting, the state-by-state pattern has scientific value, Oswald explained. "We wanted to study whether people's feelings of satisfaction with their own lives are reliable, that is, whether they match up to reality - of sunshine hours, congestion, air quality, et ceteras - in their own state. And they do match." Oswald and Wu used data from CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System collected from 2005 to 2008. The survey, launched in 1984, collects information on a variety of health measures.

At a macro level, the recent world happiness survey concluded that the United States was not anywhere near the top of the happiness scale. Would you believe it, Bangladesh is the happiest nation in the world! The United States, on the other hand, is a sad story: it ranks only 46th in the World Happiness Survey. That's way behind India, the fifth happiest place in the world, and others including Ghana and Latvia, Croatia and Estonia.

Research led by London School of Economics professors into the link between personal spending power and the perceived quality of life has conclusively proved that money can buy everything but happiness. The study revealed that people in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, derive far more happiness from their small incomes than, for example, the British (32nd on the list) do from their relatively large bank balances. In fact, people in most rich countries including Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Japan and others are much more unhappier than their poorer counterparts in countries like the Dominican Republic and Armenia.

Most unfortunate, however, are Russians and people in some other parts of the former Soviet Union. They are neither rich nor happy, indicates the World Happiness Survey. Slovenia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria and Moldova follow the United States in the list to bring up the rear.

So I guess I live in one of the worst states in one of the worst countries in the world as far as happiness goes. Bummer. I was actually pretty happy with things.