10 most unhappy states in the U.S.

[garbon]

Probably no real surprises. 

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-most-unhappy-states-in-the-us-2013-03-20?link=sfmw&mod=e2tw

According to a recent Gallup poll, the U.S. has shown almost no improvement in well-being in the past five years, with just a slight increase from 2011 when Americans reported the most miserable scores since the survey began. The top and bottom states have remained nearly the same. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has surveyed 1.7 million Americans since the survey was first conducted in 2008, reflects the physical and emotional health of residents in each of the 50 states. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the scores of each state in the six categories that comprise Gallup's index to identify objective measures that impact well-being. Some of the factors include health, life expectancy, income and education level.

Though odd perhaps that unhappy = unhealthy here.

[Valmy]

It seems not everybody is as happy about living in Kentucky as Cal  is 

I am kind of surprised the sunny warm states are generally unhappier than the cold dark states.

[Admiral Yi]

It's all about healthiness, not happiness.

[garbon]

It's all about healthiness, not happiness.

Actually I did a little more digging on gallup's site:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/123215/Gallup-Healthways-Index.aspx

The Well-Being Index score is an average of six sub-indexes, which individually examine life evaluation , emotional health , work environment , physical health , healthy behaviors , and access to basic necessities . The Index is calculated on a scale of 0 to 100, where a score of 100 would represent ideal wellbeing.

So though that article presented it that way, there are components of happiness in there like "life evaluation" and "emotional health".

[derspiess]

Yi's point still stands.  None of that stuff necessarily correlates to happiness.

[DGuller]

It seems like Bible Belt is where civilization in US goes to die.  Pretty much any index you can think of, Bible Belt will bring up the rear.

[fhdz]

Yi's point still stands.  None of that stuff necessarily correlates to happiness.

Emotional health doesn't correlate to happiness?

[derspiess]

Yi's point still stands.  None of that stuff necessarily correlates to happiness.

Emotional health doesn't correlate to happiness?

Depends on how it's evaluated.  Anyway most of what's mentioned in the "article" is stuff like obesity rates, smoking, economic stuff, etc. 

Seems like they could have just polled people & asked them to rate their happiness on a 10-point scale, rather than compile a bunch of irrelevant or at best semi-relevant data and decide who's happy & who's not.

[fhdz]

Seems like they could have just polled people & asked them to rate their happiness on a 10-point scale, rather than compile a bunch of irrelevant or at best semi-relevant data and decide who's happy & who's not.

Happiness isn't quantifiable, whereas a lot of that other data is.

You also have a lot of people who report as happy who are not.

[Valmy]

Seems like they could have just polled people & asked them to rate their happiness on a 10-point scale, rather than compile a bunch of irrelevant or at best semi-relevant data and decide who's happy & who's not.

Surely they did do that.  The 'life evaluation' and 'emotional health' stuff had to be simply a bunch of questions like that.

And I find it sorta funny to consider that professional data collectors are unable to calculate simple correlations, but in today's media I guess anything is possible.

[crazy canuck]

Yi's point still stands.  None of that stuff necessarily correlates to happiness.

Emotional health doesn't correlate to happiness?

Not sure why it should.  One can be free of a mental illness and be very unhappy.  Also, one can have a mental illness (with the exception of the depressive illnesses) and be quite content.

[Admiral Yi]

And I find it sorta funny to consider that professional data collectors are unable to calculate simple correlations, but in today's media I guess anything is possible.

They could theoretically find correlations between health and happiness, but to do so they would first need to find measures of happiness.  If they could measures of happiness, they could just report them directly.

[fhdz]

Not sure why it should.  One can be free of a mental illness and be very unhappy.  Also, one can have a mental illness (with the exception of the depressive illnesses) and be quite content.

Excellent point, but when correlated with all the other factors mentioned I would imagine there's a high probability that high-scoring people on these indexes are indeed "happy".

[fhdz]

Well, this was an interesting little read, if nothing else:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics

[Phillip V]

Send unhappy people to re-education camps.