Ryan Streeter
A healthy preoccupation with happiness is as American as apple pie. We Americans may not be the happiest people in the world, but we are clearly the most obsessed with it.
And this is as it should be. Along with Life and Liberty, Happiness is enshrined in the Declaration thus:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
However preoccupied we are with happiness, the study of it as a subject of inquiry is relatively late-breaking.
Now, Jefferson & Co. had a more objective, property-based notion of happiness in mind than the kind of “subjective well-being” that academics like to study, but I can’t help but to think Jefferson himself would have enjoyed reading the research that is coming out almost weekly on what makes some people subjectively happier than others.
There are some interesting new findings in Gallup’s Well-Being Index on states’ well-being, which Natalie covered yesterday as the results came out. The survey combines subjective well-being (how people evaluate their lives) with some objective assessments about quality of life.
Today, it’s worth looking at Texas and California, the comparison of which has become something of a national sport in the past two years. Our two most populous states serve as an example of stark policy differences and their effects on population, migration, business, and well-being (I kicked off a series at the Enterprise blog on this topic, for instance, in late 2009).
Looking at the charts below, pulled from the Gallup reports, it’s clear that:
- Texas trails California mainly due to healthy behaviors (hey, when you can't work out on Venice Beach...) and basic access to services. Otherwise, California's lead basically vanishes.
- The housing bubble crisis really hit California hard. These data are taken from data that's a couple years old: 2008 and 2009. California's problems were pretty well-advanced by then, though percolating more below the surface, poised to wreak havoc on the state when the economy got to a topping point.
- Texans are just happier. Judging by emotional health and life evaluation, it's hard to argue that Texas is "sunnier" than California.
Some aspects of well-being and happiness seem not to have to do with geography or policy but with culture (for instance, Gallup's data on happiness and religion, released in January, suggests that religious communities have similarities in their happiness levels across geographic boundaries).
But it's also clear that policy choices condition a lot of factors that, over time, that affect the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of the citizenry. California's debt, regulatory and tax burden, and poor public administration have finally reached a tipping point. The only good thing about California's slow-moving train wreck has been the policy example it has been to the rest of us.
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