Happiness Rankings By State

People in Utah report the highest levels of well-being, according to recent survey results from Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. West Virginia had the lowest score.

The index is also broken down into six smaller sub-indices: life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behavior, work environment and basic access.

The states that scored highest over all didn’t necessarily ace all of these subcategories. Hawaii, for example, had extremely high scores for every sub-index except for work environment — the category in which it had the lowest score of all the states.

Create your own comparison tables and maps here. Expect to see all sorts of correlations with this data in the future. Currently we have income and porn.

This is based on the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. The site has graphs showing how the value has changed for the entire US over the last year. Not heading in the right direction at the moment.

More information on the methodology here. Looks like they randomly select 1,000 people a day and ask them a series of question on health and well-being. They break the questions into 6 subcategories and then give a numerical value to each, averaging them to get the well-being index value.

The one thing I don't get is why instead of just taking the results for the life evaluation as they are they calculate the value by the percentage of thriving respondents minus the percentage of suffering respondents. Not sure what the impact of that decision is on the results, but it leads to greater variance between states. The other subcategories only differ by 10 points from lowest state to highest state, but life evaluation differs by 20 points.

via Economix via Will Wilkinson
and Breitbart