Audio By Carbonatix
You feel happy, West Palm Beach? Because a recent study by the University of British Columbia says you are. SO SMILE.
Hell, West Palm is such a happy place, sharks migrate there in droves and hang out on the beaches.
Know who isn’t so happy? Those fancy-pants New Yorkers and their tall buildings and their pizzas and their cabdrivers, that’s who.
The working paper, titled “Unhappy Cities” and cowritten by Joshua Gottlieb of the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver School of Economics, dove into federal data to find how satisfied younger folks felt with their lives, accounting for race, education, marital status, and family size. The study found, among other things, that people are willing to relocate to an unhappy city if it means getting a good and steady job.
The paper, which used data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was released last week by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic and shows that, while people in New York are generally miserable jerks, they’re also very wealthy jerks. So, they ain’t movin’, and they ain’t smiling f’nobawdy,
On the heels of LeBron James bolting sexy South Florida for dreary Akron, City Lab did a study to find out exactly why people move to an “unhappy place.”
And basically what they found was that people do this for better income.
I’m miserable BUT I’M WELL OFF AND HAVE MANY FANCY GADGETS IN MY HOME!
So the lesson here would seem to be that politicians need to focus their policymaking on better income for their respective cities rather than overall happiness.
That, or people can just move to West Palm Beach.
Top 10 happiest metropolitan areas with a population greater than 1 million:
1. Richmond-Petersburg, VA
2. Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News, VA
3. Washington, DC
4. Raleigh-Durham, NC
5. Atlanta, GA
6. Houston, TX
7. Jacksonville, FL
8. Nashville, TN
9. West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, FL
10. Middlesex-Somerset-Hunterdon, NJ
Top 10 unhappiest metropolitan areas with a population greater than 1 million:
1. New York, NY
2. Pittsburgh, PA
3. Louisville, KY
4. Milwaukee, WI
5. Detroit, MI
6. Indianapolis, IN
7. St. Louis, MO
8. Las Vegas, NV
9. Buffalo, NY
10. Philadelphia, PA
Read the study below:
Send your story tips to the author, Chris Joseph.
Follow Chris Joseph on Twitter
