According to a University of Vermont analysis of tweets, the wine country towns of southern California rank among the happiest places to live in the United States. The study ranked the entire state of California as a top 13 happy state and Napa as the nation's happiest city. The university analyzed 10 million geotagged tweets gathered from 373 urban areas giving weight to happy terms and keywords most commonly used in tweets such as LOL, good, beautiful and, yes, happy.
The Vermont study also seems to confirm the idea that those with money tend to at least express that they're happy. The irony is, if I may call it that, is that many of those happy towns are also rich towns in deficit-prone blue states with late annual "Tax Freedom Days."
LA Weekly Blogs Excerpt:
Happiness within the US was found to correlate strongly with wealth, showing largest positive correlation with household income and strongest negative correlation with poverty amongst the census data sets used.
OK, now for the bad news. The saddest state they found is Louisiana, followed by Mississippi. Say what? That's right. The two saddest states in the union also boast of being ranked one/two in the country for the earliest tax freedom days according to the Tax Foundation.
It all seems so bizarre since many of these red state governors claim that a balanced budget and low taxes foster healthier economies and helps create jobs, prosperity and generally, an upbeat outlook.
But the university's tweeter study contradicts those mimes and confirm most of my suspicions about the race-to-the-bottom low-wage conservative establishment and their droning beatdown of the working poor and middle-class wage earners promoted mainly by republican governors. It's a dead-bang losing environment that practically feeds upon itself into a very sad and increasingly hostile constituency.
But to answer the contradiction, how could the two states with the earliest tax freedom days be listed at the top of sad, while deep blue "tax" states and their cities dominate the happy ranks? Our country's entire economic and social compact is built on acheiving success that is expressed from our own personal pursuit of happiness. So the question to the earliest tax freedom day red states with all of your low-wage conservative baggage is, why are any you even listed in the top ten of sad, let alone being ranked one and two?
SOURCE: University Of Vermont - The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place
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