"scientific breakthrough" ascertains our "happiness levels" ... by state

New research by the UK’s University of Warwick and Hamilton College in the US has used the happiness levels of a million individual US citizens to discover which are the best and worst states in which to live in the United States.  New York and Connecticut come bottom of a life-satisfaction league table, and Hawaii and Louisiana are at the top.  The analysis reveals also that happiness levels closely correlate with objective factors such as congestion and air quality across the US’s 50 states.

The new research published in the elite journal Science on 17 December 2009 is by Professor Andrew Oswald of the UK’s University of Warwick and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in the US.   It provides the first external validation of people’s self-reported levels of happiness.  “We would like to think this is a breakthrough.  It provides an justification for the use of subjective well-being surveys in the design of government policies, and will be of value to future economic and clinical researchers across a variety of fields in science and social science” said Professor Oswald.

"The beauty of this statistical method is that we are able to look below the surface of American life -- to identify the deep patterns in people's underlying life satisfaction and happiness from Alabama to Wyoming.  The type of study is new to the United States.  We are the first to be able to do this calculation..."

I know you are anxious to know from these scientists just how happy you are in your state, so with no further ado, here's their list. 

1	Louisiana
2	Hawaii
3	Florida
4	Tennessee
5	Arizona
6	Mississippi
7	Montana
8	South Carolina
9	Alabama
10	Maine
11	Alaska
12	North Carolina
13	Wyoming
14	Idaho
15	South Dakota
16	Texas
17	Arkansas
18	Vermont
19	Georgia
20	Oklahoma
21	Colorado
22	Delaware
23	Utah
24	New Mexico
25	North Dakota
26	Minnesota
27	New Hampshire
28	Virginia
29	Wisconsin
30	Oregon
31	Iowa
32	Kansas
33	Nebraska
34	West Virginia
35	Kentucky
36	Washington
37	District of Columbia
38	Missouri
39	Nevada
40	Maryland
41	Pennsylvania
42	Rhode Island
43	Massachusetts
44	Ohio
45	Illinois
46	California
47	Indiana
48	Michigan
49	New Jersey
50	Connecticut
51	New York

Perhaps you noticed, as I did, that the bottom ten states are ALL blue states  that went for Obama - actually, it's the bottom 13 straight - while the red states tend to cluster around the top (15 out of the top 20). 

Scientific correlation? You decide.

 
Whoops, wrong map.

 Nope, that's not it either.  That's the comparative size of Israel (in yellow).

I know I had it here somewhere... Ah, this is it. For your reference.